Melbourne, Australia — The estranged husband of a woman convicted of killing three people with a meal laced with deadly mushrooms suspected his wife had been poisoning him more than a year before the fatal meal, an Australian court has heard.
A judge on Friday lifted a gag order on pretrial evidence that triple murderer Erin Patterson, 50, had wanted kept secret while she attempts to overturn her convictions.
The evidence included the suspicions of Simon Patterson that she had previously attempted to kill him.
Simon Patterson testified at a pre-trial hearing that he had declined the lunch invitation out of fear.
“I thought there’d be a risk that she’d poison me if I attended,” the estranged husband told the court months before the trial in testimony that wasn’t presented to jurors.
MARTIN KEEP / AFP via Getty Images 
Simon said while he had stopped eating food prepared by his wife, from whom he had been estranged since 2015, he never thought others would be at risk.
Erin Patterson was convicted by a Victoria state Supreme Court last month of murdering her parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson at her home in Leongatha with a lunch of beef Wellington pastries that contained toxic death cap mushrooms.
She was also found guilty of attempting to murder Ian Wilkinson, Heather’s husband, who survived the meal but spent weeks in hospital.
Erin Patterson was initially charged with attempting to murder her husband by inviting him to the lunch in July 2023. He had accepted the invitation, then cancelled.
James Ross / AAP Image via AP 
She was also initially charged with three counts of attempting to murder him on three occasions around Victoria between November 2021 and September 2022.
Prosecutors dropped all charges relating to him before her trial began in April.
Simon Patterson testified before the trial that he suspected his wife had deliberately made him seriously ill with dishes including penne bolognese pasta, chicken korma curry and a vegetable curry wrap. No poisons were ever…
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