An Australian court has heard a husband suspected his wife of poisoning him over a year before she murdered three of his relatives with toxic mushrooms
The husband of a woman convicted of killing three people with a meal laced with deadly mushrooms suspected his wife had been poisoning him more than a year before the fatal meal, an Australian court has heard.
A judge on Friday lifted a gag order on pretrial evidence that triple murderer Erin Patterson, 50, had wanted kept secret while she attempts to overturn her convictions.
The evidence included the suspicions of Patterson’s estranged husband Simon Patterson that she had previously attempted to kill him.
Simon Patterson testified at a pre-trial hearing that he had declined the lunch invitation out of fear.
“I thought there’d be a risk that she’d poison me if I attended,” the husband told the court months before the trial in testimony that was not presented to jurors.
Simon said while he had stopped eating food prepared by his wife, from whom he had been estranged since 2015, he never thought others would be at risk.
Erin Patterson was convicted by a Victoria state Supreme Court last month of murdering her parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson at her home in Leongatha with a lunch of beef Wellington pastries contained toxic death cap mushrooms.
