Ashamed of your mushroom murder obsession? Don’t be

5 hours ago 4

By the time Louisa Collins was hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol in 1889, she had been tried four times for the murders of two husbands. She was alleged to have poisoned them, possibly with Rough on Rats, an arsenic-based rat poison freely available in the colony at the time.

Collins maintained her innocence until the end. But there was so much public and political pressure to have her brought to justice (her husbands having both died from short and violent gastro-intestinal illnesses) that the authorities seemed determined to keep trying her until a jury eventually convicted.

Convicted killers Erin Patterson and Louisa Collins, who was the last woman hanged in NSW.

Collins’ hanging was horribly botched, leaving her windpipe exposed, according to the eyewitness report in The Sydney Morning Herald. Her executioner, nicknamed Nosey Bob (he had lost his nose to a kicking horse and was left with nothing but two nasal holes) was famously bad at his job.

When Collins swung shortly after 9am on January 8, 1889, wearing “the usual prison clothes of dark wincey material”, as per another Herald report, she became the last woman ever hanged in NSW.

Louisa Collins’ story is not well-known by contemporary Australians. In an excellent book by Caroline Overington on Collins’ short but notorious life (she was 41 when she went to her death), Overington wonders why Australians know well the history of our male villains, but not the female ones. But of course, the names of Collins’ victims – Charles Andrews and Michael Collins – are not known at all.

The female poisoner who has captured the contemporary imagination – Erin Patterson – will also outlast her victims in the public memory.

Patterson was this week convicted of three murders and one attempted murder, having poisoned her family members with a meal containing death-cap mushrooms.

There has been some consternation from some, and even a scolding sense of moral condemnation, about the sheer volume of coverage of Patterson. Meanwhile, these critics say, her victims have been callously disregarded, cruelly dismissed as their deaths become fodder for the salacious true-crime appetites of the masses.

Staff from Museums of History NSW with a noose and black hood used in the execution of convicted poisoner Louisa Collins in 1889.

The amount of media coverage tells its own story. In a demand-driven, highly competitive media ecosystem, media outlets, traditional and non-traditional, will serve up what they know will be well-read, or well-viewed.

Hence, there has been blanket coverage of the trial, and since the verdict was announced, the frenzy only increased because the media had more freedom to report information that had been inadmissible or sub judice during the trial.

Mycology has never been so popular.

The media has undoubtedly evolved in its treatment of victims of crime, largely due to the efforts of domestic violence advocates and feminist activists, who have highlighted the dated misogyny with which murders of women have so often been reported.

But nothing like that exists in the case of Patterson.

Anecdotally, I noticed that women tended to be more sympathetic towards Patterson at the beginning of the trial, but as the trial wore on and the evidence mounted, it was difficult to believe that she was anything other than guilty.

Her victims have been centred in reporting. We all know their faces, and we know the outline sketch of their lives. The media has portrayed them to be much-loved members of their community who were trying to do the best by both parties in a messy divorce involving children. Our fascination with Patterson can sit alongside our sympathy for her victims.

There is no reason to inject moral judgment into something that is clearly so intriguing to so many people. New media (notably podcasts and streaming services) have led to a proliferation of “true crime” content, but the microfiche records of the colonial newspapers of the 1880s show the appetite for it was just as strong then.

As any Shakespeare scholar knows, the portrayal of violence has always been a form of popular entertainment. No one is bloodier than the Bard.

In the coverage of Patterson, I have seen no gruesome lingering on the detail of the deaths of her victims, or voyeurism of their suffering. On the contrary, the fascination with her is an effort to comprehend why she did it. There is no clear motive, which throws us back on to her psychology.

Is she sociopathic? Does she have narcissistic personality disorder? Were there things in her past that might have served as a warning, or given a clue of what she was capable of?

And then there is her femininity. Female murderers are rare, and rarity is always more interesting. The murder method of both Patterson and her predecessor Louisa Collins is especially chilling because women are supposed to nurture and nourish.

How terrifying to consider that you cannot trust the person who is feeding you. How horrifying to realise our own vulnerability when the ones we are close to might want to hurt us. (This, of course, is something women have lived with since time began.)

In NSW in the 1880s, women didn’t yet have the vote. The case of Louisa Collins was relatively confusing to both the early suffragettes and their opponents.

“You want equality?” the suffrage-opponents said. “Well, that means you will hang for murder too.” To which the suffragettes responded (through strident argument in the letters pages of the Herald, among other places) that if women were to be treated as intelligent adults when it came to criminal responsibility, then they should be able to vote and stand for parliament too.

Others believed Collins should be shown mercy due to her gender, but many (including Sir Henry Parkes, then NSW premier) believed Collins should hang.

To some, it seemed that Louisa’s femininity made the crime more monstrous. Like Lady Macbeth, who appealed to supernatural spirits to “unsex me here” so she could go on to murder, Collins had acted against natural female instincts to commit a heinous crime.

All of this was picked over by the colonial residents of NSW, much as Patterson’s ill deeds are being picked over by the internet denizens and media consumers of today. This is not wrong, or evidence of a moral decay brought on by the internet. It is the product of the most human, pro-social instinct of all – to understand one another.