Insulting three-word nickname colleagues gave 'mushroom murderer' Erin Patterson

A woman who murdered three relatives by serving them a meal of poisoned beef Wellington had been given a chilling nickname by work colleagues.

Erin Patterson, 50, was found guilty today of three counts of murder and another of attempted murder after giving her in-laws a dinner which included death cap mushrooms at her Leongatha home on July 29, 2023. The jury in the Supreme Court trial in Victoria state returned a verdict after six days of deliberations, following a nine-week trial that gripped Australia. And it has now emerged how she was given the nickname “Scutter the Nutter” by work colleagues before she was married, with her maiden name Scutter.

She had worked at Airservices Australia and trained as an air traffic controller in Melbourne between February and November 2001. “Something was not quite right, she was a bit strange,” a coursemate who asked not to be named told The Herald Sun.

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The unnamed person also told how she was dubbed “crazy Erin” and “would say some weird off-the-cuff things”. They added how she was “super secretive” and “wasn't a nice person, she just wasn't someone you connected to”.

While another colleague alleged she had placed a pencil sharpener blade in a banana. They told The Australian: “No one could prove that, but she had a way about her that was off-putting.”

She is understood to have been sacked by Airservices Australia for leaving work early, having denied the accusation until footage proved it. The ex-colleague also said she was “manipulative” and a “pathological liar” while at the same time she had been able to “wrap (men) around her little finger”.

Patterson now faces life in prison and will be sentenced later. Sitting in the dock between two prison officers, she showed no emotion but blinked rapidly as the verdicts were read.

Three of Patterson’s four lunch guests — her parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson — died in the hospital after the meal at her home in Leongatha. She served individual beef Wellington pastries containing death cap mushrooms.

She was also found guilty of attempting to murder Ian Wilkinson, Heather’s husband, who survived the meal. It wasn’t disputed that Patterson served the mushrooms or that the pastries killed her guests. The jury was required to decide whether she knew the lunch contained death caps, and if she intended for them to die.

The guilty verdicts, which were required to be unanimous, indicated jurors rejected Patterson’s defence that the presence of the poisonous fungi in the meal was a terrible accident, caused by the mistaken inclusion of foraged mushrooms that she didn’t know were death caps.

Prosecutors didn’t offer a motive for the killings, but during the trial highlighted strained relations between Patterson and her estranged husband and frustration that she had felt about his parents in the past.

The case turned on the question of whether Patterson meticulously planned a triple murder or accidentally killed three people she loved, including her children’s only surviving grandparents. Her lawyers said she had no reason to do so — she had recently moved to a beautiful new home, was financially comfortable, had sole custody of her children and was due to begin studying for a degree in nursing and midwifery.

But prosecutors suggested Patterson had two faces — the woman who publicly appeared to have a good relationship with her parents-in-law, while her private feelings about them were kept hidden. Her relationship with her estranged husband, Simon Patterson, who was invited to the fatal lunch but didn’t go, deteriorated in the year before the deaths, the prosecution said.