On Thursday, officers of the Australian Police force apprehended the woman suspected to be the mastermind of the mushroom meal mystery, that left three people dead and a local preacher fighting for his life.
Erin Patterson’s arrest is the latest action in the developing story which took place in the small rural town of Leongatha, Melborne.
In a statement released by Victoria Police, the police stated that Homicide squad detectives arrested the woman this morning after they had executed a search warrant at Patterson’s address following an incident in Leongatha earlier this year, they also made it known that she has not been charged.
Intelligence gathered revealed that Patterson served the mushrooms as part of a beef Wellington dish on the afternoon of July 29 to her estranged parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson, local Baptist pastor Ian Wilkinson and his wife Heather.
Later that night, the two couples were taken to hospital with food poisoning symptoms as their health rapidly deteriorated and in the space of a week the three of them were dead.
The Police believe their symptoms were consistent with those caused by eating highly toxic death cap mushrooms, and they revealed that only the 69-year-old pastor Wilkinson survived after spending nearly two months fatally ill in hospital. He was released on September 23.
After careful investigations, the Police had declared the community newsletter editor Patterson, a suspect after the devastating incidence following the deaths of innocent people.
Patterson always insisted she was innocent, reportedly saying in August that she unknowingly bought the mushrooms from an Asian grocery store and that the poisonings were accidental.
