She Wiped Her Phone From Inside a Police Evidence Locker
In July 2023, three people died after eating beef Wellington at a family lunch in rural Victoria. The cook, Erin Patterson, was convicted of triple murder, though no motive was ever proven. Her conviction is now under appeal.
What gripped the public - and the jury - wasn’t just the mushroom mystery. It was the digital evidence: the phones, the searches, the resets, and the devices that vanished.
Three Phones, One Story
To make sense of the digital trail, you first have to understand Erin’s phones. She didn’t have one. She had several - and her SIM card moved between them like a traveller changing hotels.
The phone prosecutors cared about most - the one she allegedly used during months of death cap research - was never found. Its search history disappeared with it.
When police raided her home on 5 August 2023, Erin handed over a phone. But prosecutors argued it wasn’t her real phone at all -it was a decoy. Around that same time, she had taken her main SIM and placed it into an old Nokia. Neither the Nokia nor her primary Samsung were ever found.
The phone she did give police turned out to have its own secrets.
Four Resets, Four Moments
Digital forensics can reveal not just what was on a device, but when it was wiped. Victoria Police forensic officer Shamen Fox‑Henry examined Erin’s surrendered phone using Magnet Axiom, a specialist forensic platform. Even though the phone had been wiped repeatedly, the resets left timestamps -breadcrumbs that couldn’t be erased.
The phone had been factory reset four times:
12 February 2023 - Erin said she reset it to clear data her son had put on the phone.
2 August 2023, 11:09 a.m. - Minutes before CCTV captured her dumping a food dehydrator at a waste station. Her lunch guests were in intensive care at the time. She said the phone had been dropped in mud at school camp.
5 August 2023, 1:20 p.m. - While police were inside her home. She admitted she panicked because the phone contained photos of mushrooms and a dehydrator.
6 August 2023, 5:16 a.m. - The reset that made investigators stop in their tracks.
5:16 a.m. - The Reset From the Evidence Locker
The morning after the police search, Erin logged into her Samsung Find account - the service that lets users locate or remotely wipe their devices. She could see that the phone she’d handed over was still connected to the internet.
So she wiped it.
At that moment, the phone was sealed inside an evidence bag in a police locker.
At trial, Erin said she was curious whether police had “been silly enough to leave it connected to the internet,” and pressed the button to see what would happen. She called it “stupid.”
The jury heard her explanation. They also heard the time: 5:16 a.m. They drew their own conclusions about why someone might remotely erase a phone held by investigators before dawn.
What the Devices Still Remembered
Even with the phone resets, the digital trail wasn’t completely cold. Fox‑Henry’s analysis of other devices - including a Cooler Master computer stashed away in a wardrobe and a Samsung tablet - recovered browser histories, cached files, photos, and chat logs. The prosecution leaned heavily on this material.
This evidence, and how it shaped the case, is explored in Fatal Lunch: The Death Cap Mushroom Murders, a year‑long reconstruction built from court documents, testimony, and forensic records.
Digital evidence is now central to Erin Patterson’s appeal. She argues that some of it - such as cell tower location data and Facebook messages - should never have been admitted. The appeal is scheduled for August 2026.
Author, Cheryl Warren, holds a Masters in IT. She spent a year meticulously working through the case’s digital evidence for Fatal Lunch. Her technical background made it possible to turn a tangle of resets, SIM swaps, and other technical evidence into a sensible narrative.
Fatal Lunch is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback. (Audiobook coming soon).
