Happy Sunday everyone, I’m back with a documentary series for you this week, but just a warning to start with, it may make you wary of eating mushrooms for a while after you eat it!
Has there been a more notorious true crime case in the last five years than the case of the Mushroom Murders in Australia? I’ll wait. Erin Patterson invited four of her in-laws over for lunch and afterwards three of them died and the fourth nearly died. When the investigation started it discovered that the four victims had ingested death cap mushrooms. The story was soon being covered by international media outlets, and when the trial happened this summer there were multiple daily podcasts about the case as well as a huge amount of reporters from around the world covering the case.
This is a three part documentary which explores the investigation and trial and has the advantage of many true crime docs because of all the coverage that this case had. I’m not a big true crime person, but so many of the series that I have watched are reliant on reconstructions. This does not have that issue. There were journalists on the ground from the start, this was clearly in the process of being made during the trial and because it’s so recent the memories of the locals that are interviewed are fresh. It’s so fresh in fact that Erin Patterson’s appeal against her sentence (sorry, spoiler!) was only lodged in November.
For me, the most interesting part of this case was seeing and finding out more about the part of Australia where this happened. Leongatha has a population of less than 6,000. Morwell where the trial took place has around 15,000 residents. They’re both in the Gippsland area of Victoria, which basically looks like beautiful English countryside and not like the desert outback that you so often picture when you think of Australia. And the Paterson case turned the town upside down – firstly because everyone knows everyone there and secondly because of the huge attention it garnered. I watched all three episodes back to back one night in the run up to Christmas and could have watched another hour if there was one. All of which means that I suspect this won’t be the last content about this case I consume, even if I haven’t knowingly eaten mushrooms since!
If you want to watch this, it was made by the Australian streamer Stan and has been sold on to various different streamers in other parts of the world. The trailer I found on YouTube is for CNN and says it’s a CNN Original, but in the UK it’s on Netflix. So you may have to have a little hunt on your local streaming services to find out where this is in your territory.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 