Mushroom killer Erin Patterson’s secret texts about family she hated

Patterson used the cash to buy land for her ‘forever’ home at Leongatha, 140km southeast of Melbourne, where she hosted her deadly beef Wellington lunch 

Her candid texts to her friend, obtained by Daily Mail Australia, can finally be revealed after she was convicted of killing her parents-in-law, her husband’s aunt, and attempting to murder her husband’s uncle.

Patterson, 50, was found guilty on Monday of murdering Don and Gail Patterson, 70, Heather Wilkinson, 66, and attempting to murder Pastor Ian Wilkinson, who survived after a liver transplant.

In Patterson’s texts after her own mother’s death, she spoke disparagingly of both her parents, but was thrilled to be inheriting half her mum’s wealth.

Patterson sent the brutal texts in May 2019 while she was clearing out her mother’s house in the NSW south coast town of Eden. 

In the no-holds-barred messages, she called her father, who died in 2011, ‘a doormat’ and said her mother was a ‘cold alcoholic’.

She also said her own childhood had been ‘like being brought up in a Russian orphanage where they don’t touch babies’. 

But Patterson was jubilant about her inheritance from her mother’s estate which let her buy the land to build her dream home where she later committed mass murder.

Sending her friend a link to the land sale, she texted: ‘I bought this today. Literally so excited I can’t breathe!!!

‘I’ve been eyeing off that block for months. I have inspected it fifteen times! 

‘It’s been a dream to build all my life and can only do it thanks to mum’s house selling. Silver lining to her passing!’

Patterson said she had a ‘notebook full of sketches of house layouts I’ve been drawing for years’ and was ‘going to build on it ASAP’.

While Patterson was depicted as a loner during her trial, she had online friends in Facebook groups devoted to true crime and notorious baby killer Keli Lane.

Patterson posted photos of the books she cleared out of her mother’s home following Dr Scutter’s death, insisting she ‘loves books’ and ‘spent my childhood reading in my room’.

She also disclosed that ‘my mum was ultra weird her whole life’. 

She added: ‘We had a horrible upbringing. Mum was essentially a cold robot. 

‘Dad wanted to be warm and loving to us but mum wouldn’t let him because it would spoil us so he did what he was told.

‘She would shout at him if he did the wrong thing so he became very meek and compliant. 

‘Mum was actually a really hard person to love and made my life tough growing up, but you still feel the loss in spite of the difficulties.’

Patterson and her sister Ceinwen Scutter inherited their parents’ oceanfront property, and money for property investments to make Patterson independently wealthy.

They grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Glen Waverley, the daughters of parents, government worker Eitan Scutter and Dr Heather Scutter, a Monash University lecturer in 19th-century adult literature and a renowned children’s literature academic.

When the Scutters retired in 2009, they moved from Victoria to the stunning Eden property, on the clifftop above Aslings Beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean. 

Heather Scutter became ill with cancer, eventually dying in 2019, although in her texts, Patterson claimed she died from excessive alcohol.

‘My sister and I would hide in our rooms most of the time,’ she posted. ‘Mum was a massive drinker.

‘She drank herself to death. That’s how she died. Drank herself into a coma.’

Following her mother’s death and the inheritance of the Eden house, Erin Patterson built a two-storey house on the one-hectare block at Leongatha.

She lived at that house with her two children from her marriage to her now-estranged husband Simon Patterson, until her arrest on November 2, 2023.

Texting her friend four years earlier, Ms Patterson said: ‘It’s amazing, really closer to the town where my kids go to school but still feels like a bush block.’

Patterson had been so confident she would be found not guilty of murder that she had the Leongatha home covered in black plastic tarpaulins for privacy once the trial ended.

But since the guilty verdict, the future of that house is now in doubt with Patterson facing decades behind bars for the murders.

Her friend, Alison Rose Prior, who attended Patterson’s murder trial as the killer’s sole supporter, is believed to hold power of attorney over her assets and properties.

She will be sentenced at a later date.