Parole Eligibility: Court Removes Release Date For Mushroom Case

Erin Patterson will not leave prison on a set schedule. The Victoria state Court of Appeal ruled on Friday that the 33-year non-parole term attached to her sentence was too short, leaving her without a date for release consideration. Had the original term stood, she would have reached eligibility age 82. She watched the proceeding from the Gordon Unit of the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, a high-security section of the women's prison in Melbourne reserved for inmates assessed as at risk from other prisoners.

The case began in July 2023 at Patterson's rural home in Leongatha, where she served a lunch of beef Wellington pastry to four relatives of her estranged husband, Simon Patterson. Death cap mushrooms were in the dish. Her parents-in-law, Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson, died within days. Ian Wilkinson, Heather's husband, survived after weeks in hospital. Simon Patterson had been invited but declined the invitation the day before.

At a pretrial hearing, Simon Patterson testified that he declined out of fear. Evidence released after the trial detailed his suspicion that Erin Patterson had previously attempted to kill him. Patterson has said she added the mushrooms to the pastry accidentally.

Prosecutors asked the Court of Appeal in August to bar her from parole eligibility, arguing the minimum term did not account for the planning involved. The three judges dismissed her appeal against the convictions and accepted the prosecution's challenge to the sentence. Justice Stephen McLeish, writing for the bench, said the case involved "shocking criminality" that made a non-parole period inappropriate. He said her intent to kill all four guests held for almost three weeks, beginning when she invited them, and that her conduct included a false cancer diagnosis used to explain why her children were absent, destroyed evidence, and repeated false claims about where the mushrooms came from.

Patterson was sentenced in September 2025 to three life terms for murder and 25 years for attempted murder. Trial judge Christopher Bale said at that hearing that there was a "substantial chance" she could be held in solitary confinement for years. She can apply to Australia's High Court to contest both the convictions and the sentence; that court is her final appeal option.