3.47pm
‘We mainly just related on logistical things’: The loss of banter in Erin and Simon’s relationship
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Erin Patterson can be seen nodding along at her barrister’s questioning, speaking with her hands, and staring at her legal team as she speaks.
Patterson said she was involved in the design of her home in Leongatha from the beginning.
She said she first designed it in Microsoft Paint, but was told by those designing the property that her design would never work.
“It modelled quite closely to how I wanted things,” she said.
“I saw it as the final house. Meaning, I wanted it to be a house where the children would grow up, [and] once they moved away from university and work, they would come back and stay for as long as they liked, bring their children.
“And I’d grow old there. That’s what I’d hoped.”
Patterson said that in July 2023, she was “comfortable” financially, which meant she could go to university without having to work a full-time job.
She said she had felt for some months that her relationship with the wider Patterson family, especially her in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, had deteriorated. She said her moving to a different town may have played a part.
“I’d come to have concerns that Simon was not wanting me to be involved too much with the family any more; perhaps I wasn’t being invited to some things,” she said.
Patterson said her relationship with Simon had been “functional” in 2023.
“From the start of the year to July, we mainly just related on logistical things like church, the streaming, the kids, but we didn’t relate on friend things, banter, like we used to. That changed at the start of the year,” she said.
3.54pm
Weight-loss surgery and Patterson’s ‘never-ending battle’ with self-esteem
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Erin Patterson is telling the jury how she felt in 2023, the year of the fatal mushroom lunch.
In July that year, she had been fighting a “never-ending battle” of low self-esteem for most of her adult life. She had put on weight and could handle exercise less, she said.
“I was planning to have weight-loss surgery. Is it a gastric bypass? I was planning to do that,” she said.
Patterson told the jury that she met Simon at the City of Monash, where they both worked in 2004.
“I was employed by the RSPCA but as part of that role I was located at the City of Monash officers as an administration officer,” she said.
Patterson said that Simon worked as a traffic engineer at the time. “We had mutual friends, is how I remember it,” she said.
“We would come up against each other at lunch, after work drinks, that sort of thing.“
Patterson said that the group of friends initially largely met for lunch at work or after-work drinks.
She said she became friends with Simon around November 2004 before they started dating in July of 2005.
Sipping water from a paper cup, Patterson said she became friends with Simon Patterson in 2004.
Erin Patterson, who is accused of murdering three relatives by serving them a beef Wellington meal that contained death cap mushrooms, is giving evidence. Follow our live updates from the trial.
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