Australia’s mushroom murderess is found guilty

IT WAS AN easy slip-up. Anyone might buy a Sunbeam food dehydrator to dry out the poisonous death-cap mushrooms they have just foraged, keep the dried fungi in some Tupperware and mistake them for the dried mushrooms they have bought from an Asian grocery in Melbourne. The recipe for Beef Wellington called for button mushrooms for the duxelle, the paste that goes between the meat and the crust. But the ones bought from Woolworths proved a bit tasteless, so it was natural for Erin Patterson to add some tangier dried ones. It was all, she said, a terrible accident. But it caused the death of three family members of her estranged husband, Simon—both his parents and his mother’s sister, whose husband survived.