the death cap dame

[John Gryphon]

[td]

Will Erin Patterson become Victoria’s longest-serving female inmate? Only one person can decide​

[/td]​

[td]

In the hours after dosing her lunch guests with death cap mushrooms, triple-murderer Erin Patterson played with Lego in her toy room. Just as on that July 2023 evening, the 50-year-old mother of two has shown little emotion about taking the lives of three family members and attempting to murder another. Today, she will be sentenced for her crimes.

[/td]​

[td]

If Patterson is sentenced to life without parole in the Supreme Court of Victoria, she will become only the second Australian woman to receive such a term. The first was NSW abattoir worker Katherine Knight, who stabbed her de facto husband, John Price, 37 times, skinning him and cooking his body parts as a meal designed for his children in February 2000. If Patterson is handed a life sentence with a non-parole period of more than 32 years, she would be serving the longest sentence of a female killer in Victoria. Currently, the female inmate serving the longest term in the state is Chinese national Cai Xia Liao, who was sentenced to life with a non-parole period of 32 years for murdering her former lover’s wife and his four-year-old grandson with garden shears.

[/td]​

[td]

In July, a jury found Patterson guilty 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. Prosecutors are calling for Patterson to be jailed for life, without the possibility of parole. Her lawyers concede the “grave offending” deserves a life sentence but want the judge to impose a minimum term when she can apply to be released.

[/td]​

​

 

[John Gryphon]

she will die in the joint.

Erin Patterson has been sentenced to life in prison with 33 years non-parole, for murdering three in-laws — and attempting to murder a fourth — by lacing their beef Wellingtons with poisonous death cap mushrooms in 2023.

The prosecution had called for Patterson to be jailed for life with no parole.

Patterson's lawyer conceded a life sentence was appropriate but urged Justice Christopher Beale to set a minimum term to give Patterson the chance to walk free by the time she is in her 80s.

 

[SamHuntVic]

John, after all of the discussions of the case over the months, my wife has discovered that the ladies who were murdered were her third cousins. She had never met them though.
Grant.

 

[starr shot]

Bet the other inmates Hope she doesn’t apply for a job in the kitchen