The unknowable Erin Patterson faces a solitary life in prison

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It is a fool’s errand to imagine that you might recognise on sight a mass murderer, as if the twisted soul should manifest upon the face, a curled lip or in cruel eyes.

Still, it seemed impossible to reconcile this small, unremarkable figure – someone you’d pass on the street without a glance – with the woman who has wrought such destruction and tumult on her family and community that she has gained worldwide infamy as the mushroom murderer.

Erin Patterson in a prison van in May during her trial.

Erin Patterson showed no trace of emotion as she was damned by a judge as a serial liar, as a person with no apparent remorse and as the architect of the premeditated murder of three people and the attempted murder of a fourth.

She sat immobile, as if asleep, as the judge declared her intention to kill continued even after she had dispensed her infamous mushroom-poisoned beef Wellington lunch. As her victims suffered their final tortured hours, she deliberately engaged in a cover-up, denying medical authorities the knowledge that death-cap mushrooms had been administered.

On Monday, Patterson did not rouse herself even when Supreme Court Justice Christopher Beale declared she had inflicted untold suffering on her two children when she robbed them of their beloved grandparents, Don and Gail Patterson.

Finally, after 45 minutes of the judge’s withering demolition of her claims to innocence and his searing summation of her malignant perfidy, Patterson rose to her feet in the dock to register her bleak fate: life in prison with no hope of parole for 33 years.

Justice Christopher Beale during his sentencing remarks on Monday.

She faces her 51st birthday at the end of this month. It means – considering the prison time she has already served – that she has no chance of experiencing free air until she is 82.

Beale painted an intensely miserable picture of what lay ahead for Patterson: solitary confinement in a small cell for her own protection for years to come, despite UN guidelines – known as the Bangkok Rules – that say a prisoner should not be in “separation” from others for more than 15 days at a time.

He noted that Patterson had already been in separation for 15 months.

Beale said that because of that notoriety – through unprecedented media coverage, plus books, documentaries and TV series under way – Jennifer Hoskins, the assistant commissioner of the service management division of Corrections Victoria, was unable to say whether Patterson would ever be removed from her solitary existence in the management unit at the Dame Phyllis Frost maximum security prison for women.

Media and onlookers wait for the prison van carrying Erin Patterson to leave the Supreme Court on Monday.

And still Patterson’s expression remained inscrutable, her innermost passions as unreachable as if she were a statue of stone, the face she had presented to the jury for most of the 11 weeks of her trial.

During the whole of Beale’s final annihilation of her claim to innocence, Patterson offered only the briefest flicker of sentiment. It was one of apparent loathing aimed at the ranks of journalists filling the pews near her in court four in the Supreme Court of Victoria.

When the judge spoke of the immense media coverage her trial had attracted and how it had played such a part in her notoriety, she flicked her eyes at the gathered reporters, as if they were the cause of her doom.

Notoriety, certainly, has become her lot.

Erin Patterson, lunch survivor Ian Wilkinson, defence barrister Colin Mandy, SC, Don and Gail Patterson, Heather Wilkinson, Simon Patterson and prosecutor Nanette Rogers, SC.

An hour before Patterson was to appear for her sentencing, a line of those hoping to witness this final act in the mushroom murders saga snaked along William Street, waiting for the court doors to swing open.

When she was led to the dock at 9.30am, there was not a seat to be had in the public gallery above her, nor on the floor of the court.

How many TV viewers around Australia and beyond watched this final act remains to be recorded. For the first time in the history of the Victorian Supreme Court, TV cameras were permitted to capture and broadcast the judge’s every word.

The two workaday video cameras mounted on tripods above and behind Patterson appeared out of place in the majestic surrounds of the old courtroom, its soaring walls and ceilings adorned with intricately moulded plasterwork, a great chandelier of brass and frosted glass suspended beneath an ornate ceiling rose.

The prison van makes its way to Dame Phyllis Frost Centre.

Beale sat beneath a vast canopy of dark wood, as if to radiate the gravity of his task.

Once, a judge might have donned a black cap beneath this canopy to pass sentence for a capital crime, but capital punishment was abandoned in Victoria in 1975, and the last woman to be hanged in the state was the murderer Jean Lee in February 1951.

And so, Patterson was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson, and life, with a non-parole period of 33 years, for each of the murders of Don and Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson, to be served concurrently.

Her crimes, it seems clear, might have been even greater if her estranged husband had accepted her invitation to lunch.

Beale spoke at some length about Simon Patterson having declined to attend the fatal lunch.

The judge read out Erin Patterson’s dismayed text at the knock-back, her annoyed retort about how she had spent hours preparing the lunch at great expense, and how she needed to discuss what turned out to be a concocted claim that she had cancer.

Simon Patterson’s decision to stay away proved wise. He now looks after his and Erin’s two children.

And this otherwise unremarkable, apparently homely, woman exists in a lonely cell, the large inheritance she once received from her grandmother gone, and the million-dollar country house she built to be the “forever home” for her family in hock to the lawyers who could not save her.

And still in the dock of the majestic court four of the Supreme Court of Victoria.

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