SYDNEY — An Australian woman convicted of murdering three of her estranged husband’s relatives with a meal laced with deadly mushrooms lost an attempt on Friday to appeal her conviction, with a court also quashing her chances of parole.Erin Patterson, now 52, was found guilty last year of murdering her three elderly in-laws and attempting to kill another when she served them a toxic mushroom-laced meal in 2023, in a case that captivated Australia. She was sentenced to life in prison with a 33-year non-parole period, among the longest terms ever handed to a woman in the country.The Australian mother was given three life sentences for the murder of three people, including her estranged husband’s parents, as well as 25 years for the attempted murder of a fourth guest, the local pastor, who recovered after weeks in hospital.Patterson has always denied wrongdoing, saying the deaths were accidental.She had appealed on multiple grounds, arguing that certain evidence should have been kept from the trial, that her cross-examination was unfair, and that a mistake placing the jury in the same hotel as other parties to the case compromised the result.A panel of three judges on Friday said those grounds were insufficient for an appeal.A separate appeal by the prosecution, which argued giving Patterson a non-parole period was inadequate in light of the seriousness of her crimes, was successful.”This offending was extraordinarily cold and calculated, and stands to be denounced in the strongest terms,” Justice Stephen McLeish, speaking on behalf of a panel of three judges hearing the appeals, told the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne.”In all the circumstances, after anxious consideration, we have concluded that the case involved such shocking criminality that it is inappropriate to fix a non-parole period.”Patterson’s lawyers had presented seven grounds of appeal in the hope that the mother of two would be granted a retrial. On the first ground, they took issue with the way the jury members were sequestered, which they claimed was “catastrophic” to their case.During the trial, held in the small Victorian town of Morwell, jury members shared a hotel at various times with prosecutors and witnesses. While there was no evidence that the guests interacted, Patterson’s lawyers said the possibility of interactions “cannot be excluded.”However, the three appeals court judges found “there was no objective basis for a fair-minded person to reasonably apprehend that the jury might not have discharged its function of rendering a verdict according to law.”The judges also rejected suggestions that some evidence shouldn’t have been submitted, including cellphone data that put Patterson near the location of death cap mushrooms posted to a citizen scientist website. The judges found the evidence was admissible as part of the prosecution’s “wider circumstantial case.”A fatal lunchThe case has been dissected at length in books, podcasts, documentaries and feature articles since the first facts emerged in mid-2023, after Patterson invited four people to her home for a special Saturday lunch.Within hours of the meal, the guests experienced severe stomach pains and within days, three of the four were dead, including her estranged husband’s parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson. Patterson doesn’t deny cooking the meal that ultimately killed most of her lunch guests, but she claimed she had accidentally laced the meal with death cap mushrooms as she tried to improve its flavor.However, the jury found she picked the mushrooms for the purposes of murder, drying them in a dehydrator that she dumped a few days after the meal, as her guests lay dying in hospital.Friday’s ruling means that Patterson will have no prospect of release during her lifetime.Patterson wasn’t in court to hear the result of her appeal, but appeared via a video link from prison. Reporters inside the court in Melbourne, Australia, said she showed no emotion when the ruling was read.
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