Court hears evidence from alleged mushroom cook: Erin Patterson trial day 24 as it happened

Asked about her relationship with Don and Gail during that year, Erin Patterson said she had begun to see them less.

“I had felt for some months that my relationship with the wider Patterson family, particularly Don and Gail had perhaps had a bit more distance or space put between us,” she said.

“I’d begun to have concerns that Simon was not wanting me to be involved too much with the family any more. Perhaps I wasn’t being invited to so many things.”

She explained that in the year the trio died, she had been busy helping her children settling into new schools. Erin Patterson said the pair lived with her full-time, visiting their father when they wished.

She said at the time, she was also preparing to return to study in 2024 after being accepted into a bachelor of nursing and midwifery at Federation University, which she had previously deferred to care for her children.

The accused was also asked about her Leongatha home, telling the jury she’d helped design it using Microsoft Paint and wanted it to be her forever home.

“Where once they moved away for uni or work, they could come back and stay wherever they liked, bring their children and I’d grow old there. That’s what I’d hoped,” she told the jury.

“I really liked living there. I was comfortable financially, such that I could afford to go to university and I didn’t need to work a full-time job at the same time.”

A softly spoken Patterson, seated in the witness box, explained that in the early days of her relationship with Simon Patterson they had lived together in Perth.

There, she said, Don and Gail Patterson visited several times a year, even helping plan part of her wedding to their son by arranging a large marquee and food.

But in early 2023, she said she felt things began to change.

“Partly as a consequence that I no longer lived in the same town as Don and Gail,” she said.

Patterson said her relationship with Simon Patterson – after separating in 2015 – had grown to be only functional and they no longer related to “friend things” like they used to.

The accused said by 2023, she was also not feeling good about herself physically and had been fighting a never-ending battle with low self-esteem, putting on weight, and was unable to exercise as much as previously.

“I was planning to have weight-loss surgery, you know, is it gastric bypass? I was planning to do that,” she said.

Mandy took Erin Patterson back to the beginning of her romantic relationship with Simon Patterson which she said began in mid-2005 before they married in June 2007.

She said it was while they were dating in early 2005 she first met Don and Gail Patterson while staying at their house during a weekend away.

The accused said at the time she knew her partner was Christian, but she described herself as a “fundamentalist atheist”. That all changed though, she said, during her first-ever visit to church where Ian Wilkinson was giving a sermon at Korumburra Baptist Church.

“So through the course of those months, December ’04, January, February ’05 we had a lot of conversations about life, religion, politics and a lot about religion, and I was trying to convert him to being an atheist, but things happened in reverse and I became a Christian,” she said.

“I remember being really excited about [going to her first church service] because I’d never been to a church service before, I’d been to my sister’s wedding in a church but that was it.

“I remember that there was a banner up on the wall, behind where Ian was preaching … it said ... faith, hope and love.

“There’s a passage in the Bible that talks about faith, hope and love and the greatest of these is love.

“I had, what at best can be described as, like a spiritual experience.”

Patterson said she went on to attend Bible study sessions with Simon Patterson and some of his family and friends before the couple got married in June 2007.

“We got married in the Korumburra Anglican Church. A beautiful church. We wanted Ian and Heather to be able to come and relax as guests rather than have jobs for the day like they would have if we’d got married at Korumburra Baptist,” she said.

The accused said her husband’s cousin walked her down the aisle as her parents were “in Russia on a train” at the time.

“Don and Gail hired a huge marquee and put on a buffet for everybody,” she told the jury.

Trying to hold back tears, Erin Patterson detailed the help Gail Patterson had been to her after the “traumatic” birth of her first baby.

“Don and Gail came very quickly. It would have been only a couple weeks after,” she said.

“I remember being really relieved that Gail was there because I felt really out of my depth.”

Erin said Gail was really supportive, gentle and patient with her, giving advice about helping settle the baby and trying to interpret his cries.

“She gave me good advice about just relax and enjoy it, you don’t have to stick to this timetable, this schedule, just relax and enjoy your baby.”

In late 2009, Erin and Simon Patterson took their three-month-old son on a trip across the top of Australia, but she said travelling with a baby was difficult and she eventually returned to Perth where the couple separated for the first time.

The jury was told after reuniting two or three months later, the pair endured further separations during their relationship until 2015 when they split permanently.

She said there didn’t appear to be any conflict in their parenting of the children.

Several members of the Wilkinson and Patterson families were present in the court on Monday, including lunch survivor Ian Wilkinson and Don Patterson’s brother Colin Patterson.

Erin Patterson has pleaded not guilty to three charges of murder and one of attempted murder. She says the deaths were an accident.

The trial continues.

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“She gave me good advice about just relaxing and enjoying it; you don’t have to stick to this timetable, this schedule, just relax and enjoy your baby,” she said.

After Don and Gail left, Erin said, they continued living in the Perth flat.

“Simon was pretty keen for us to resume the trip where we left off before we stopped to have [the baby],” she said.

In April, the couple put their belongings in a storage unit and decided to continue travelling the northern part of Australia without any time constraints, other than meeting relatives on Gibb River Road, in Western Australia’s Kimberley region.

“One of Simon’s friends also joined us, and we took a couple of weeks for the Gibb River Road,” she said.

Her new in-laws, Don and Gail, hired a huge marquee and put on a buffet for the wedding guests.

Erin Patterson said her new husband lived in a unit in Clayton or Oakleigh, owned by Don and Gail Patterson, so she moved in briefly after the wedding.

The couple had a brief honeymoon in Olinda, but what they really wanted to do was drive around Australia. She said they sold everything and “hit the open road”.

Patterson told the jury they started by visiting Sydney, where Simon had a few friends.

Later, the pair travelled to Perth. She said they also went to South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia before returning to Perth at the end of the year to settle there.

“Simon was pretty keen to keep travelling, and I was pretty keen to stop for a while and put down roots,” she said.

Patterson said they got engaged and then married in 2007. She said the first people Simon told about the engagement were his parents, Don and Gail, who were living in Korumburra at the time.

Some members of the Patterson and Wilkinson families can be seen staring at the floor and straight ahead in court, while a smaller number are watching Erin Patterson speak.

A dozen of them are here, seated across two rows of the court on the side opposite the witness box.

Erin Patterson is still seated, fiddling with her fingers as she answers questions from her barrister.