Victoria’s Court of Appeal has dismissed Erin Patterson’s appeal against her murder convictions and removed her non-parole period, so her life sentence will expire only on death, ABC News reports. Justices Stephen McLeish, Lesley Taylor and Peter Kidd called the crimes “extraordinarily cold and calculated.”

Patterson was sentenced last year to life with a 33-year non-parole period for murdering Don and Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson, and attempting to murder Heather’s husband Ian. The group was poisoned with death cap mushrooms in beef Wellingtons served at a 2023 lunch. The non-parole period has now been scrapped: “On any view, these were heinous crimes,” the judges wrote.

McLeish said her intent to murder all four was sustained for nearly three weeks from the lunch invitation through their deaths. Patterson watched via video link from the maximum-security wing of Dame Phyllis Frost women’s prison. It is unclear whether her lawyers will seek leave to the High Court of Australia.

The court also rejected every conviction-appeal ground, including the claim that housing jurors in the same hotel as police and prosecutors was a “catastrophic” arrangement — “fertile grounds for speculation,” the judges said, but no miscarriage of justice. Challenges to phone-tower, iNaturalist, SD-card and Facebook evidence also failed, as did complaints about prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC’s cross-examination, which the court largely found proper despite “some blemishes” in her closing.

Image: Supreme Court of Victoria, Melbourne (Wikimedia Commons).

Sources consulted: Mushroom murderer Erin Patterson likely to die in jail after failed appeal - ABC News.