Shortly after Erin Patterson’s lunch guests finished their deadly beef Wellingtons and left, never-before-seen CCTV footage reveals her chilling next move.
In evidence that was never seen or heard by the jury at her triple-murder trial, Patterson drove straight to a local tip where she is believed to have dumped the four guests’ plates, just 30 minutes after they had left her home on the afternoon of July 29, 2023.
Footage exclusively obtained by Daily Mail Australia shows Patterson dropping off what appeared to be a load of cardboard and a garbage bag at Koonwarra Transfer Station and Landfill at 3.30pm that afternoon. She then drove away in her red MG.
The mother-of-two was clearly seen arriving at the tip just after 3.30pm, making a card payment believed to be less than $10.
The killer then backed her car up to a dumping point and carried flattened cardboard boxes to a recycling bin.
Patterson was also seen carrying another, non-flattened cardboard box carefully to the bin where she struggled to squeeze it inside.
However, she managed to carefully place the box into the bin without squashing it.
Patterson also dumped some other rubbish from behind the boot of the car.
It was almost impossible to tell from the footage what rubbish was dumped.
Patterson then crushed and discarded some other boxes, including packaging for a food dehydrator, and drove away.
It was the same tip where, days later, she would dump the dehydrator she used to dry the death cap mushrooms she put in the beef Wellingtons to murder her victims.
Patterson, 50, pleaded not guilty to the murders of Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson.
Only Pastor Ian Wilkinson survived the lunch, in what Crown prosecutor Dr Nanette Rogers, SC, suggested was a big mistake on Patterson’s behalf.
The jury heard the lunch finished sometime between 2.30pm and 3pm, as Mr Wilkinson needed to attend a meeting with church staff.
Police sources suspected that Patterson dumped more than just cardboard at the tip after the lunch, but the contents were never found.
The dehydrator was found in an e-waste bin at the tip, and CCTV footage from the facility captured Patterson’s vehicle arriving on August 2, 2023, four days after the lunch.
This was evidence seen by the jury during the epic 10-week trial.
It is now widely believed that Patterson hid the plates she used to serve herself and her doomed guests in the cardboard that she dumped at the tip on the day of the lunch.
The remains of what was left of her guests’ deadly leftovers were also likely dumped at the tip at the same time, so the theory goes.
In opening the trial, Dr Rogers told the jury that Patterson had invited her guests over to ask them how she ought to tell her children she had ovarian cancer.
Prosecutors said that Patterson served beef Wellington and ate from a different plate to the others, distinguishing her meal from those she had poisoned.
There were four large grey dinner plates on the table, while Patterson ate from a smaller, tan-orange dish, according to Mr Wilkinson.
The issue of the plates became a pivotal part of Patterson’s defence because when police executed a search warrant at her Leongatha property on August 5, the plates that Mr Wilkinson described couldn’t be found.
Instead, they located a number of black and white plates, and no orange plate Mr Wilkinson had observed Patterson eat her Wellington off.
In his closing arguments to the jury, Patterson’s high-profile barrister Colin Mandy, SC, accused the pastor of being flat-out wrong about the plates.
‘It has to be the case that Ian Wilkinson is wrong about what he said. It makes no sense logically that you would use that method to deliver up an unpoisoned parcel, but otherwise, on all of the evidence, he’s wrong; honestly mistaken,’ Mr Mandy said.
He also said Mr Wilkinson was wrong about the colour of Patterson’s other plates, which he had described as being grey.
‘Erin and Simon were far more familiar with the crockery in the house than Ian was, and so we submit to you that you would have to find, on a proper and analytical examination of that evidence, that he wasn’t right about those plates. Honestly mistaken,’ Mr Mandy said.
But during the final days of the trial, Dr Rogers ran the jury step-by-step through how she claimed Patterson committed the murder.
‘The prosecution says that the accused deliberately served herself on a different plate to the others in order to identify which of the meals was not poisoned and which she would then serve to herself,’ she said.
‘The only reason she would do that is because she knew that there were poisonous mushrooms in the other meals because she’d put them there, and to ensure that she could identify the sole non-poisonous meal.’
The jury ultimately backed Dr Rogers’ version of events. On Monday afternoon, Patterson was found guilty of murder and attempted murder and will face a pre-sentence hearing at a later date.
