Key events
Patterson’s defence lawyer, Sophie Stafford, is cross-examining McKenzie.
She agrees she removed and disposed of every death cap mushroom she could find when she spotted the mushrooms.
Stafford asks McKenzie about her evidence there was a risk that the death cap mushrooms could grow back.
McKenzie agrees this would depend on conditions such as temperature and rainfall.
She says she did not go back to visit the location to see if the mushrooms had grown back.
Under questioning by Warren, McKenzie says it is possible to zoom into the dropped pin on the post to see the location of the site.
The jurors are shown a zoomed-in screenshot, showing the dropped pin to the left of the oval in Loch.
The same evening, McKenzie posted them on iNaturalist, the court hears.
She says she had “location settings” turned on, meaning the uploaded photos included the location of where the photographs were taken.
The court is shown a screenshot of McKenzie’s iNaturalist post, including photos of the mushrooms.
It shows the posts of these mushrooms were observed on 18 April 2023 at 11.31am and posted at 1.39pm.
Under the post, McKenzie suggested it was a death cap mushroom.
Another user has also “suggested” it is a death cap mushroom.
The post also includes “observation” notes by McKenzie where she wrote: “About 2 metres from large oak trees on Loch recreation reserve” and “under tree canopy”.
The prosecutor, Jane Warren, turns to questioning about the website iNaturalist.
McKenzie says she has a profile on the website she describes as a “citizen science” website. She says her profile name is “ChrisMck” and has contributed about 70 posts to the website, mainly about fungi.
She says she has made two posts about sightings of death cap mushrooms. The first was in May 2022 in the gardens of the state parliament house under oak trees.
The second was in Loch in April 2023. Under questioning by Lenthall, McKenzie says she was in Loch on 18 April to visit her daughter:
We’d been for a walk … my husband and I took our grandson and dog for a walk and we were on the oval sportsground at Loch, surrounded by oak trees. I observed some Amanita phalloides [death cap mushrooms] around the roots, or underneath the oak trees on the western side … of the oval.
She said initially she spotted the death caps under a single oak tree and then noticed more under the surrounding oak trees.
McKenzie said she took photos of the mushrooms and then removed all of the death caps and placed them in a plastic bag.
Because of my training at the poisons centre, I’m very aware about the toxicity of the Amanita phalloides.
She says death caps are also toxic to dogs and she knew the area was a popular dog walking spot. She tells the court: “I was very keen to remove all the samples I could find of them.”
McKenzie says it was a “risk” that more could “pop up”.
McKenzie says in her role she answered calls from members of the public and professionals regarding ingestion of a range of poisonous substances including fungi.
She tells the court what her role involved when someone calls the help line:
We need to ascertain the circumstances, for instance it might be a toddler who has a nibble of a little brown mushroom and nothing more.
She says if someone has symptoms, it becomes more urgent to identify the fungi.
McKenzie says she was “fascinated by the world of fungi” and did extra reading on the topic.
She says in her work, it was important to be able to quickly identify the most poisonous fungi.
McKenzie is a retired pharmacist, the court hears.
For the past 17 years of her career she worked as a senior poisons information specialist at the Victorian Poisons Information Centre.
McKenzie worked at the centre from 2006, the court hears.
Prosecution calls poisons information specialist as witness
The jurors have entered the court room in Morwell.
The prosecution calls their next witness, Christine McKenzie.
While we wait for today’s proceedings to kick off, here’s a reminder of what the jury heard on Friday:
A scientific expert, Dr David Lovelock, told the trial tests detected death cap mushrooms in two out of seven test tubes containing samples from a dehydrator dumped by Patterson in the days after the mushroom lunch.
Lovelock, who worked as a virologist at Agriculture Victoria in August 2023, said the positive test tube results had a 99% similarity to the DNA of death cap mushrooms.
He said only DNA from button mushrooms were found in ziplock bags containing the beef wellington leftovers.
The court previously heard that two days after the lunch a police officer had fished leftovers of the beef wellington meal from a bin at Patterson’s property in Leongatha, with her permission.
Patterson’s trial is entering its fourth week.
We’re waiting for the jurors to enter the courtroom in Morwell.
Here’s a report from our justice and courts reporter, Nino Bucci, on what the jury heard last week.
Welcome
Welcome to day 14 of Erin Patterson’s triple murder trial.
We’re expecting today’s evidence to begin after 10.30am once the jurors enter the courtroom.
Patterson, 50, faces three charges of murder and one charge of attempted murder relating to a beef wellington lunch she served at her house in Leongatha, in regional Victoria, on 29 July 2023.
She is accused of murdering her in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, and her estranged husband’s aunt, Heather Wilkinson. The attempted murder charge relates to Heather’s husband, Ian.
She has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The prosecution alleges Patterson deliberately poisoned her lunch guests with “murderous intent”, but her lawyers say the poisoning was a tragic accident.
