Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - The Mushroom Murders - The Erin Patterson Story

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

Erin Patterson, a 50‑year‑old Australian mother of two, was convicted in July 2025 for murdering three of her estranged husband’s relatives—his parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and his sister Heather Wilkinson—by serving them beef Wellington laced with lethal death cap mushrooms at her home in Leongatha, Victoria

So this woman kills her whole family with mushrooms. How's that for an opening? Now the woman's name is Aaron, and Aaron's about 48 during this time, living in Australia, and Aaron has a problem. She and her ex-husband are fighting a lot. Now, her ex-husband is this guy, Simon. And I guess she and Simon are separated, but they never officially got divorced. I'm not sure what that's all about, but it sounds like they're in the middle of what is about to be a divorce.

Anyway, at some point, Aaron, and Simon and Simon start fighting all the time over finances, over child support and, you know, stuff like that. She's hitting him up like, you're a deadbeat, you're not doing enough for the kids. And of course, he's like, I've been helping these kids for years. Fuck you. Plus, Aaron feels like it's not just Simon who's being a jerk. It's also his whole side of the family, specifically his parents. She feels like they, especially, are always taking Simon's side instead of doing what's right for her and the kids. And so at the this point, Aaron has had enough, and she decides it's time to get rid of Simon for good. Not only that, but she also wants to take out his whole family. So in 2023, she comes up with an

insane plan that she's pretty sure will work. She's going to unalive her ex-husband and his parents. She plans to go out and find some poisonous mushrooms growing in the wild, and then cook them up and slip them into ex-husband's food. And so she starts looking online at this plant database website to see if anyone has spotted any poisonous mushrooms in her area. I guess people post sightings on this site to warn mushroom foragers to stay away so that they don't accidentally pick them and get poisoned. So she goes on this website and she basically hits the jackpot.

Like she learns that there are two nearby towns where people have spotted death cap mushrooms. Death cap mushrooms are like super poisonous mushrooms. Most of the fatal mushroom poisonings in the world are from death caps. So Aaron goes out to these spots the website told her about and she collects as many of these death caps as she can. She also goes out and buys a dehydrator which she needs to dehydrate the mushrooms. Once she gets home, she dehydrates them and she crushes them into powder and she gets ready

to hide them in the beef Wellington she's making. And once everything is ready to go, Aaron invites Simon over for lunch and his parents and his aunt and uncle too, because I guess she hates them as well. And when they ask why she's inviting them over for lunch, she's like, I got a medical issue and I want to discuss whether or not to tell the kids about it. And of course, everyone's thinking, oh, a medical issue, she probably has cancer or something. So of course they're going to be there. And so on that morning, on the day of the lunch, Aaron makes all the food and she puts the poison mushroom. powder into the mushroom paste that's on the beef Wellington and into the mushroom gravy that she makes But Aaron is careful to make a separate set of mushrooms for her food that you know don't have poison in them

And when it's finally lunchtime Simon's parents and his aunt and uncle show up to Aaron's house But Simon actually doesn't I guess the day before he cancels because you know Aaron's been an asshole to him lately But everyone else does show up now keep in mind she originally wanted to take Simon out, her ex-husband, but since he didn't show, I guess she's like, well, I'll just, you know, I'll just kill his whole family instead. So they all sit down at the table and Aaron brings over four gray plates with Beef Wellington. She then puts her own food on an orange plate so that she doesn't screw up and accidentally poison herself. So they all eat and they're chatting and near

the end of the meal, Aaron announces to them all that she has cancer, which she 100% does not have, but I guess she told them on the phone that she had something important to tell them, and I guess she has to keep the lie going. Even though they're all about to be dead. Aaron is just shameless. Regardless, all the guests think it's real. And they all feel really bad for her and everyone starts giving her advice on how to break the news to the kids and stuff like that.

Anyway, eventually lunches over and everyone leaves and goes home. Later that night, those mushrooms start kicking in. Because I guess they take six to 12 hours to start working. And Simon's family is all at their homes and they all start getting sick. And they're like throwing up all night. In fact, they're throwing up so much that in the morning they go to the hospital for treatment. And Aaron learns that they all got sick and went to the hospital and she wants to cover up her tracks. I mean, she can't be the only one who didn't get poisoned.

That would look suspicious. So two days later, she also goes to the hospital and she's like, I'm feeling sick too. Meanwhile, the condition of Simon's family keeps getting worse. They're still vomiting. They have diarrhea. They're severely dehydrated. And then their organs start failing, which is a really bad sign.

So they all get a bunch of treatments, including one of them who receives an emergency liver transplant, which is just wild. But despite all that treatment, within a week, unfortunately, Simon's mom, dad, and aunt, all three of them pass away. in the hospital. While Simon's uncle, he's actually still alive. I mean, he's still poisoned, but he falls into a coma. And he spends weeks in the hospital in a coma, but he is eventually able to pull through. So he does survive. Meanwhile, Aaron is out here talking to the news media for some reason, and she like pretends to be sad about the whole thing. It's a tragedy what's happened with some of the best people I've ever met. They never did anything wrong to me. And I'm so devastated about what's happened. Can you tell us a bit more about the lunch?

What I can tell you is that I just can't fathom what has happened, that Ian and Heather have lost their lives, and Gail has lost her life, and Dawn is still in hospital, and I pray, I pray that he pulls through. I just can't believe it. Can you tell us where the mushrooms came from? Not a bad performance, I guess. And she's still actively trying to cover her tracks, Like she goes to a local trash dump and disposes of the food dehydrator she used to dry out the mushrooms because, you know, that's evidence. Plus, she starts wiping data off her phone by factory resetting it multiple times. She also apparently has multiple burner phones for some reason and she throws those away because those are also evidence.

And why do you need a burner phone to poison someone with mushrooms? Like, this woman is just weird. And so anyway, because doctors suspect all these deaths were maybe by poisonous death. cat mushrooms, they report all of this to the police. And so police start investigating all this. And pretty quickly, the police, they talk to Aaron, and they ask her, where did you get those mushrooms? They're poisonous. And she says, ah, I bought them at the Asian supermarket. But, you know, that's bullshit. And none of her story is adding up. And as they keep investigating, they're able to interview Simon's uncle and get a lot of information out of him, because, you know, he survived.

And they get information like, you know, like she had the only orange orange. plate and how she told them all she had cancer and all that stuff. Anyway, and so police eventually gather enough evidence, and so, bam, Aaron is arrested. And I don't have her mugshot, but here is a picture of her fake crying. This morning, police arrested Aaron Patterson, the woman who cooked the beef Wellington at the center of the case. And so she goes to trial and she was just found guilty of all of this a few days ago. And since this just happened, she actually hasn't been sentenced.

yet, but she faces life in prison.