Speaker 1: Usually when I'm interested in a crime, I want there
Speaker 1: to be layers. I'm interested in stories which tell us
Speaker 1: something about Australia and what it is like to be
Speaker 1: living in this country in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: Like so many of us, Chloe Hooper spent twenty twenty
Speaker 2: five obsessing over the triple murder trial of Aaron Patterson.
Speaker 3: It was different to the crimes that she's.
Speaker 2: Written about before in her books The Arsonist and the
Speaker 2: Tall Man, which was about a death in custody.
Speaker 3: For Chloe, it.
Speaker 2: Was the domestic nature of the Mushroom killings, the family
Speaker 2: dynamic that drew her in.
Speaker 1: Love skirts very close to hate sometimes, and hate can
Speaker 1: skirt close to love, And I think in our domestic settings,
Speaker 1: people have these really complex relationships, and so I think
Speaker 1: there was a sort of you know, even it's pretty warped,
Speaker 1: but people attached to this story like a folks story
Speaker 1: because we could all relate to it in some way. Actually,
Speaker 1: I think it told us something about Australia's fascination with
Speaker 1: true crime, and people were tuning into this story for
Speaker 1: all sorts of complex reasons.
Speaker 2: So why did this story captivate the country and what
Speaker 2: does it say? About us, particularly about women that were
Speaker 2: drawn to true crime. That was one of the questions
Speaker 2: that drove Chloe and her friends and colleagues, the writers
Speaker 2: Helen Ganner and Sarah Krasnastein, as they began traveling to
Speaker 2: the town of Morewell to watch Aaron Patterson's trial. What
Speaker 2: followed is the Mushroom Tapes. Conversations on a triple Murder,
Speaker 2: a book that wrestles with ideas about power.
Speaker 3: Money, marriage and murder.
Speaker 2: I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM today
Speaker 2: Chloe Hooper on what our collective fascination with Aaron Patterson
Speaker 2: tells us about who we are as a country in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five. It's Wednesday, December thirty one. Chloe, this
Speaker 2: case became a national obsession this year, But if you
Speaker 2: look back to when the story first broke in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three, we got these brief details of what had happened,
Speaker 2: and these initial glimpses of Aaron Patterson herself. I just
Speaker 2: can't fathom what has happened.
Speaker 1: That Ian and he have lost her lives, and Gail
Speaker 1: has lost her life, and Donna is still in hospital,
Speaker 1: and I pray, I pray that he pulls through.
Speaker 2: What do you think it was that, I think right
Speaker 2: from the very beginning before it sort of turned into
Speaker 2: I guess what it is now? What do you think
Speaker 2: was interesting about it at that point?
Speaker 1: Well, I think everybody I know has some family complexity,
Speaker 1: has a relative or in law, or knows somebody who
Speaker 1: has had a bitter separation. And I think that something
Speaker 1: about this story spoke to all of our sense of
Speaker 1: family dynamics and how complicated they can be. And I
Speaker 1: think in a way, Aaron Patterson is a sort of
Speaker 1: operatic figure. The sort of scale of what she did
Speaker 1: was just so extreme, and I think people kind of
Speaker 1: tapped into that.
Speaker 2: As the book describes, there was this whole cottage industry
Speaker 2: of journalists, of podcasters, of authors, documentary filmmakers, TV producers,
Speaker 2: you know, TV fiction in the work as well. So
Speaker 2: everyone's there in this tiny town in more Well for
Speaker 2: the duration of this trial. So I mean, first of all, well,
Speaker 2: just I mean, what was that lacking part of that?
Speaker 1: Well, it started off slowly. We got to the trial.
Speaker 1: It was day five, so it was you know, we
Speaker 1: hadn't really decided to go until the trial had already started.
Speaker 1: And at first you could find a seat in the
Speaker 1: courtroom relatively easily, and then slowly, as you probably saw
Speaker 1: photographs in the newspapers are online, there were crowds descending
Speaker 1: on the court house.
Speaker 4: This is more Well, a small, unassuming town two hours
Speaker 4: outside of Melbourne. Until recently, its main tourist attractions were
Speaker 4: a rose garden and an art gallery. But that was
Speaker 4: before it became the host of an Australian murder trials
Speaker 4: gripped the nation and captured international attention.
Speaker 1: People were getting up at four am and driving to
Speaker 1: get a seat and lining up outside.
Speaker 2: Well. Almost every major news outlet in the country has
Speaker 2: set up basically this is Channel seven, Here is the ABC,
Speaker 2: it's Channel ten and Channel nine, this.
Speaker 1: Is the Lunelab. And then there was sort of seemed
Speaker 1: to be more and more news outlets and media events
Speaker 1: and people doing crosses about this story all over the world.
Speaker 3: It's a case straight out of a true crime TV.
Speaker 4: Psychostaticquit yours a whole Australian mushroom poisoning fatalities made headlines
Speaker 4: far beyond the sleepy Aussie tone in which they happened.
Speaker 1: You know, every conversation you had with friends or family
Speaker 1: seemed to revolve around this. It did become a national obsession.
Speaker 2: And so this book, this is a very kind of
Speaker 2: different book to what you've put out in the past.
Speaker 3: It's a collaborative work.
Speaker 2: How did it change your process and the way that
Speaker 2: you thought about the case? To be spending all of
Speaker 2: this time I'm picking it in these conversations with two
Speaker 2: other brilliant writers, Sarah Cratenstein and Helen Ghana, I.
Speaker 1: Think that we got further working together than we would
Speaker 1: have worked by ourselves. And it was an amazing experience
Speaker 1: because usually we would all go into court proceedings on
Speaker 1: our own, and you know, we'd have your notebook, and
Speaker 1: it's very sort of solitary in a way, exercise. But
Speaker 1: I think that there was something actually accelerated by not
Speaker 1: putting your shoulder to your work and hiding it and
Speaker 1: doing it on your own, actually engaging in these conversations,
Speaker 1: and I think there were sort of moments where we
Speaker 1: would spark off each other and lift each other up
Speaker 1: further in our thinking. And I suppose I see this
Speaker 1: book as actually just as much about women talking about
Speaker 1: power and about good and evil and ethics of crime
Speaker 1: writing and writing in general. And I suppose to have
Speaker 1: those conversations with Helen and with Sarah was a special
Speaker 1: moment in all of our lives. And we're all at
Speaker 1: different stages in our careers. But you know, when you'd
Speaker 1: go to a trial, you're also sitting alongside really great misery,
Speaker 1: and so there is always the reality behind the headlines
Speaker 1: of the damage that is wrought in true crime, in
Speaker 1: communities and a family.
Speaker 3: Coming up.
Speaker 2: What the trial revealed about Aaron Patterson and about us
Speaker 2: if we go back to the trial itself, so as
Speaker 2: it progressed, more and more of Aaron's life was revealed.
Speaker 2: So you know, you looked inside her kitchen, you heard
Speaker 2: her children talking. Her estranged husband also gave evidence. So
Speaker 2: before anyone heard from Aaron herself, there was already this
Speaker 2: picture of her forming, I suppose. So how did you
Speaker 2: start to think about her who she was?
Speaker 3: At that point?
Speaker 1: I had a sense that she was a fairly dark
Speaker 1: character from her actions. It just struck me as incredibly
Speaker 1: calculated to go and search for deathcat mushrooms and then
Speaker 1: spend months working out how to make this meal and
Speaker 1: inviting your husband's family over. She invited them over two
Speaker 1: weeks before the lunch. It was also after she had
Speaker 1: served the lunch. It's a horrible way to kill somebody
Speaker 1: because it's very slow and painful, And there were opportunities
Speaker 1: where she might have told medicos earlier that she'd foraged
Speaker 1: for mushrooms, and they may have been able to administer
Speaker 1: a prophylactic which could potentially have changed the outcomes for
Speaker 1: her victims.
Speaker 2: And So, how did the way that you saw Erin
Speaker 2: compare to the others?
Speaker 1: Sometimes I thought that they had sort of access to
Speaker 1: deeper wells of humanity. They've had more sympathy for Erin
Speaker 1: than I did. But I guess that one of the
Speaker 1: interesting things about collaborating with other people is that even
Speaker 1: when you disagree, it's almost as if you're all taking
Speaker 1: different sides, which actually, in the writing of a book
Speaker 1: an author might do anyway. So maybe they could afford
Speaker 1: to be softer because I was being more hardline. And
Speaker 1: I think that there actually was a way in which
Speaker 1: our different perspectives balanced out, and the disagreements we were
Speaker 1: having kind of replicated what could happen in a writer's head.
Speaker 1: And I think that in a way, this book kind
Speaker 1: of shows the seams of what can happen in the
Speaker 1: making of a book, and.
Speaker 2: It wasn't clear for a lot of the trial whether
Speaker 2: or not Aaron Patterson would give evidence, but she did end.
Speaker 3: Up doing that.
Speaker 2: So when that happened, what were you kind of looking for?
Speaker 1: I suppose I think that when you're watching somebody on
Speaker 1: the stand, you're thinking, well, you know, wondering what the
Speaker 1: jury will make of their presentation. I was particularly interested
Speaker 1: in the stories in which that erin was telling the jury,
Speaker 1: but also the stories in which she felt that she
Speaker 1: was telling herself. Some of these tales were blatantly untrue.
Speaker 1: So Aaron Patterson is a person who lies very easily,
Speaker 1: and when she got onto the stand there were a
Speaker 1: number of discrepancies which she had to try to explain
Speaker 1: her way out of. Sometimes she did that very artfully,
Speaker 1: other times it was a less convincing performance. She was
Speaker 1: also on the stand for over a week, which is
Speaker 1: it's a lot for somebody under pressure to maintain their
Speaker 1: different fictions, I suppose, in a really stressful environment. At
Speaker 1: the end of it, there was the feeling, though that
Speaker 1: she had done very well, and it was unclear whether
Speaker 1: or not she would be found guilty, or at least
Speaker 1: there seemed a strong possibility that there would be a
Speaker 1: hung jury.
Speaker 2: Did you find your opinion of her changing at all
Speaker 2: during that week?
Speaker 1: I suppose the personality that thinks that they can get
Speaker 1: away with a crime like this is also one that
Speaker 1: thinks that they can kind of talk their way out
Speaker 1: of it. So I didn't believe going into the trial
Speaker 1: that Erin was innocent. We knew before driving to Morewell
Speaker 1: that there had been charges just recently dropped against her
Speaker 1: for attempting to murder her husband, and that he had
Speaker 1: been in a coma as well, with part of his
Speaker 1: small intestine removed after eating some of Aaron's food. So
Speaker 1: it seemed clear to me that she probably was guilty,
Speaker 1: But I didn't know that she was going to I
Speaker 1: didn't know whether or not she would actually be found guilty,
Speaker 1: So my opinion of her did not change a great deal.
Speaker 2: And how do you feel now, both about your own
Speaker 2: interest in this case and all of our fascinations with it.
Speaker 1: Well, I think that in some ways Erin seemed to
Speaker 1: me a kind of fixed force in this saga, And
Speaker 1: I think that our reactions and I'm you know, my reaction,
Speaker 1: Sarah's reaction, Helen's reaction, and Australia and the world's reaction
Speaker 1: is sort of more interesting. In a way, we know
Speaker 1: that true crime is a genre, that the production of
Speaker 1: it is largely being driven by a female audience, and
Speaker 1: that's across all of the media. So why broadly are
Speaker 1: we fascinated by true crime and why in particular this crime.
Speaker 1: I think that it's an escape. I think that these
Speaker 1: are stories about power. I think women are often tend
Speaker 1: to empathize not just with the victim of the crime,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately most often the victims are women, but also
Speaker 1: with the murderer. I think that in this case, most
Speaker 1: people are waking up in a state of deep anxiety
Speaker 1: in Australia in twenty twenty five, but it regarding wars
Speaker 1: around climate change, AI cost of living, and it's a
Speaker 1: horrible thing. But in a way, I think we were
Speaker 1: all looking at this trial so as not to think
Speaker 1: about these issues that confront our day to day life
Speaker 1: in ways we don't know how to fix or understand.
Speaker 1: With true crime, there's often the sense of an ending,
Speaker 1: the sense that Erin is now in jail, that order
Speaker 1: is restored, and we don't need to look so deeply
Speaker 1: at our own disorder.
Speaker 2: Well Chloie, thank you so much for speaking with me,
Speaker 2: and congratulations again.
Speaker 3: I loved the book. I really enjoyed reading it. Ruby,
Speaker 3: thanks so much.
Speaker 2: Tomorrow, on the show, I'm bringing you an interview with
Speaker 2: China expert Linda Javin. After years of spectacular growth, China
Speaker 2: has been struggling. People in the country are now stuck
Speaker 2: in a loop of burnout and austerity, with high youth
Speaker 2: unemployment and low birth rates. The country has been trying
Speaker 2: to turn us around, focusing on things like tech AI
Speaker 2: and electric vehicles. We look at how China's new economic
Speaker 2: experiment went in twenty twenty five and what this year
Speaker 2: holds for one of the world's great superpowers.
Speaker 3: I'm Ruby Jones. Thanks for listening.