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SYDNEY, Australia — It is the criminal trial that has captivated Australia. No fewer than four podcasts track its every update. At least two documentaries are delving into it. Newspapers have been devoting pages to the trial, while websites have been live-blogging every witness's testimony. And each morning, scores of people line up for the chance to squeeze into a courtroom to watch it unfold.
It is the mushroom murder case, and almost everyone Down Under is talking about it.
"It's fascinating," said Dave Thorpe, 78, as he waited for a coffee at a Sydney cafe, with a mushroom-case-heavy tabloid under his arm. "She's not your typical murder suspect. She looks more like a churchgoer."
For the past month, the small town of Morwell, a few hours outside of Melbourne, has been the setting for a courtroom saga of a mushroom meal most foul.
Erin Patterson, a 50-year-old mother of two, faces three counts of murder for serving toxic beef Wellington to relatives at her house in the even smaller nearby town of Leongatha on July 29, 2023.
Patterson's parents-in-law, Don and Gail Patterson, died of suspected death cap mushroom poisoning. Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson, also died, while Heather's husband, Ian, survived after spending weeks in the hospital. Patterson's estranged husband, Simon Patterson, was supposed to attend the ill-fated lunch but backed out.
Patterson has pleaded not guilty in proceedings expected to conclude early next month.
At a time when the United States and much of the world is fixated on another trial - the celebrity-filled case against American rapper Sean "Diddy" Combs - the story of the Leongatha lunch gone wrong has gripped Australia and even garnered some global attention of its own.
Australians suddenly can't stop talking about mycology, the scientific study of fungi. The Latin nomenclature for death cap mushrooms - Amanita phalloides - has become a household name. And Facebook groups are afire with debates over different methods of forensic analysis.
"Everyone has an opinion on this case and we hear it - friends, family, people at the cafe down the road," said investigative reporter Rachael Brown on a recent episode of "Mushroom Case Daily," the most popular of the mushrooming number of podcasts on the mushroom case.
Australia averages fewer than 300 homicides per year, and most of those stem from fights, criminal vendettas or domestic violence incidents. Female offenders make up about 13 percent of cases.
Those cases often draw more attention because they defy the gender norm of women as caregivers, said Murray Lee, a professor of criminology at the University of Sydney. The accusation that Patterson poisoned her victims with death cap mushrooms adds to the public interest.
"It's the fact that it's so unusual, yet it's also mundane," he said. "It could happen to anyone, and yet it doesn't."
Lee likened the case to an episode of "Midsomer Murders," the long-running TV mystery series set in a small English country town.
Or an Agatha Christie novel, said Jessica Gildersleeve, a literature professor at the University of Southern Queensland who has written about the case.
"It's a family drama and they are alluding to elements of revenge," she said of prosecutors. "It's really appealing to those base literary elements that make for a really good story."
Unlike most murder mysteries, however, many of the facts in the case aren't in dispute. Instead, the trial's outcome hinges on the question of intent.
Prosecutors have said the poisoning was deliberate and have put forward as evidence that Patterson traveled to known death cap mushroom locations before the lunch; that she disposed of a food processor used to prepare the mushrooms; and that she reset her phone afterward. They also say Patterson told a number of lies, from the false cancer diagnosis she allegedly used to lure people to the lunch to the origin of the mushrooms she served.
But Patterson's defense team has called the deadly meal "a terrible accident" after which she "panicked."
"She was overwhelmed by the fact that these four people had become so ill because of the food she'd served to them," defense barrister Colin Mandy said during opening arguments.
The case has weighed heavily on Leongatha, a close-knit town of fewer than 6,000 people, according to Nathan Hersey, a local councillor who was mayor for the area at the time.
"The media interest was like nothing our community had ever seen," he said, recalling journalists "stopping people on the street, going to people's homes, going to the church, basically wanting comment from anyone and everyone that was around."
Locals who were shocked by the three deaths were then stunned to see them on the front pages of newspapers in the United States and Britain, he said. As mayor, he received messages of condolences from communities in New Zealand and Africa. "It was really something that had a much farther reach than anyone would have anticipated," he said.
The current mayor, John Schelling, declined to comment other than to say: "I hope the trial goes away."
The trial, which began in late April, has renewed the media interest and reopened some wounds, Hersey said. But Leongatha has been partially spared by the fact that it is too small to host the proceedings, and that a mountain range stands between it and Morwell, giving locals some physical and mental distance.
For Morwell, whose only other moment in the national spotlight was when the power station closed, the trial has been a much-needed boon, with its streets "awash with journalists, bloggers, podcasters and more - notebooks and microphones at the ready to capture every detail aired in court," the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported.
"It's been a positive thing to see the cafes and restaurants and bakeries and shops with a bit of a buzz about them," said Dale Harriman, the mayor for the area, who is hoping all the media attention leads to more tourism. "Hopefully, there are a few people sitting in London or over in Europe thinking, ‘That looks like a nice spot; we might pay it a visit.'"
If they do, it'll probably be because they heard about it on one of the four mushroom case podcasts, three of which are in Australia's top 10.
"I've never seen a trial that has captivated such a wide audience across the country as this one," said Brooke Grebert-Craig, a reporter at the Herald Sun newspaper and the host of "The Mushroom Cook." The daily podcast has been downloaded almost 2 million times in Australia, she said, and listened to 400,000 times in Britain, as well as 120,000 times each in the U.S. and Ireland.
"The international reach and attention on this case is unlike anything I've ever seen before," said Penelope Liersch, a reporter for 9 News and the co-host of another competing podcast, "The Mushroom Trial: Say Grace."
For Liersch, who did a podcast on a different trial last year, part of the appeal is to take listeners inside a case as if they were in the courtroom, and to dispel misperceptions that some Australians might have adopted from American pop culture. "People have this idea that the Australian legal system is like the American legal system, and it really isn't," she said.
Perhaps the biggest difference is the strict rules surrounding media coverage of trials in Australia, which doesn't have an equivalent of the First Amendment. Jurors are usually off-limits for interviews, even years after a trial has ended. And journalists covering trials are instructed not to include details that haven't been put before the jury, such as public statements a person might have made before the trial began.
Gildersleeve, the literature professor, said such close coverage can be a double-edged sword, providing transparency into the trial but also empowering listeners to form their own conclusions, which might conflict with the court outcome.
Already, details from the trial have worked their way into Australian pop culture, with references to mushroom dishes or the color of plates after Ian Wilkinson, who survived, testified that Patterson ate off a different colored plate than her guests.
For some, like cafegoer Thorpe, it's already changing their culinary preferences. "I don't think I'll ever eat a beef Wellington again," he said.