Erin Patterson, on trial for murder, has spent a full day in the witness box providing evidence about the lunch, the night after the lunch and the days following the meal.

Now her lawyer, Colin Mandy, SC, is directing her to an image police took during a search of her house showing a black case sitting on a windowsill.

When asked by Mandy what the case was, she identified it as phone A.

Patterson said that when police asked for her phone, she gave them phone B, which had a SIM card that ended with the number 835.

“I remember coming home and being a bit confused because they’ve given me the property seizure record which showed two Samsung [phones] had been taken, which I thought there must be the Nokia left behind,” she said.

Patterson said that when she got home she found that device in a basket, and then she saw phone A sitting on a windowsill.

“I thought if there’s two Samsung in the seizure records, and this is here, what’s the other Samsung?” she told the jury.

Patterson said she took the SIM card out of phone A and put it in the Nokia sometime around midnight.

“It baffled me why [the Nokia] was still in my house,” she said.

On August 5, 2023, Erin Patterson said she had a discussion with a child protection worker about changing her phone number.

Patterson said she told her she was going to change her number because she was becoming concerned about Simon’s behaviour and allegations.

“I was concerned about my security, so I wanted him to not be able to contact me any more,” she said.

Patterson said she had been updating the contact information for all her accounts from her old phone number to her new phone number.

“My phone was damaged. The screen was becoming less responsive and harder to read, so I decided to … use an undamaged phone,” she said.

Patterson said she had been setting up applications for her accounts on the new phone.

Erin Patterson’s defence lawyer Colin Mandy, SC, points to a record showing a series of factory resets on phone B, starting in February 2023.

Patterson said she was responsible for the last three factory resets, while her son had been responsible for the first. “That had been my phone since the start of the year but in February [my son] damaged his own phone and so he needed a new phone, so I bought a new [Samsung] A23 and gave him the one I’d been using, which was this phone,” she said.

Patterson said her son had factory reset the phone so he could set it up as his.

She said she did a factory reset on August, 2, 2023, to get her son’s information off the phone so she could add her own information. She said her son had used that phone until May, when he went on school camp and accidentally dropped it in mud. She noticed that the charging port had become a bit muddy, so she left the phone near a charging station she had set up in an ottoman in her loungeroom.

Patterson said that she reset the phone again on August 5, 2023, the day police searched her Leongatha home.

“I had put all my apps on it, including my Google account, including my Google Photos, and I knew that there were photos in there of mushrooms and the dehydrator. I just panicked and I didn’t want [the detectives] to see them,” she said.

Patterson said that on August 6, 2023, after the search of her house and interview with the police, she decided to log onto her Google account to see if she could see where her devices were.

She said she then wondered whether they had been “silly enough” to leave the devices connected to the internet, and she “hit factory reset”. “It was really stupid,” she said.

Erin Patterson’s defence lawyer, Colin Mandy, SC, is now directing his client to more text messages between her and Sally Ann Atkinson, from the Department of Health, where she was asked several questions about the meal, including when she had bought the ingredients from the supermarket.

At that stage, Patterson said, she did not believe that any of the ingredients she had purchased from the supermarket had made anyone unwell, but she did not tell Atkinson this.

“I was scared,” she said.

Patterson said she still thought it was a possibility that the mushrooms she had bought in the Asian grocery store could be to blame.

“But I knew it wasn’t the only possibility,” she said.

Following the conversation about the dehydrator and the hospital, Erin Patterson said she started to feel scared and to feel responsible.

The following day, August 2, 2023, Patterson said she drove the children to school and returned home.

Afterwards, she took the dehydrator to the tip because she feared where the conversation with government workers might go when it came to the meal and the dehydrator. “I was scared that they would blame me for it, for making everyone sick,” she said. “And I was scared they’d remove the children.”

Patterson said she did not tell anyone that she had realised death cap mushrooms may have been served at the meal.

“I thought there might be evidence of that [in the dehydrator]. Evidence of any foraged mushrooms in there,” she said.

Slowing down her responses, Erin Patterson is telling the jury about a conversation with her estranged husband at the hospital on August 1, 2023.

That afternoon, she said she had a conversation with Simon Patterson and their children about why they were at the hospital, and some of their relatives were unwell.

“I remember explaining how there was a concern that the lunch I had served on Saturday might have made people unwell,” she said.

Patterson said she remembered her daughter asking her why they were at the hospital if they hadn’t been at the lunch, and she explained it was because they had eaten the leftovers, but she had scraped the mushrooms off.

Patterson said that opened up a conversation about mushrooms, and they spoke about how their daughter had preferred eating muffins with mushrooms in them when Patterson had made a blind taste test.

“I don’t remember if it was Simon or I that initiated it, but there was a conversation about how I had used a dehydrator to do that and he said to me: ‘Is that how you poisoned my parents, using that dehydrator?’

“I said: ‘Of course not’,” she said.

That comment, which occurred after the children left the room, caused her to do “a lot of thinking about a lot of things”.

“It got me thinking about all the times I had used it [the dehydrator],” she said.

Patterson said the conversation got her thinking about whether foraged mushrooms could have gone into the container with the Asian mushrooms. “Simon seemed to be of the mind that maybe this was intentional. I was really scared,” she said.

On Tuesday, August 1, 2023, Erin Patterson woke up at Monash Medical Centre feeling, she says, a fair bit better. Her children were in the pediatric wing, where their father, Simon Patterson, had spent the night with them.

The jury heard Patterson got a phone call from Department of Health manager Sally Ann Atkinson about 8.30am that morning, where she spoke about the ingredients used in the lunch and the meal.

“I told her what I had told Leongatha [Hospital]: that the majority of the ingredients came from Woolworths and that there were dried mushrooms from an Asian grocer,” she said.

She told Atkinson she could not remember the exact location of the Asian grocer, but gave some possible suburbs from which the dried mushrooms could have come.

The jury has been shown a series of text messages between Atkinson and Patterson following that initial call.

Patterson said that at the time, she and Simon were looking after the children and in meetings at the hospital.

In one of the messages to Atkinson, Patterson said she would get information to her as soon as possible, but she was busy trying to look after the children and dealing with the meetings.

Erin Patterson’s defence lawyer, Colin Mandy, SC, is continuing to question her about what happened after the fatal mushroom lunch, particularly if she had plans to bring her children to hospital to be checked after they consumed beef Wellington leftovers.

The answer, she told the court, was partly logistical. Would her estranged husband want to pick them up?

Patterson told the court that at the time, Simon Patterson would likely be reluctant to do so since he hadn’t wanted to drive 10 minutes to pick her up and take her to hospital that morning.

They said they discussed whether someone at the school might be able to help with the children, but that she wanted to be close to them. “I just wanted to be with them in hospital,” she said.

Patterson said she asked Dr Veronica Foote to tell her what was happening, but was told staff could not tell her for privacy reasons.

“Dr Foote explained to me that yes, I had scraped the mushrooms off, but maybe the toxin had gone into the meat, who knows, and better to be safer than sorry. I could understand the logic in that,” she said.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want them to get treated.”

She said she didn’t want to cause the children stress about going to hospital unless it was strictly necessary.

Patterson said she received saline fluids and NAC, a liver-protecting drug, at the urgent care in Leongatha. Eventually, she said she was put in an ambulance and taken to Monash Medical Centre.

She told the court she was given anti-nausea medication and fentanyl nose spray for a headache. Patterson said the drug took the pain away but made her feel a bit “loopy”.

She also said that after being admitted to Monash Medical Centre at 2.40pm, she saw Simon and her children before being put in a cubicle while waiting to be assessed.

“It’s a bit of a blur,” she said.

Patterson said that throughout that day (July 31, 2023), she still had to take “toilet trips” in Leongatha.

She said the nausea came back in the afternoon and evening, and she still had some diarrhoea, but she wasn’t feeling as bad as she had that morning.

Following a break for lunch, accused murderer Erin Patterson is back in the witness box.

She said that after leaving the hospital, she went home to prepare for the journey to Melbourne, where she went to the toilet a couple of times and rested.

About an hour later, she returned to Leongatha Hospital, where she spoke again with Dr Chris Webster in urgent care. She was ushered into a private room for assessment.

Patterson said that at that time, she discussed the leftovers with Webster and other hospital staff.

“I think he asked me if [the children] ate the meal or not. I told him not on the Saturday, but on the Sunday they had the leftovers,” she said. “I told him I had removed the pastry and mushrooms.”

Patterson’s defence barrister Colin Mandy, SC asked her about her communication with the police about the leftovers.

She recalled speaking to them on the phone and providing them with instructions to access her property and bins inside and outside the house.

Patterson also recalled receiving a phone call that morning from Matthew Patterson, the brother of her estranged husband, Simon.

“He said he was there with Don [Patterson, his father] and that someone from toxicology was asking where the mushrooms came from,” she said.

Patterson told him they came from Woolworths and an Asian grocer that may have been in the south-east Melbourne suburb of Oakleigh.

“I didn’t remember. I wasn’t sure, but these were the likely, the possible places it could be, because that’s where I shop,” she said she tried to convey in the conversation with Matthew.

That morning, Patterson said she also discussed picking up her two children with medical staff.

“I remember that I wanted to go and get them. And there was obviously push back on that from the medical people,” she said.

Patterson told the court that, in retrospect, her reaction was absurd given the doctors’ urgency about receiving appropriate treatment, but she wanted to be responsible for the children as their mother.