It is a horror story without monsters or demons, though evil is certainly present. In the absence of an intelligible motive, Erin Patterson’s alleged triple-murder of her in-laws has elicited incredulity and the familiar fallback of “evil.” This old bromide stands in for a cogent explanation, but psychologists have remained silent, journalists are waiting for inspiration and even the lawyers prosecuting Patterson failed to explain her motives. I’ll try. But first, let me describe what is, after all, an extraordinary sequence of events.
Erin Scutter worked for RSPCA Australia (an animal welfare organization) in Melbourne, Australia, when, in the early 2000s, she met Simon Patterson. They married and moved to Perth, a city on the west coast. Scutter had earlier inherited $2 million Australian ($1.32 million). She had a son by Patterson and enjoyed cordial relations with her in-laws, Gail and Don Patterson. She changed her surname after marrying. Later, the couple moved to the state of Victoria, ostensibly to be nearer his family. Erin gave birth to a second child but soon lost both her parents to cancer.
Around 2015, Erin and Simon separated amicably, sharing custody of their children. They remained on friendly terms, even vacationing together. But in 2022, Simon filed tax returns listing himself as single, which reduced Erin’s government child support payments. He claimed it was an accounting error, but it is at least possible that Erin blamed him and bore a grudge.
Between November 2021 and September 2022, Simon was hospitalized three times with severe gastrointestinal issues. Physicians never identified the cause, though the symptoms appeared consistent with ingestion of rat poison. Erin maintained friendly relations with both Simon and his family.
In July 2023, Erin invited Simon’s parents, Gail and Don and his aunt and uncle, Heather and Ian Wilkinson, to lunch at her home in Leongatha. Simon declined. Patterson, who reportedly told her guests she had ovarian cancer, served beef Wellington. Later, all four guests ended up being admitted to the hospital with gastro-like symptoms. Gail and Heather later died, followed by Don. Only Ian survived.
Police searched Erin’s home and questioned her. In November 2023, she was arrested and charged with three counts of murder and one of attempted murder. She pleaded not guilty, claiming the deaths were a tragic accident. But the jury found she had laced the food she served with Amanita phalloides, better known as death cap mushrooms, and found her guilty. The judge sentenced her to life imprisonment (though one imagines she won’t be trusted with kitchen duty).
So far, no one has satisfactorily answered the question: Why would an apparently ordinary woman commit such an extraordinary act of familial homicide?
Why? Why not?
Let me start by turning the question inside out: Why wouldn’t Patterson, a supposedly ordinary woman, kill her relatives? She may have harbored resentment toward her estranged husband after what he called an accounting error reduced her income. Perhaps she didn’t rage at him or his family openly, but silently held a simmering grievance. Rage can be expressed in different ways.
Criminologist Travis Hirschi’s Social Control Theory begins from an unusual premise: People commit crimes not because of irresistible urges, but because the restraints that usually check behavior have weakened. Bonds of attachment, commitment, involvement and belief ordinarily fasten us to society and restrain our behavior.
In Patterson’s case, many of those bonds appear weakened. Her marriage had collapsed. Trust in the extended family was frayed. She’d allegedly engaged in deception, by which I mean fabricating a cancer diagnosis. These are signs of someone unmoored from the attachments and commitments that inhibit transgression. Social Control Theory doesn’t reduce her actions to pathology: It suggests how crime becomes possible when the ordinary prohibitions of social life lose their hold.
It’s conceivable Patterson may have suspected that Simon, though estranged and living independently, had met another woman. There is no evidence of this, but even the belief could have shaped her sense of entrapment — hemmed in by disappointment, estrangement or disrespect. The fantasy of removing obstructive relatives may have seemed like a reasonable solution to otherwise insoluble pressures. The lack of control can’t explain the actual transgression, but it frames it as a distorted response to unbearable experiences.
Unnatural born killers
Killers are not born with murderous intent. They acquire techniques, rationalizations and cues that normalize deviance. Crime is learned behavior. People adopt definitions favorable to lawbreaking through their interactions with others. For Patterson, these lessons may not have come from a criminal underworld, but from subtler sources, like television, books, even casual conversations. Poisoning with mushrooms requires familiarity: lethality, preparation, dosage. Anyone versed in Agatha Christie’s novels knows how cues abound in popular literature. Knowledge, once acquired, makes the step into action conceivable.
Sociologist David Matza’s theory of “drift” adds another layer. Matza argued that people don’t set out to become criminals. (There are exceptions, as anyone familiar with the first line from filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas knows: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”) They drift into deviance, oscillating between conformity and transgression. At times of loosened social bonds or weakened supervision, opportunities for deviance open up and individuals rationalize their acts as temporary departures from the norm.
The Patterson case fits this unsettling model. She may not have begun with a firm resolve to kill, but with smaller transgressions — deceits, manipulations, fantasies. Over time, these slid toward a point where serving poisoned food no longer felt unthinkable but almost natural, even normal. Drift explains the gradual erosion of moral boundaries that can culminate in extraordinary violence.
None of these accounts alone captures Patterson’s motivation. But together they suggest a convergence: weakened social bonds, perceived strains, learned definitions of deviance and a slow slide into moral suspension. This does not yield a neat motive — revenge, resentment or liberation may all have played roles — but it situates the crime in broader social dynamics. What looks incomprehensible becomes, from a sociological perspective, an intelligible sequence of disintegrating bonds, blocked goals, deviant learning and drift toward transgression.
Enduring fascination
If the causes of the crime lie in subterranean processes, the spectacle it created belongs to a different realm. The “mushroom murders,” as they’re colloquially called, were not just a local tragedy. They became global news, followed in real-time by podcasts, documentaries and soon a drama series. Why has this case captivated the world?
Since the 19th century, crime has been a staple of mass journalism. The Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 made East London the focus of global headlines and established a template: Lurid crimes, mysterious motives and a public insatiable appetite for detail. The mushroom murders fit into that lineage.
They contained all the elements of narrative drama: family betrayal, exotic poison, survival and death, deception and courtroom revelation. A Sunday lunch, usually a picture of domestic normality, became the setting for spectacular horror. Journalists know instinctively that such juxtapositions of the banal and the grotesque guarantee readership. So do scriptwriters for the British drama Midsomer Murders, in which charming villages in rural Oxfordshire, England, become the scenes of macabre killings.
The 21st century has seen an explosion of true-crime culture. Streaming platforms, podcasts and documentaries have turned real cases into serialized entertainment. The mushroom murders, with their unusual method and compelling characters, were perfect raw material for this ecosystem. Millions followed the daily updates, not only in Australia, but worldwide, as though consuming a live drama. ABC’s decision to dramatize the case in a television series, Toxic, is less an aberration than the logical next step in a global appetite for crime stories.
Why does crime, especially gruesome crime, hold such enduring fascination? Partly it reassures: By observing the extraordinary, we confirm our own normality. Partly it excites: Transgression, especially in the domestic sphere, exposes the fragility of everyday order. A family lunch is supposed to embody familiarity, friendship and safety. Turning it into an occasion of mass poisoning shatters those assumptions and forces us to ponder what we ordinarily suppress.
We are also drawn to questions of motive. When killers act from greed or desperation, their behavior is explicable, even if repellent. But when motives remain opaque, as in Patterson’s case, curiosity intensifies. The absence of explanation makes the story more haunting. Media interest feeds on that vacuum, replaying details in the hope that a rationale might surface.
Finally, the globalization of media ensures crimes no longer stay local. Satellite news, digital platforms and social media amplify cases that once would have occupied only regional headlines. The mushroom murders became a global spectacle not only because they were sensational, but because the global infrastructure now exists to circulate them instantly. In that sense, the case reveals as much about us and our contemporary media ecology as it does about Patterson.
[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” is published by Bloomsbury.]
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
The post Anatomy of the Mushroom Murders appeared first on Fair Observer.
from Fair Observer https://ift.tt/IPMzT5h
0 Comments