- Perspective
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- Mushroom trial
Erin Patterson’s children hover offstage, haunted by her crimes
By Tony Wright
Of all the inhabitants of this ghastly drama, two children, mercifully invisible and unnamed, remain those with the most power to haunt.
Their physical absence from the queue of other victims who addressed their personal pain in court four of the Supreme Court of Victoria on Monday served only to spur the imagination to focus upon their everlasting, off-stage agony.
Erin Patterson was seen twisting a tissue round and round in her hands during Monday’s plea hearing.Credit: Anita Lester
They are condemned, these two obscured children, to be burdened for life with the knowledge that their mother, Erin Patterson, is a mass murderer who killed their grandparents.
Patterson was brought from prison and compelled to sit and listen to the consequences of her 2023 lunch when she used poisoned food to murder her in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66. Heather’s husband, pastor Ian Wilkinson, now 71, survived after weeks in an induced coma.
The ornate courtroom, its salmon and gold plasterwork illuminated by a vast chandelier, was packed with those whose lives were derailed by Patterson’s evil, those who came to spectate from the balcony and journalists who occupied every available pew on the floor to record every tormented word of those victims.
Loss, trauma, heartbreak, anger and, yes, the horror of it all filled the court’s hushed atmosphere, and more was delivered in written form, but not read out. If a courtroom that has witnessed the recitation of crimes most dreadful since 1884 could be said to be capable of being appalled, then this was a room appalled.
Patterson, for most of it, seemed the least engaged of all.
She sat impassive in the dock, peering straight ahead, her thoughts unknowable.
She allowed herself little more than the quiver of a bottom lip and a crumpling of her chin when Wilkinson – doomed to a half life after his wife of 44 years was murdered by Patterson – offered his personal forgiveness.
Having spoken at tender length about his “compassionate, intelligent, brave and witty” wife, and his bottomless grief at having to survive without her until they would be “reunited in the resurrection”, the pastor stunned the court by declaring: “In regard to the many harms done to me, I make an offer of forgiveness to Erin.
“My prayer for her is that she will use her time in jail wisely to become a better person. Now I am no longer Erin Patterson’s victim, and she has become the victim of my kindness.”
Patterson took a tissue and dabbed briefly at her nose at Wilkinson’s astonishing benevolence, but her eyes remained dry.
They remained dry, too, with not a quiver of a lip nor even a blink, when Patterson’s estranged husband, Simon Patterson, introduced the spectre of the couple’s children.
Possibly distrusting the ability of his voice to survive what he had to say, he chose to have his statement read to the court by a relative.
Convicted triple-murderer Erin Patterson arrives at the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne on Monday 25th August ahead of her sentencing. Erin Patterson stumbles as she gets out of the prison truck. Credit: Jason Edwards
“My children, two children, are left without grandparents as a result of these murders,” he said in his statement.
“They have also been robbed of hope for the kind of relationship with their mother that every child naturally yearns for.
Ian Wilkinson and his daughter Ruth Dubois in May this year.Credit: Jason South
“The grim reality is they live in an irreparably broken home with only a solo parent, when almost everyone else knows their mother murdered their grandparents.
“None of these hurdles that my children face are easy for them to overcome. The fact these foreseeable hurdles were actively put in front of them by their own mother is an impact we will wrestle with for the rest of our lives.”
Other statements of victims rang out through the court, too, including the Wilkinsons’ daughter, Ruth Dubois, who spoke, we might imagine, for many when she expressed disbelief in Patterson’s icy delivery of murder by death cap mushroom.
“It is difficult to comprehend how someone could spend months planning this out, researching, collecting the items needed, making the lunch invitation, preparing the meal, sit through eating it, and then to carry on with normal life, all while knowing what tremendous harm that was being caused, followed up by the extraordinary lies and the absolute lack of care shown for the victims,” she said.
Patterson sat as if undisturbed, at least on the surface.
Beneath the desk of the dock, however, her hands twisted a tissue, around and around.
Korumburra Baptist pastor Ian Wilkinson.Credit: Jason South
Her children, the shape of their lives twisted by her murdering, were elsewhere, physically absent. This, at least, seemed a mercy.
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