Erin Patterson Loses Appeal and Will Die in Prison After Harsher Sentence

Erin Patterson will spend the rest of her life in prison. On Friday, October 30, 2026, the Court of Appeal in Victoria dismissed her bid to overturn her triple murder convictions and imposed a harsher sentence, removing the 33 year non-parole period that would have left her eligible for release in 2056 at about the age of 82.

The ruling

Three judges, Stephen McLeish, Lesley Taylor and Peter Kidd, heard the appeals in August and delivered their decision on Friday. McLeish said Patterson's offending was, in his words, "extraordinarily cold and calculated" and stood "to be denounced in the strongest terms." The court found the killings were carefully planned and deliberate and saw insufficient grounds to try the case again.

On sentence, the court allowed the prosecution appeal brought by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Brendan Kissane, who had called the original term manifestly inadequate. McLeish said: "We have concluded that the case involved such calculated criminality that it is inappropriate to fix a non-parole period." It is the most severe sentence available in Victoria and has been imposed in only a small number of cases.

Patterson, 52, watched by video link from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, a maximum security prison on the outskirts of Melbourne, and, according to The Guardian, showed no emotion as the decision was read.

The crimes

In July 2025, a jury of 12 found Patterson guilty of murdering her estranged husband Simon's parents, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, and Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66, and of the attempted murder of Heather's husband, Ian Wilkinson, a pastor who survived after weeks in hospital.

The four had eaten beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms at a lunch at Patterson's home in the Victorian farming village of Leongatha in July 2023. Patterson maintained the poisoning was accidental and that her convictions were a miscarriage of justice. In September 2025 she was sentenced to life imprisonment, with Justice Christopher Beale fixing the 33 year non-parole period that the appeal court has now set aside.

Why the appeal failed

Patterson's lawyers raised seven grounds of appeal. The court granted leave on the first two grounds and dismissed both. One concerned the jury, which for part of the trial stayed in the same hotel as members of the prosecution team and a police witness. The court found there was no real possibility that the arrangement had affected the verdicts. The second concerned phone tower evidence used to suggest Patterson had travelled to areas where death cap mushrooms had been sighted. The court held that the evidence was admissible. Leave was refused on the remaining five grounds. Her lawyers had also alleged an oppressive cross-examination and unfair decisions on evidence.

Prosecutors argued the sentencing judge had erred on her likely solitary confinement, infecting his parole decision.

What happens next

Patterson has one avenue left: 28 days to seek special leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia, with any application anticipated by November 27. Special leave is granted in only a small proportion of cases. If it is refused, or none is made, Friday's decision is final.

The trial last year drew podcasters, film crews and true crime followers to Morwell, and audiences from New York to New Delhi followed the case now known as the mushroom murders. The motive remains a mystery.