A Murder The Whole Family Can Enjoy

I haven’t really followed the Mushroom Lady murder trial—unless you count skimming the headlines, which were so everywhere-all-the-time that I felt I basically absorbed the whole story by osmosis. Like everyone else, I had an opinion. She done it. She so done it. And when the conviction finally came through, I’ll admit, it was satisfying, especially after what felt like a worrying delay for the jury to deliver the correct verdict.

It got me thinking about my own time on a couple of juries. People get weird in that room. Suddenly, everyone’s a philosopher or a rebel, and you realise how easily a verdict can go sideways because someone’s in the mood to be contrary. I remember telling Jane, who agreed with me, that this Mushroom Lady jury probably had a “Joh’s jury” situation—not that she’d planted someone, just that there was a holdout. Jane called them a “dirty stop out,” a phrase she used in such a familiar way that it suggested it was in common use among lawyers for juries who wouldn't do the right thing.

Maybe the mushroom jury was sequestered—locked away in some hotel with no Wi-Fi, no newspapers, just each other and their thoughts, or maybe they were at home. I don’t even know if the courts do sequestration anymore. They used to, years ago, on really difficult cases. Back in the day, you’d end up at the Racecourse Motel in Ipswich, with three meals a day and a carton of beer. Not a carton each, mind you, but one slab for twelve punters, enough to lubricate the wheels of justice. I once got a verdict late on a Friday just by dangling the prospect of a boozy weekend at the Racecourse Motel. We let the bloke go, which was what I wanted, but not what most of my fellow citizens did.

We were in Byron Bay visiting a friend while the Mushroom Lady jury was deliberating, staying with Madeline, a retired lawyer, Jane’s former boss. Madeline didn’t say Mushroom Lady was innocent, but she did insist the prosecution hadn’t made their case and the jury couldn't possibly convict. “You’re talking like a lawyer, not a punter,” I laughed. She was unmoved, adamant they had to let her go. When the guilty verdict came in, she was genuinely surprised.

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that despite not reading more than a headline about the case, I did very much enjoy this Substack piece from The Carpet that pointed out that while Mushroom Lady killed a whole bunch of people, who died horribly, at least she brought the rest of us together.

Beyond the fundamentally compelling nature of the story, the Erin Patterson case achieved something else. It became a common interest shared by much of the country.

Briefly, Australia was a monoculture once again.

This used to be the norm. We had fewer options, so people around the nation would watch whatever was on the television — all five channels of it – and then talk about what we’d seen the next day.

It sounds so banal. Many people probably didn’t even notice the gradual erosion of this common ground as we moved from televisions to computers, computers to phones. But it disappeared all the same, and now there is a void…

For a short, shining moment, however, we filled that void with poisoned beef wellingtons.