In the days after she wiped out her estranged husband’s family by feeding them a lunch laced with poison, Erin Patterson tried to convince me — and the world — she too was a victim.
She stood in front of me sobbing in the carport of her Leongatha home, in what would become her only television interview.
“I loved them,” Erin professed.
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“They never did anything wrong to me.”
Perhaps an odd thing to say, because I hadn’t asked if they had.
I stood less than a metre away as Erin wiped her eyes — though there were no tears.
It was a case that had all the ingredients of a gripping murder mystery.
A quiet country town. A simmering family drama. A lunch gone fatally wrong. A homemade Beef Wellington.
And at the centre of it all: a seemingly ordinary mum with a propensity to kill.
The world was transfixed.
I had interviewed one other murderer before, and the spidey senses I felt then came flooding back. I was hardly surprised when the Homicide Squad called asking for a copy of the tape.
In the weeks that followed, Erin and I spoke most days outside her home. She complained about being crucified in the press and she told me she couldn’t even leave her front door to feed her sheep.
At one point, Erin gave me her mobile number so we could stay in touch.
A number I would later learn belonged to the mobile phone that would become the centrepiece of her triple murder trial — the Samsung in the distinct pink case police never found.
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During the trial, prosecutors claimed Erin deliberately withheld this device, while handing over a “dummy” phone when police came knocking with a search warrant in August 2023.
That is, after she swapped sim cards while detectives were standing metres away, inside her home.
Through my interactions with Erin, I was surprised by how much she complained about media coverage of her now infamous Beef Wellington meal, but how she almost relished in it. I wondered why she would repeatedly take a leisurely stroll past our cameras outside her home, stopping to tell me and my camera crew, “my lawyer has told me I can’t talk to you”. Perhaps if she really didn’t want the attention, she could have stayed inside.
Since the deadly events of 2023, I’ve often wondered — did Erin Patterson really think she would get away with murder?
How did she expect an entire family to be killed at a lunch she hosted and have nobody raise an eyebrow?
Was it ignorance or arrogance? Or just a deluded belief she actually did nothing wrong? I’ll never know.
Erin’s neighbours described her to me as a strange, at-times rude woman, who mostly kept to herself.
Now she can be called something else too: one of the worst mass murderers in Australian history.
In many ways, the nine-week trial has left more questions than answers.
Everywhere I go, people want to talk about Erin Patterson.
Why did she poison her children’s grandparents, and presumably want to kill their dad too — all under the guise of a nourishing home-cooked meal?
It’s a question only one person knows the answer to — and that answer may never leave Erin Patterson’s lips.
