Death Down Under

The title of this posting could be the latest Agatha Christie mystery if Dame Christie hadn't died 47 years ago at 85. She usually bumped off the victim of foul play through poisoning, and it is alleged a woman in Australia has done the same to some luncheon guests through their ingestion of highly poisonous mushrooms called death caps. Dame Christie might have applauded the method, but surely not the deed.

I missed the original story back in August when the news hit he media that a woman in Leongatha, Victoria served a meal of beef Wellington topped with mushrooms to her guests only to later learn three of them died after ingestion and a fourth was critically ill, but recovered. 

The story in the NYT on August 2023 remarked that Leongatha is a quiet town. I'm sure it remains so, even through three people croaked there. I mean, how much noise do you make when you're dying?

The fact that the town is named Leongatha and I'm drawing parallels to Agatha Christie—get it?— just furthers my contention that everything is connected, and the Möbius strip extends all the way to the Antipodes. I didn't make this up.

The initial dispatch of course reports that the three deaths raise a whole host of questions. The dead are Ms. Patterson's former mother-in-law, Gail (from Ms. Patterson's ex-husband, Simon) and her husband Don and Gail's sister Heather. Ms. Patterson, the host, initially did not report any symptoms from the death cap mushrooms, nor did her two children, also at the meal. Heather's husband Ian Wilkinson took deathly ill, but recovered after two months. Ms. Erin Patterson, 48, was divorced from her husband, but was supposedly on good terms with his family members.

The police at the time were reported to be keeping an "open mind" Apparently, death cap mushroom are common on Victoria, Australia in the fall, March to June. (The seasons in the Southern hemisphere are opposite of ours.)  Mushroom deaths from death caps are 90 percent of mushroom deaths. Dame Christie would have surely used them in her story if she were alive to write one set in Australia.

I missed the initial story in August, but did a double take when the follow up story appeared in the NYT on November 3. A headline that reads: Police Charge Host of Lunch With Murder by Mushroom will get your attention, if you're paying attention. I suspect the International Classification of Diseases has a code for this.

The "open mind" of the  police in Victoria has shifted to charging the host, Ms. Erin Patterson, with three counts of murder, and five counts of attempted murder. Counts of attempted murder were made due to an unidentified man in 2021 and 2022 who became ill. Erin's former husband, Simon, did not attend the meal where the four people fell ill. Erin herself said she had stomach pains and diarrhea, and was hospitalized.

The big takeaway from the second dispatch for me is that the police had dogs who sniffed Erin's house for USB sticks and SIM cards. Huh? They can do that?

Obviously with Agatha Christie passing away in 1976 she couldn't have written about crime being solved with dogs sniffing for computer parts.

It's not known was evidence the police presented to the CPS,(Crown Prosecution Services) but Erin claims her innocence. She says she bought fresh mushrooms locally at a supermarket and dried mushrooms from an Asian grocer 85 miles away in Melbourne. Now Australia's a big place, but buying mushrooms 85 miles away for a food ingredient might have been a clue. The police also report Erin disposed of a food dehydrator in a dump.

What is a food dehydrator? Turns out it pretty much is used for what you might expect it to be used for: remove food moisture to preserve food.

Mushrooms? If my wife starts serving death cap mushrooms I'm eating out. I now know what they look like. They are pictured above.

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