02 September 2023 , 03:05
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The son of two of the victim's in Australia's "poisoned beef wellington" case has shared the last messages his mother ever sent him.
Gail and Don Patterson, and Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson all died last month after consuming a beef wellington lunch at the home of the Pattersons' former daughter-in-law, Erin Patterson, in Leongatha, Australia. Ms Wilkinson's partner, Ian, meanwhile, remains critically ill in hospital after eating during the same incident.
Police in Australia have launched a murder probe in the wake of the deaths. Erin Patterson has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crime.
“It was no fluke that mum’s final text message on our family group chat as she lay in Dandenong hospital was: ‘Lots of love to you all’,” Simon Patterson, 49, told 350 mourners at a memorial event on Thursday, Australian media reports. He went on to describe his mum and dad as “very much a team".
He went on: "The fact they died in consecutive days reflects the togetherness that they always worked so hard to grow. As mum and dad lay in comas in the hospital in their final days and each day … we were unsure if they would recover or not, it was comforting to know that when we said, “See you later,” we knew it was true.
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“The only thing we didn’t know was when. In the meantime, we’ll miss them.”
Erin Patterson was not at the memorial service. She has always claimed the beef wellington she served that day contained dehydrated mushrooms she had bought at least three months before. However, she does admit to disposing of a food dehydrator in a skip once police started investigating the deaths.
Earlier this week, the Mirror reported how a leading toxicologist has expressed his fears that the forensic samples from the deadly mushroom meal that left three people dead were done too late.
Dr Michael Robertson told the Herald Sun : "The laboratory knows what it is looking for, death cap mushrooms, but that's not something we see routinely in Australia and the method of analysis is far from routine. Those early samples are very important because they, particularly any urine samples, would help prove it was death cap mushrooms."