Capris, #cozzylivs and cap mushrooms: the case that fed a nation
Is this Australia's most cooked crime? Armchair jurors across the country feel that rather than death cap mushrooms, justice was served with Erin Patterson's guilty verdict yesterday.
Water coolers across the country have run dry as colleagues, friends, work nemeses and secret lovers gathered one last time to dissect the biggest thing to hit Australia since Rhonda met Ketut: the Mushroom Verdict.
Unless you’ve been out foraging, you’d know about The Case That Stopped A Nation. Erin Patterson, the woman accused of poisoning her in-laws with death cap mushrooms, was found guilty by a jury yesterday afternoon. (If you live in Australia and still haven’t heard about this, how? Do you not own a TV? What’s all your furniture pointed at?)
Personally, I’ve been utterly obsessed since this story hit our screens in mid-2023. Like America, Covid, or a mushroom itself, it kept mutating -fuelling endless group chats, memes, and Monday morning tea-spills that transcended work hierarchies and social status.
Mushroom sales declined, everyone suddenly Googled and learnt what a beef Wellington actually is, and as a nation, it grabbed our attention more than the Federal election ever could. Not since Steven Bradbury glided to gold or the Great Emu War have we been so collectively obsessed with a story too ridiculous not to be true.
I lived for the theories – the grainy YouTube explainers, the Reddit spirals, the exclusive “friend of a friend” interviews with someone who might have walked their dog past the house in 2003. When someone knows someone whose auntie is mates with the cousin who once dated the neighbour’s postman — I feel like I’ve basically earned a seat at the trial beside all the media and funemployed in Morwell.
There’s been the group confusion as an Australian collective - if she did it, why? And if she did, how could she so painfully neglect to cover her tracks? Like, has she never watched a single episode of Law & Order or Forensic Files? And if she didn’t, well… that’s a mighty lot of unfortunate coincidences.
We’ve all been there - Making a gourmet lunch for your in-laws using mushrooms you foraged without a fungi degree (#fungifriday), pairing it with packet mash (#yum), telling people you have cancer when you don’t (#lol), texting the family that you’ve got diarrhoea while cruising into a servo toilet (#grwm), juggling 40 different phones (Gotta hit that #CandyCrush), ranting about fungi and family on Facey (#hesnotafunghi), serving the kids leftovers from the same lunch that hospitalised your family (cos #cozzylivingcrisis) and factory resetting those phones when the cops come knocking. Like, isn’t that just a Tuesday?
At first, while binging a bit of It Wasn’t Me during my Shaggy renaissance, I really tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was a tragic mistake. Maybe she did love her in-laws. Maybe she panicked and binned the dehydrator. Maybe she’s just mortified by cosmetic surgery and made up a story. Maybe shittake happens. Maybe she’s just a really fun-ghi? (Sorry. Not sorry.)
It suspends a lot of belief. But there was one thing that I, and I assume, the jury, just couldn’t get past:
Ain’t NOBODY with diarrhoea cruising around a servo in white capris.