The Court of Appeal has dismissed Erin Patterson’s conviction appeal and upheld the DPP’s appeal against her sentence.
The decisions by Justices Stephen McLeish, Lesley Taylor and Peter Kidd mean Ms Patterson will not get a retrial and will spend the rest of her life in jail.
Following a jury trial which ran from April to July last year, Ms Patterson was found guilty of murdering her parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson and her aunt-in-law Heather Wilkinson. She was also found guilty of the attempted murder of her uncle-in-law Ian Wilkinson.
The Director of Public Prosecutions filed an appeal against Ms Patterson’s sentence in October 2025. He argued the sentence of life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 33 years was manifestly inadequate.
The bench agreed, finding the case involved “such shocking criminality that it is inappropriate to fix a non-parole period”.
Ms Patterson was resentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
“[Ms Patterson’s] conduct was characterised by an elaborate series of deceptions, including the false cancer claims deployed to explain the absence of the children, the false denials of having foraged for mushrooms, the repeated false assertions as to the source of the mushrooms and the destruction of evidence,” the Justices said.
“The offending was carefully planned and deliberate. It represented a cruel breach of trust to members of [Ms Patterson’s] extended family.
“The taking of three lives (and the attempt on another) in these circumstances called in our view for much stronger denunciation.”
Ms Patterson filed an appeal in November 2025 to overturn the jury’s verdict of guilty (an appeal against conviction). She argued the verdict was unsound in seven ways. The bench found two of the seven grounds had merit but ultimately dismissed all of them.