A taxonomy of takes: The mushroom trial

At 2.15 yesterday afternoon, a sonic boom to rival Krakatoa spread throughout the country as news came in that the jury in the Erin Patterson mushroom murder case had found her guilty — and a million podcast mics, broadcast lights and news cameras all clicked on in unison.

It was in keeping with the striking unreality of it all to see these unsettling new images of Patterson in the back of a police vehicle, taken on May 12 of this year. The pictures were only published after she was found guilty of the murder of her in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, as well as the attempted murder of Heather’s husband Ian.

Initially emotionless, she stares down the barrel of the camera lens, and then, under the glowing white light, her face contorts into a look of horror and she turns away. It’s difficult to look at, and was run image-by-image across Australia’s media. It was an indication of things to come, with the blanket coverage going to some dark and strange places.

The live blog(s)

Sky News set a countdown clock in the lead up to the verdict announcement like it was waiting for the New Year’s Eve fireworks.

Meanwhile, having kept readers abreast of vital developments like a prison van “presumed to be transporting Erin Patterson” leaving the Latrobe Valley Law Courts, the ABC live blog started spitting out images from the evidence exhibits. No detail, apparently, could be allowed to escape the public’s notice: police photos of plates and a cookbook on a kitchen counter, the invoices for Patterson’s dehydrator, the diary note victim Gail had made for the lunch, even CCTV footage of a doctor photographing the leftover wads of beef wellington.

The gratuitous details

The passage of the verdict has allowed all manner of raking over Patterson’s past; The Australian and the Herald Sun have both dived right in to her “troubled” former employment, with the Hun going particularly classy:

The Herald Sun can reveal the callous murderer, whose maiden name was Scutter before marrying Simon Patterson in 2007, was secretly dubbed ‘Scutter the Nutter’ among her training group.

The Australian found an even more gratuitous angle. Readers still unsure how they felt about Patterson after the jury found she had murdered three elderly people, were treated to the revelation she was a right whinger on her first night in prison:

And of course, after a trial which consumed Australia’s media (including, for a small time, us), you would expect the aftermath to be stripped for every possible click-magnet angle, like starving piranhas setting upon a cow. But here’s where it gets really gross — the commentary. The Oz, under a headline that promised: “At last, the full Erin is outed”:

… not even the guilt of killing a kind old soul like her children’s grandmother was enough to make [Patterson] break out in proper, heaving — humane even — emotion.

Remember, there were often times in court when Patterson cried or tears welled as she went through her evidence or listened to the words of others.

No, what the court got on Monday was the full Erin.

Cold, mean and vicious.

The Age also emphasised that “the killer didn’t even flinch” — calling upon ideas that have, at best, a very dicey history.

From there, the obvious next step — diagnosis via spectator.

The Oz found it “obvious” that Patterson’s motive was “domestic violence coercive control”, even offering a vague rebuke to the woke double-standards that allowed any confusion to pop up:

The fact this crime was committed by a woman, and involved poison, and not a gun or a knife, has confused what should be crystal clear — and should have been a motive clearly presented to the jury.

Meanwhile, The Age offered a psychologist’s take on the “reason Patterson … thought she could get away with it, the reason she did it”. It was, apparently, “because she does not see the world the same way as you and me. Her lens is likely different”. No-one involved was given any pause by the very pertinent disclosure that the writer had “not personally assessed Patterson” before reaching the conclusion that “insight may be gained by considering her world view from the perspective of the narcissist”.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Malcolm Knox — managing to somehow usurp his previous piece “Australia’s ball tampering scandal is a lot like the revelation of widespread rape and assault in Hollywood” in the baffling takes ranking — meanwhile found the whole thing hopeful.

In a piece titled “Why our mushroom murder trial fixation is a sign of hope”, Knox writes that in a world apparently awash with fake news:

… if you look around, trivia quizzes — and therefore facts — have never been more popular. Media is spiced with quizzes for the reason that they suck in audiences. We get stirred up about the ambiguous wording of a question in the Good Weekend Superquiz. Pub trivia, imported from Britain since the 1970s, is booming among 18- to 25-year-olds. And let’s not get started on those of us (guilty!) who use our phones less as communications devices than as pocket encyclopedias.

Sure, great piece for a “guilty as charged!” joke. Anyway, he’s getting there: “Life’s knottier questions are seldom simple enough to reduce to ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’, but while we remain interested, while we are curious about facts, we are engaged in a resistance movement.”

The real heroes, and the real victims: Us

Naturally, there are several stories or asides about what it has been like to stay in Morwell for so long, but we have to, as ever, tip our hat to the Daily Mail for vaulting above all the takes collected here to record the most unhinged content in the aftermath of the verdict.

“Some of us felt like we were losing our minds. A photographer had a heart attack on the first day. Something about this trial felt cursed,” wrote the Mail‘s correspondent Wayne Flower. He noted that Sophie Stafford, one of Patterson’s lawyers, “would break into a smile and attempt to hide it with her flowing brunette hair” as she entered the court. He ended on the revelation that the trial helped bring about the end of his marriage:

The grind and my absence had made my partner of 24 years — the mother of my two children — come to realise she no longer needed me in her life.

Days after my 50th birthday, for which she had organised a surprise party with all my friends and family in attendance, she told me she no longer loved me and I was discarded like yesterday’s newspaper.

It ends with a truly breathtaking assessment: “But the trial went on and so did I. Perhaps the last sad victim of Erin Patterson”.