‘We wanted to be best, not just first’: Mushroom murder spawns first TV show

When news of a spate of deaths from suspected food poisoning in South Gippsland broke in 2023, Gil Marsden’s ears pricked up. His wife was from Sale, so he knew the area well. And he was a big fan of the suspect meal, too.

“My go-to Christmas dish was beef Wellington, I made one literally every year for 10 years straight,” he says. “I stopped in 2023, and haven’t gone back since. I feel like I need to confront my fears.”

Initially, he thought the deaths of Gail and Don Patterson and Heather Wilkinson, and the hospitalisation of Ian Wilkinson, were the result of a terrible accident. But when he got a call from US production company Fifth Season, with whom he has a deal, on August 5, 2023, he figured it was worth paying closer attention. “They’re like, ‘what is this thing that’s going on in East Gippsland?’,” he recalls.

And when Erin Patterson spoke to reporters outside her home after being interviewed by police, the Emmy-nominated filmmaker realised this was his next project.

“July 29 was the lunch, and basically the day after she spoke [August 5], I drove down,” says Marsden, whose three-part documentary series Revealed: Death Cap, will be the first of many cabs off the rank when episode one drops on Stan on September 14.

Within a week, Marsden had met Marta Pascual Juanola, the Spanish-born police reporter who covered the case for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Along with veteran crime writer John Silvester, she would become a key figure in telling the story in the series.

“I first met her as she was saying goodbye to someone I was meeting for the first time, a shop owner, and I was struck instantly by, firstly, the Spanish accent. And then by the empathy with which she was engaging with this woman, who was basically saying, ‘we’re tired of this, we’re tired of people sniffing around, please go away’.”

The tension between a small country town trying to deal with unimaginable trauma and the influx of outsiders desperate for fresh angles is central to the story Marsden ultimately tells in Death Cap. And he doesn’t excuse himself from the interest that sometimes bordered on prurient.

By the time he arrived in town he, like many others, assumed he was covering a murder, though at that stage nothing was proven. “And so immediately I’m going, ‘oh my God, this is a creepy small town’. You bring so much baggage and perception. You bring a lens that you’re viewing that community through.

“That really ended up informing how we approached the series, understanding not just how the media spotlight traumatises a town and forces a town into hiding in some sense, but also how [it shapes] how we perceive truth.”

There are multiple tellings of this story in the works in print and on screen, with the ABC/Matchbox dramatisation Toxic perhaps the most eagerly awaited (and potentially fraught). And while Marsden’s film will be the first to emerge (other than a Spotlight special on Seven last month), that wasn’t the guiding ambition in making it.

“Obviously, there’s a version that we could have done where we had something dropped on the day of the verdicts, but we weren’t really focused on that,” he says. “We wanted to come out while the audience is still clamouring for more information, but we wanted to be best – ethically and creatively – not just first.”

Making a show about a story as it’s evolving is tricky. In fact, Marsden says, “it’s the most complicated project I’ve ever worked on”. There have been “five or six” different versions over the past two years, he reveals.

“Not only is there a version of this where she’s acquitted, but there is a version of this where it is an accident,” he says.

Ultimately, the decision of the jury is what guides this telling, and in that version – the truth as established by the judicial process – Erin Patterson is a killer.

She was found guilty last month of murdering her in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66, and the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson, who was 68 at the time.

“But I think we wouldn’t have been doing our job right if we didn’t engage with all possibilities through the entirety of the process,” says Marsden, “including up to minutes before the verdict.”

Erin Patterson is to be sentenced on September 8.

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