Speaker 1: It's time for Drue Crime Tuesday. The story is true,
Speaker 1: sounds true? No, it sounds made up. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Perry and Shannon present True Crime. Well, this is this
Speaker 1: case out of Australia is being overshadowed by the court
Speaker 1: cases that we have going on here in America. We've
Speaker 1: got the Karen Reid case, We've got the Harvey Weinstein case,
Speaker 1: We've got the Shan Didi Combs case. We've got all
Speaker 1: these cases that are going on and sucking a lot
Speaker 1: of attention away from what's going on in Australia. This
Speaker 1: is a tiny little town, a tiny a few hours
Speaker 1: outside of Melbourne, the small town of Morewell is where
Speaker 1: this trial is taking place. But the crime that they're
Speaker 1: hearing about took place in the even smaller town of
Speaker 1: Leongatha in July of twenty twenty three. Aaron Patterson, a
Speaker 1: fifty year old mom of a couple of kids, is
Speaker 1: facing three counts of murder murder for serving toxic beef
Speaker 1: Wellington to relatives at her house. Now, she was a
Speaker 1: strange from her husband Simon at the time, and he
Speaker 1: was invited to the lunch, but he didn't show up,
Speaker 1: so he and Aaron invited her in laws, Don and
Speaker 1: Gail Patterson Gail's sister, so this would have been her
Speaker 1: aunt and uncle in law, Heather Wilkinson, and Ian Wilkinson.
Speaker 1: Three of those four people died as a result of
Speaker 1: eating that beef. Wellington, Don and Gail the mother and
Speaker 1: father in law, and then Gail's sister Heather the aunt
Speaker 1: in law, all died. Ian Ate but survived even though
Speaker 1: he spent several weeks in the hospital. And again the
Speaker 1: estranged husband, Simon, was supposed to be at the lunch,
Speaker 1: but he backed out. Now all of this has to
Speaker 1: do with poisonous mushrooms. Patterson had said that when COVID hit,
Speaker 1: she started foraging for mushrooms on her own, just kind
Speaker 1: of a hobby during lockdown of March of twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: and the question was, well, who knew you had this hobby,
Speaker 1: and she said, only my kids, which is weird. Now,
Speaker 1: we've been told for a very long time don't just
Speaker 1: take mushrooms out of the wild and cook them and
Speaker 1: eat them. They can kill you, she says. When she
Speaker 1: would forage for these mushrooms, she would cut a little
Speaker 1: bit of one, fry it up with some butter and
Speaker 1: eat it. She said, they taste good. She said she
Speaker 1: didn't get sick. She also fed some of these foraged
Speaker 1: mushrooms to her kids. She chopped them up very small
Speaker 1: so they wouldn't pick them out of the dishes that
Speaker 1: she was making, the curries, the pastas, and the soups,
Speaker 1: and developed a taste for exotic mushroom varieties. She even
Speaker 1: joined a mushroom lover's Facebook group. She even bought a
Speaker 1: dehydrator of food dehydrated to preserve these mushrooms. And when
Speaker 1: asked by her own attorney, did she accept that that
Speaker 1: beef Wellington she made in July of twenty three did
Speaker 1: include death cap mushrooms? She said, yes, yes, she knows
Speaker 1: she did it, but it was entirely an accident, she said. So.
Speaker 1: She told her lawyer most of the mushrooms that she
Speaker 1: used that day in that beef Wellington came from local supermarkets,
Speaker 1: and she agreed she might have put them in the
Speaker 1: same container as some of the wild mushrooms that she
Speaker 1: had foraged. And there were even others that came from
Speaker 1: an Asian food store that she didn't necessarily know the
Speaker 1: provenance of. Oh there's more, she did say like I
Speaker 1: said is she admitted that there were death cap mushrooms
Speaker 1: in there. She said it was completely accidental. But she
Speaker 1: was asked about a series of expletive filled messages that
Speaker 1: she had sent about those in laws a few months
Speaker 1: before they died. She said it was in a Facebook
Speaker 1: group she described as what she thought was a safe
Speaker 1: venting space for a group of women. And she's talking
Speaker 1: smack about her in laws who then six months later
Speaker 1: end up completely dead. She said she tried to have
Speaker 1: her in laws mediate a dispute with their estranged husband,
Speaker 1: Simon their son about school fields school fees, and she
Speaker 1: was feeling hurt. She said, she was frustrated, She was
Speaker 1: a little bit desperate. The couple they separated a long
Speaker 1: time ago, ten years ago, So this is eight years
Speaker 1: later that she invites the in laws and the aunt
Speaker 1: and uncle in law over for this beautiful beef Wellington.
Speaker 1: This is a captivating trial in a country of Australia.
Speaker 1: Everybody everywhere is talking about this. There are at least
Speaker 1: two documentaries that have been produced the delve into this.
Speaker 1: Newspapers there in Australia have devoted entire full pages to
Speaker 1: this trial. Websites have been live blogging everybody's testimony and
Speaker 1: each morning. Well, we've seen cold cases before, this is
Speaker 1: one of the oldest ones that we've seen in a
Speaker 1: long time. After decades of suspicion, police up in San
Speaker 1: Jose have confirmed they know the identity of the killer
Speaker 1: of a high school teacher in San Jose. It was
Speaker 1: June sixteenth, nineteen seventy eight, just a day after Brandham
Speaker 1: High School in San Jose recess for the summer. A
Speaker 1: student found a teacher, Diane Peterson, lying on the floor
Speaker 1: of the hallway near her classroom, single stab wound to
Speaker 1: her chest, and the Santa Clara County DA's office said
Speaker 1: that Peterson was just one of a handful of teachers
Speaker 1: who were on campus that day. They were cleaning out
Speaker 1: their classrooms from the summer break for the summer break
Speaker 1: when she was killed. And for years, authorities said they
Speaker 1: had one person in mind. A sixteen year old student
Speaker 1: at the school was considered a person of interest in
Speaker 1: the case, but they didn't get any information. The tips
Speaker 1: they had didn't lead anywhere, so the case remained unsolved
Speaker 1: for forty seven years. Now, the reason this kid, the
Speaker 1: sixteen year old, became a person of interest was he
Speaker 1: was arrested in an unrelated crime, and detectives noticed that
Speaker 1: his booking photo looked a lot like the police sketch
Speaker 1: of the teacher's killer. We just don't see police sketches
Speaker 1: anymore because of the ubiquity of surveillance cameras that exist
Speaker 1: all over the place. But the sketch came from a
Speaker 1: student witness who said that they heard the teacher yelling
Speaker 1: for help and saw the killer take off. That same student, however,
Speaker 1: the one who came up with the original image the sketch,
Speaker 1: later disclaimed his statement. Police had also been told by
Speaker 1: a witness that they had seen the sixteen year old
Speaker 1: carrying a knife that had the words teacher deer written
Speaker 1: on the side of it when he was questioned, and
Speaker 1: the sixteen year old said he didn't have a knife
Speaker 1: at all, so they were unable to corroborate all of that. Now,
Speaker 1: prosecutors note that the retracted statement by the fellow student,
Speaker 1: as well as another one when she confronted him about
Speaker 1: drug dealing, neither story was corroborated. But they've said now
Speaker 1: that a relative disclosed that Nicki Nickerson his real name
Speaker 1: was Harry, that Nicki had admitted to stabbing the teacher
Speaker 1: literally minutes after it happened. The Santa Clara County DA
Speaker 1: Jeff Rosen said Miss Peterson would have been a senior
Speaker 1: citizen today if she had not crossed paths with this
Speaker 1: violent teenager, so finally officially solved,