Video footage of Erin Patterson dumping a food dehydrator at a tip and handing a mobile phone to police has been released by the Victorian Supreme Court, nearly a month after she was found guilty of murdering and attempting to murder her estranged husband's family.
The footage, taken from the Koonwarra Transfer Station CCTV and from a police officer executing a search warrant at Patterson's Leongatha home, was tendered as evidence during her trial but only released to the media on Monday.
Both events occurred in August 2023, the week after Patterson served a beef wellington lunch laced with death cap mushrooms that fatally poisoned Don and Gail Patterson, her estranged husband Simon's parents, and Heather Wilkinson, Gail's sister.
In the footage, Patterson is seen placing a Sunbeam food dehydrator, still in its box, into an area for electronic waste disposal. The dehydrator, described during the trial as 'the murder weapon', was later recovered by police and found to contain traces of death cap mushrooms and Patterson's fingerprints.
Another video from inside her home shows Patterson sitting at her dining table and handing over a mobile phone to a detective at the end of an almost four-hour search. It was later alleged she did not hand over her main mobile phone at this time, but another device she had recently factory reset, which she would reset again in the coming hours. Her main phone was never recovered by police.
