The woman who served a lunch of poisonous mushrooms that killed three people was previously convicted of an accident in which she drove an unregistered vehicle and fled the scene.
Erin Patterson, 48, lost her driver’s license for 30 months in 2004 and was fined $1,000 for crashing her vehicle in Melbourne’s eastern suburb of Glen Waverley and for subsequent offences, The Australian reported.
Ms Patterson, then 29-year-old Erin Trudi Scutter, was convicted on 7 September 2004 by the Dandenong Magistrates Court on five counts, the newspaper reported.
It has been revealed that Erin Patterson lost her driver’s license and was fined $1000 for a 2004 escapade in which she fled the scene of an accident in Melbourne in an unlicensed vehicle.
The charges included failure to stop a vehicle after an accident, failure to provide a name or address after causing property damage, operating an unregistered vehicle on the highway, and failure to provide her name or address when property was damaged.
She reportedly took a breath test within three hours of the accident and recorded a blood alcohol level of 0.14 percent — more than twice the legal limit — but a sixth related charge was dropped.
When approached by The Australian, Ms Patterson declined to discuss the matter.
Her attorney, Bill Doogue, said: “Our client has no comment for you on a drink-driving charge made 19 years ago.”
When asked directly, Mrs. Patterson said, “My lawyer told me not to talk to you.”
Homicide detectives have branded Ms Patterson a ‘suspect’ over the deaths of three of her in-laws who died in the days following her luncheon in the Victorian Gippsland town of Leongatha on July 29.
Ms Patterson claims she prepared the lunch with a mixture of mushrooms from a major supermarket chain and dried mushrooms from an Asian supermarket in Melbourne.
She Patterson was chased by reporters on Tuesday during a brief visit to Mr Doogue’s office in the CBD.
Ms Patterson and her lawyer Bill Doogue make their way past reporters on Tuesday
Dressed in a gray sweater and khaki trousers, Mrs. Patterson refused to disclose the purpose of the meeting with Mr. Doogue or whether she had anything to say about the matter.
Pastor Ian Wilkinson was the only one of the four guests to survive the toxic beef wellington.
His family recently said Wilkinson, 68, who has been in Melbourne’s Austin Hospital since lunch, is in a stable condition and his health is slowly improving.
Mr Wilkinson, his wife Heather and her sister Gail and husband Don Patterson were invited to lunch as part of a ‘mediation meeting’ to discuss Mrs Patterson’s relationship with her estranged husband Simon, who backed out at the last minute.
Daily Mail Australia does not suggest that Erin Patterson is responsible for the poisonings or their deaths.
It has been more than two weeks since Victoria Police issued a public update on its investigation.
At the time, Detective Dean Thomas gave mixed reports to the media about their treatment of Ms. Patterson.
Don and Gail Patterson died after consuming supposedly poisonous mushrooms served by Erin Patterson
Ian Wilkinson and Heather Wilkinson (both pictured) became seriously ill after eating wild mushrooms. Mrs Wilkinson died while her husband was in hospital
The seasoned detective began his briefing by stating that her relatives’ deaths were “not suspicious.”
“The deaths are unexplained and for that purpose we are involved and working as hard as we can to try to identify why these deaths happened and the circumstances surrounding them,” he said.
But under fire from reporters, Inspector Thomas arranged a stumbling backflip.
“The 48-year-old is, well, she’s (a suspect), um, she was, and she is because, um, she cooked those meals for us, for the people who were present,” he said.
Police raided Ms. Patterson’s home on August 5, taking her phones and computers for analysis.
She gave an interview without comment and was released that night.
News of that raid came out the next day, resulting in a media frenzy descending on the small country town where she lived with her two children.
Inspector Thomas then told reporters that Ms. Patterson had not shown any symptoms at the hospital – a claim she later refuted in a written statement she later provided to detectives after seeing a lawyer.
He said homicide detectives would work to get to the bottom of the case.
Erin Patterson is approached by the media outside her home on August 8
“We still have a lot of work to do. We need to understand what caused these symptoms, which ultimately caused the deaths of these three people,” the detective said.
“We need to understand what happened, what caused the injuries… what caused their deaths and the circumstances surrounding it all. So it’s a very complex thing… it’s really interesting. You know four people show up and three have died.’
Ms Patterson’s former husband’s much-publicized illness will be thoroughly investigated, with officers trying to rule out any links to her cooking.
In her statement, Ms. Patterson said she divided the meal into plates and let her guests choose their own plate.
She said she took the last remaining plate and ate a portion, later handing the leftovers over to the hospital’s toxicologists for examination.
Simon Patterson would join his parents for the lunch that cost them their lives
A drying device she owned was later dumped in the local landfill, fearing her estranged husband would blame her for his parents’ deaths and gain custody of their two children, she said.
Ms Patterson told police she had had a good relationship with her in-laws, even after the split with their son.
‘I had a good relationship with Simon’s parents for a long time. Our relationship had continued in a fairly amicable way after I ended the relationship with their son Simon,” she said.
“Our relationship was affected to some extent by seeing them less after the breakdown of my marriage to Simon, but I’ve never felt differently about his parents.”