Overview

• On June 16, prosecutors outlined four calculated deceptions by Patterson: fabricating a cancer diagnosis, secretly lacing individual Beef Wellingtons with death cap mushrooms, feigning illness and orchestrating a cover-up.
• Digital evidence, including web searches and phone-tower data, indicated Patterson’s knowledge of death cap mushrooms and her travel to known foraging sites in regional Victoria.
• Jurors heard that Patterson disposed of a food dehydrator at a local landfill the day after her hospital discharge, which prosecutors say was intended to hide mushroom-drying evidence.
• The defense opened its closing argument on June 17, contending that the prosecution cherry-picked evidence to the exclusion of any accidental poisoning theory.
• After the defense concludes, the judge will instruct jurors on legal principles before they retire to deliberate Patterson’s guilt on three murder counts and one attempted murder count.