August 24, 2023 • 36 mins
Several guests fall gravely ill and lose their lives after attending a meal hosted by Erin Patterson.
Among the victims, the symptoms were immediate and severe, but curiously, Erin's symptoms did not align with the rest, casting a shadow of suspicion over her. In this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack dive into the twisted tale of the death cap mushroom, a case that sends shockwaves across Victoria, Australia.
From exploring the forensic complexities of the case to uncovering the historical context of poisonings, Joe Scott and Dave guide listeners through a web of mysteries, detailed autopsy procedures, and the legal intricacies that come into play.
Time codes:
[00:00:20] Joseph Scott Morgan discusses various types of mushrooms, ending with the fatal death cap mushroom.
[00:03:04] Dave Mack tells the story of Erin and Simon Patterson's split, the deadly lunch, and the unfolding drama.
[00:05:11] A twist is revealed when Dave states that Erin's symptoms do not match those of the other guests.
[00:08:01] Joe Scott discusses the challenges of identifying toxins in a body.
[00:13:20] A pattern of people falling ill when Erin cooks, dating back to May 2022, is revealed.
[00:15:36] Details are shared about the gruesome effects of toxins on the liver and kidneys.
[00:18:44] Joe Scott contemplates intentional poisoning.
[00:19:16] References to historical cases of poisoning with death cap mushrooms.
[00:25:00] Morgan explains food identification even after digestion.
[00:30:33] Insight into the role of pathologists adds legal dimensions.
[00:32:40] Questions about weaponizing common food items open a new line of inquiry.
[00:33:21] Joe Scott emphasizes the importance of medical charting.
[00:35:20] The investigation's scope broadens when considering other geographically close cases.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Some of the names
that I'm about to give to you kind of contra
up all kinds of warm feelings from the perspective of
(00:28):
fine food or food that I would consider comfort food.
Button chantraline, cremini, shaitaki. One of my favorites orscher snowpuff, portobella.
I love a good portobella sandwich, grilled porcini morale for
the you high dollar types out there. But you know,
(00:49):
the name that is not included on this list is
a scientific name. First off, it's called Amanita falloid, otherwise
known as a death cap. The death cap a mushroom
is so very lethal that once it is ingested, there
is a high probability that death will visit you in
(01:10):
less than about twenty four hours. Today we're going to
talk about arguably one of the more bizarre cases that
we've heard about. We're going to explore some of the
issues that may have occurred in a town in Victoria, Australia.
I'm Joseph Gott Morgan, and this is body bags. I
(01:31):
love mushrooms, Dave, I love them. This is how I
love them. I love them generally button mushrooms. I like
to take them fresh ones. Now I don't like them
out of the can because they're too salty, and they've
got that funky color that's almost gray. It's not very appetizing.
But I like to take button mushrooms and sautee them
in butter, onions and garlic, and then once I have
(01:54):
them just right, and after I have grilled my rib
I steak, I like to take them and pour them
over the top of that steak and maybe have a
few on the side and enjoy that flavor, that robust
flavor with a grilled steak. I don't know that there's
anything better. Maybe a hamburger with salted mushrooms. But boy,
(02:15):
I'll tell you what. You bring out the mushrooms and
you really really make my mouth start. A matter of fact,
hang on, we'll get my handkerchief out right now. Kind
of my mouth is kind of watering.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah, you're kind of freaking me out. How deep you've
gone into this, Joe. I'm a little concerned. But the
story has gained worldwide attention for its simplicity and diabolical nature.
Here it is in a nutshell. Joe Aaron and Simon
Patterson have been married for several years, They've got two children. However,
the marriages are working out, Aaron and Simon split up. Aaron,
(02:49):
hoping for reconciliation, reaches out and invites Simon over for
a big lunch with Simon. She invites her exen laws
soon to be exend laws, Gail and Don Patterson. She
also invites Heather Wilkinson and Ian Wilkins. That would be Wilkinson,
that would be Simon's and uncle. Ian Wilkinson is a pastor.
He's a much beloved pastor. And I think Aaron, in
(03:12):
her mind's I was thinking his family will be in
favor of staying together from that generation, if you stay
together for the kids or whatever. But what she doesn't
know is that Simon's family doesn't trust her. They really
are a little weirded out by Aaron Patterson. So as
this lunch is going on, this lunch of beef wellington
and mushrooms prepared for by a mushroom connoisseur, somebody who
(03:33):
knows how to forge, meaning find mushrooms out in the field.
She knows the right stores to shop for the right mushrooms.
She actually prepares this beef wellington garnished with mushrooms for
her soon to be accent loss, thinking there will be
a reconciliation, but instead, Simon doesn't show up and the
family basically turns on her in her mind's eye, and
they are not in favor of the dude getting backed together.
(03:55):
What happens next is the reason this story has gone worldwide.
Of the five adults sitting in that table partaking of
beef wellington garnish with mushrooms, three of them end up
dead and one ends up in ICU waiting on a
liver transplant. Only one was able to walk away from
that table. That person was Aaron Patterson.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
I find it interesting that she would prepare a meal
for these individuals, and it was within a very short
period of tom that you've got these individuals who begin
to display gastro intestinal discomfort.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
They were straight up poisoned at lunch. That's what I'm
going to be honest with you. We could beat around
the bush all day long. But the reason I pointed
out that Simon wasn't there and that the family was
not in favor of them getting back together is Aaron
knew that when they got there, she immediately knew that
this was not going the way that she wanted. And
next thing, you know, beef wellington and mushrooms deserved and
everybody gets sick.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Well, let me ask you. Did Aaron get sick?
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Joe, I'm I'm glad you asked that. I feel like Colombo.
According to Aaron, she got sick and that she too
went to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
But here's the deal.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
You've got these four elderly people.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Oh and by the way, just let me interject this.
The pastor you mentioned, this guy's on the list for
a liver transplant, so he's like in dire straits.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Well you may as well go ahead and say it.
The other three are dead, Joe, They died, and this guy,
the pastor. The only reason he's alive is anybody. Ian
Wilkinson is alive by the grace of God. That's the
only way you can look. They all eat the same thing,
so they all get sick and die. Ian, as you mentioned,
liver transplanted. The guy's barely hanging on. And Aaron Wilkinson,
(05:46):
she's not on her deathbed, she's not in the hospital.
She claims she got sick, and there is a report
that she did go to the hospital. If you and
I go out to dinner tonight and you make meat mushrooms.
I could probably go to the hospital and take a
good sick I could go in and complain about my stomach,
and I could do all of that for at least
twelve hours they put me in. Just by complaining alone,
(06:07):
I can make myself throw up, tell them anything I
needed to tell them. So her being in the hospital
doesn't mean very much to me because she doesn't have
any of the other symptoms everybody else has.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Yeah, and most of the time, if there's a toxic
substance that everybody is ingesting and it's impacting this many people,
there's a high probability that if anyone ingested it, they're
going to be equally as sick. As a medical legal
(06:51):
death investigator, in forensics, one of the things that we
look for is kind of from an epidemiological standpoint. You
look for or rogens of diseases. You look for origins
of medical conditions and what brought that back, particularly when
you're thinking about, say, for instance, a major loss of
life event, or you're thinking about something that brings about
(07:14):
an illness. Just think about any kind of pandemic. But
here we have in almost a microcosm where you have
multiple people, three of which die, and you have an
additional individual that is now on life support with his
liver essentially destroyed. We approach this from a medical model
(07:37):
when we're investigating these kinds of cases. It's not like commonly,
when you begin to think about gunshot wound or stab
wound or bludgeoning, you can kind of trace that back
to a single instrument that is used. But it's not
so simple when you begin to think about something that
is so toxic and incompatible with life, you really have
(07:59):
to put your thinking cap on and begin to examine
what you have before you and trying to determine because
it's not necessarily going to just immediately present itself. You
can't look at a body and say, well, look, this
toxin is present.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Now.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
There are certain things that you can look for, particularly
like with heavy metal poisoning, for instance, you can see
changes in the body and the pallor and all those
sorts of things, nail beds and all those things that
we look for. But if you're talking about something perhaps
like a poison mushroom, that's going to take a bit
more time to understand. Because as many cases, as many
(08:35):
kinds of toxic events that emergency room personnel have to
deal with that walk through the door, and clinical personnel
from a treatment standpoint, long term treatment, they don't encounter
poison vegetation like this, and certainly not something as glaring
as a poison mushroom.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
When I think about, what would I know if I've
sit down to eat and you're describing how much you
love the mushroom and you sit down to eat, would
they taste different? Do poison mushrooms taste different than non
poisonous mushrooms?
Speaker 1 (09:07):
No, I mean, and listen, I think probably a discerning
person that is really into mushrooms. You think about somebody
that forages for mushrooms. There are different textures and my
family are big on chanterline mushrooms. They love them, they
cook with them, they wait for these seasons to come in,
and they all have different textures and many of them
(09:28):
will be described as being kind of light and others
will be described literally as being very beefy when you
eat them, And a lot of that has to do
with texture and flavor as well. So it's like anything
else in the world, whether it's a bottle of wine
or a cigar, everybody has different things that they like,
and mushrooms are no different. But for this particular species
(09:50):
that we're actually talking about with the mushroom, and just
so you know, from Jump Street, we know that something
is afoot because the authority is actually identified the mushroom
as a species that is referred to as the death
cap mushroom, and it's highly toxic. But here's the thing.
It has to be ingested in order for it to
(10:12):
do harm to you. So it's not what we refer
to as a transdermal thing. There are certain species of
plant life in the world in which we encounter that
when you touch it, it can be transdermal. You know,
you can absorb it through your skin. And keep in
mind a mushroom is not necessarily a plant like we
think of. It's actually a fungus that's growing out of
(10:34):
the earth like this, and the death cap mushroom actually
has kind of this very interwoven network beneath the surface
of the earth that it's growing through. So you'll have
multiple of these sprouts coming up, but it's very distinctive.
And this is the thing. The wife in this particular
case aaron. She's known as a forager, and so one
(10:55):
of the hallmarks or a really good forager from mushrooms
is that you understand species, You understand the way things look.
And I beg any of you within the sound of
my voice to go and actually take a look at
the different species of mushrooms out there, and each one
of them are very, very distinctive. And the most common
is the button mushroom. It's white. Sometimes they're referred to
(11:17):
as white mushrooms around kind of a bulbous head the
death cap mushroom, though, Dave, this should be your first warning.
The cap itself spreads out rather wide. Think of a
rather substantial miniature umbrella, okay, And it's the thickness of
it is not as thick as, say, for instance, relatively
speaking as a portobello or a button mushroom. The cap
(11:41):
on it is kind of thin. But here's the thing.
It has this luminescent green color. When you see it
that first off, it doesn't look appetizing at all. I
know you don't like mushrooms, and none of them look appetizing.
But if you come across something that's green other than
maybe a green apple granny smith are green grapes, you're
(12:02):
not necessarily going to grab it up and stick in
your mouth. Well, and for somebody that does this, even
as a hobbyist, they're going to look at this thing
and say, you know what, that's probably something that I
ought to stay away from. Or they're going to look
at it and say, oh my gosh, that's a death
cap mushroom. We not only do I need to stay
away from it, I need to warn everybody that might
(12:24):
be in my little group that goes out and forges
for mushrooms that there are death cap mushrooms here. We
need to stay away from them.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Here we are, at this time and place where you've
got a forager. She is an expert on these things.
She knows what she's doing when it comes to mushrooms.
We've got four people at a lunch that doesn't go
her way, and all the adults at the table are
sick except for Aaron the Patterson, the woman who prepared it.
Her ex husband. Well, I don't like calling somebody X
(12:51):
when they're only separated, but I don't think there's any
real chance they're going to get back together. But they
are currently not together. Simon has no interest and getting
back together with his wife Aaron. And yet now we
find out and this is something that investigators pulled out.
How did these people get sick? Did you feed them
these mushrooms? Well, they started looking back in history. Has
(13:12):
she done this before? Do we have any other people
getting sick when she cooks? Sure enough? May twenty twenty two,
a year and two months before her husband Simon ended
up in the hospital with very similar symptoms.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
And that's amazing, because, Dave, if this is in fact,
and let's face it, this is almost a serialized event
when you think about it. Poisoners in and of themselves
are interesting birds, to say the very least. First off,
they're very stealthy. And here's the thing. In order to
poison someone, and let's just she has not been convicted
(13:50):
of having poisoned anyone. Let me see, not even charged yet. Yeah,
let me just say that very plainly. But here's the
thing with these poisoning cases. You almost have to be
an intimate to be within the circle of an individual,
because why well, you have to get close enough to
them to apply whatever toxin it is that you're looking
(14:12):
to get into their system. And what's the most effective
way to do that. Well, ingestion is the quickest way
to do it, because once you uptake this thing and
it begins to metabolize in your system. You're going to
have this onset and this horrible onset of nausea. It'll
be accompanied by vomiting. There'll be terrible intestinal pain. If
you've ever had severe intestinal cramping. It leads to severe dehydration,
(14:37):
just an unquenchable thirst. It's a horrible way for these people.
The course is very horrible, and they if they can
survive beyond I don't know the first six hours or so.
Guess what happens. There's a phase two that this kicks
into relative to the poisoning, and you think that you're
(15:00):
out of the woods. This is a scary part. You
might be in the hospital. They've hung an ivy on you.
They're pushing the necessary medications into your system. There's almost
like this dormant phase where this toxin is coursing through
your system. It's not that it's necessarily gone into a
dormant state. It's now working at a cellular level and
(15:22):
it cannot be detected until it gets into phase three.
And you know what happens. Then your liver begins to
shut down and we think about the pastor right the
sixty six year old, and your kidneys begin to shut
down at that moment time. And look, man, if you
have renal failure, renal failure is that's one of the
leading causes of death at an end stage phase with people.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
What is it?
Speaker 2 (15:45):
What is renal fail.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Renal failure means literally that your kidneys have shut down
and they can no longer appropriately process waste in your body.
So everything, all these toxins begin to back up in
your body. And isn't it interesting? Also a liver begins
to fail, so you go into what's referred to as
hepatic failure, which is just a fancy term for the liver,
(16:07):
and the liver begins to shut down. The individuals actually
begin to present with yellow skin color, and of course
we know that means they're in a state of jauntice.
If you've never seen anybody with jauntice, it's striking. And
when you see them, even what were the whites of
their eyes become yellow at that time too, And so
(16:28):
they're in a total system failure at this point in time.
It's a horrific way to die.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
How is it possible, Joe, that four people seemingly similar health,
three die, one survives. I mean that the fact that
the sixty six year old pastor is still alive. Granted
he's on a liver transplant list and things are not
looking good for him, But is it always obviously is
not always fatal. What are some things that would make
(16:53):
a difference, do you think?
Speaker 1 (16:54):
I think probably within this is an excellent point day
when you look at this, you think about survivability. This
pastor that you mentioned, he is sixty six. The rest
of these poor victims, they're well north of sixty six.
He's the youngest one in the group. And let's face it,
as you age, your systems become weaker than they were
when you were younger.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Would it be possible that the chef, the person who
prepared the dish, that they could, in fact, being substantially younger,
eat some of it, have some moderate symptoms, but not deathly.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
No, I don't think that that's possible, because if you
ingested this thing, from my perspective, if you ingested this mushroom,
which is arguably the single most toxic mushroom in the world. Okay,
there are no degrees to it. Really, I'm going to
be very curious to find out when her husband had
(17:54):
complained of this illness several months prior to this fatal
event that occurred at their home or at their former
family home there where they were getting together. I'd like
to know the symptomology that he went through and kind
of the progress now people can survive this. What's really
horrific about this kind of circumstance is that if she did,
(18:16):
in fact poison this group of people, she really took
a shotgun approach. She was indiscriminate, Dave. She blasted them
essentially with this toxic substance, and she really didn't care
who died. Maybe she viewed everybody in the room as
an enemy. Maybe she said, well, I'm going after the
one target, and if other people die as a result
(18:38):
of it, so bit. But she certainly didn't die. She
still survived.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
She's lived to tell the tale.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
I love history, I do unashamedly. I think probably one
of our most successful episodes that we had was probably
the examination that we did of Julius Caesar's autopsy.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Oh my goodness, that was crazy.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Well, let me throw another couple of names at you.
Emperor Claudius was a Roman empire, and in addition to
Emperor Claudius, Charles the six, who was one of the
holy Roman emperors. Take a while, guess what both of
these cats had in common.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Death by poison.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah, and not just poisoning, but death cap mushroom poisoning.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Oh, I thought you were messing with me.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
No, honest to God's truth. And Voltaire actually wrote about
Charles the sixth death as a result of ingesting death
cap mushroom. And it may have not have been a
homicidal poisoning, but he was on a hunting trip and
he ingested these. Claudius was in fact poisoned, lethally poisoned,
(20:04):
and common history and I think a lot of these
scholars concur that it was probably a death cap mushroom.
And these mushrooms have been known for years and years,
and they actually they were initially found in Europe, That's
where they kind of spring from. And I find it
it's fascinating to me the way these things travel across
the world, because you know the case of these poor
(20:27):
people down in Australia, I don't know that this species
of mushroom existed prior to that land down there being
inhabited by Europeans. And they can also be found in
North America as well. And again, what do we have
in common with that? Well, the first settlers of North
America were European, so it's and you know, over a
(20:49):
period of time, certainly these species will kind of evolve
within their environment. It might turn into a different species,
or it might vary slightly from say the European The
one thing that they do have in common is that
their level of toxicity and kind of what you're seeing
with them when they present at autopsy and certainly in
(21:10):
the clinical phase when you're doing an examination of the
records leading up to their death.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Let me ask you about autopsy. You mentioned that what
did it show up in an autopsy that it was
a death cab mushroom poison or would it just be
vague in that while they died from some poison, I mean,
is there a way to tell?
Speaker 1 (21:31):
This is one of the really cool things about a
case involving something that is ingested, like a fungus like this,
which a mushroom is, or some type of plant life
that we might see. One of the things that we
do at autopsy, Dave, and I don't know that many
people really think about this. When not only draw blood,
we draw urine and bile and vitreous fluid. We examine
(21:54):
the organs and take samples of those. One of the
tasks that you have to do at autopsy is during
the dissection. Just imagine the shape of a stomach. Okay.
You have the long tube that comes down the esophagus,
and you take a piece of string, okay, and you
(22:14):
make an incision beneath the esophagus where it attaches on
adjacent to where like the aord is and running down
the spine okay, and you tie that piece of string
off so that you've essentially tied off the top end
of the esophagus where it dumps into the stomach, or
(22:34):
the lower end of the esophagus, forgive me where it
dumps into the stomach. And then you cut, you transsect
across that where with a pair of scissors. Then you
go beneath the stomach where it dumps into the small intestine.
And here's the other part. You take a piece of
string and you tie off that bit that dumps in
(22:55):
to actually the small intestine, and you clip below that
so that when you pull up the stomach you have
a completely in cased sack. It's the stomach removed from
the body and that's the way we examine it. And
we'll take that entire stomach before we examine the contents,
and we'll put it in a scale, and the scales.
(23:15):
If you've ever been to the grocery store and been
to the produce section, that's what the scales look like
in the morgue, No more, no less, that's exactly what
they look like. We measure everything in gram, so we
would get a weight for the stomach where the contents therein.
We then go over to a sink that we have
in the morgue and we carefully hold the stomach above
(23:37):
a container in the sink and we gently opened up
the stomach by incision, and everything that's contained within that
stomach dumps into that container. Now, I know this is
horribly grotesque for people to listen to, but this is
part of medical legal debt investigation because once we have
all of those remnant that harshly digested food stuffs that
(24:03):
are in stomach, we can take that container and walk
over to the autopsy table, put it up on our
dissecting board, and very very carefully go through it and
we will literally try to identify every type of substance
that's contained within that gastric content. We'll also get a
fluid measurement on it too. We'll talk about how many
(24:25):
c ses of content for instance, you know, like a
c C is an increment of measurement that we do
injections with in a clinical standpoint, but we measure out
in ccs the amount that's contained in the stomach. And
we'll actually talk about color because you know, sometimes it'll
be green the contents of the stomach. It will be green,
it will be a bage. Sometimes you'll see reds. And
(24:46):
you can actually identify food stuffs within the stomach. I'll
give you for an example. The most identifiable food in
the human stomach that you can come across are actually
hot dogs because they're in a case, whether it's a
naturally occurring caseing or synthetic casing, and most people don't
chew them up very well, and you can look at
it and say, oh my gosh, that's a hot dog,
(25:08):
and easily easy to spot. Any kind of leafy green
vegetable matter like salads, most of that stuff's easily appreciable.
So with a mushroom, it's kind of spongy, right, so
as it would be chewed all right, you would still
see a remnant of that. Perhaps if you were keen
(25:29):
on this, you would hone in on something that resembles
a mushroom that's in there. And I say this because
this goes back to the investigation that the police would
have been conducting concurrently with the local corner. Because down
in Australia they actually still have a corner system. So
when they get together before the autopsy, if there's a
(25:51):
suspicion on the part of the investigators the police that
is death cap mushrooms have been used, then the corner
would begin to look at this at au time and
they would save every bit of the stomach content day.
They would put it in little clear plastic vials that
have a screw on cap and they would set it aside,
keep it in the refrigerator, keep it cool, and then
(26:12):
they would take a sample of this and they would
send it off. They would send it off to the
crime lab and it would be examined there. It would
be examined in the crime lab. Now you would have
to have somebody at the crime lab that can look
at stomach contents like this, and first off, they would
look at it from a taxonomy standpoint where they're identifying
what type of matter this is. Is it of some
(26:36):
type of non animal matter that has been ingested, So
it might be a fungus like a mushroom, or it
could be a leafy vegetable like a lettuce or whatever
it is. You think about the components contained within this
beef wellington dish, which mushrooms are actually a component of.
You think about a baked good, because beef wellington actually
(26:57):
has a crust on it, it's rolled up, and there's
beef contained in there obviously, and other vegetable matter, and
so you would be looking at this mishmash of stuff
that's in there. So you have to be very very
careful and once you've identified that mushroom, because heat is
not going to change it. So if this mushroom was
baked in, okay, that mushroom is not going to be
(27:19):
baked down to the point in a kitchen where it
would be unrecognizable from a microscopic standpoint. And if you
need further help, for instance, in a case like this,
I would suspect that a sample of this mushroom, and
this happens here in the US relative to the Smithsonian,
they would send a sample of this off to the
(27:40):
National Museum perhaps or to an organization that deals with
toxic plants, and there will be specialists on staff that
will specifically identify this, and if this case does go
to trial, they'll have these individuals testify.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
By it amazing that you can find all of that
out at an autopsy, and it makes sense that they
would be. There would be a lot of undigested stuff
in there. The people got sick right away, So even
if they are getting rid of the content, I mean
through expulsion, through vomiting and diarrhea and everything else, there
would still be enough left to determine what actually caused this.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Yeah, there would be. And keep in mind, and I
don't want to really discuss people with this, but you
have to understand one of the presentations with this toxic
event is gastrointestinal discomfort. Okay, so let's just kind of
take this stage by stage. Once it's ingested, this toxin
goes into the system. Now, how does it go through
(28:37):
into the system. Well, it's in the stomach first, It's
passed through the sophocause it's sitting in the stomach. Just
because we ingest something doesn't mean it just merely pauses
in the stomach and then goes into the small intestine
where absorption takes place and all this sort of stuff.
At that point, you still have absorption that's going on
in the stomach. With the triggering mechanism of this toxic event.
(28:58):
You have people that dive nausea. They can vomit, but
they'll also develop things like diarrhea. So you might have
it coming out of both ends, as they say, but
there would still be a remnant enough of this. And
here's another piece to this that's kind of fascinating. When
you have a toxic substance like this, it's not just
(29:20):
what has been ingested into the system through absorption through
the stomach and the small intestine and that sort of thing.
One of the other things that you look for is
that many times with a toxic substance, it will begin
to cause changes in the lining of the stomach perhaps,
(29:41):
and those changes that you see are associated and microscopically
they can be identified as being associated with certain types
of toxins. Okay, you might look at it and it
might look red and irritated, for instance, or inflamed, but
microscopically those changes sometimes can be very specific to specific
types of toxin. So once that stomach is removed, like
(30:03):
we were talking about just a second ago, you would
trim out part of that stomach itself and you would
preserve it and the physicians would take it and fix
it onto a slot. And part of that is I
guess you could refer to it as forensic histology. It's
really just histology, which is the study of tissues. So
then that's one of the things that pathologists do. Those
(30:25):
samples that we take from all of the organs in
the body. They would examine that microscopically over a period
of time and document those changes and they can testify
to that on stand Dave. Because forensic pathologists are pathologists
as well, and so they're experts in the area of
histology studying tissue, you know, because like things that come
(30:45):
out of surgery, if somebody has a gangrenous limb or
or cancers and all these things that are removed, pathologists
takes a look at all that stuff. So they're keen
on different types of tissues, and so that would be
examined as well. So you've got a myriad of things
that come into play here, and we haven't even mentioned
all of these people will have had some kind of
(31:06):
liver failure as well, and that can be demonstrated. And
it's very powerful when you think about it, because if
this thing were to go to trial, the pathologist could
actually put up several slides of what healthy liver looks like,
and then they take a slide and they show what
a damaged liver looks like from an acute poison event.
(31:27):
And it's going to be striking and they will literally
on the stand given an anatomy lesson, and it can
be very powerful.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
We probably want to be very clear that she has
not Aaron Patterson has not been charged. She has been
mentioned as somebody they're interested in based on how these
deaths occurred. Three out of the four dying, one still
in the hospital. But police they're playing this as they
get everything together. The one thing that you and I
both noticed, Joe, is the amount of Q and A
(31:55):
you and I have gotten privately away from here of
people asking about this particular case and poisoning. Is it
because using something we eat as a weapon, I mean
using a gun a knife that you know, you've got
a big deal there. You're talking about something that people eat.
When we began the program today, you were salivating talking
(32:16):
about mushrooms. Is that the fascinating part. You think that
people are going man something in my backyard. In this case,
the death cap mushroom could actually be used as a weapon.
And the bigger question, could they prosecutors, if they decided
to move forward with this, could they go back and
look at her husband Simon from fourteen months ago when
(32:37):
he was in the hospital in intensive care for twenty
one days with gastrointestinal problems. He had three surgeries while
he was in there. Could they go back and pull
slides from the different things that they were doing with
him and determined at this late date that he himself
was poisoned?
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, I think that they probably could. They've certainly for
any of my listeners that have ever been in the hospital,
think about all the times when you were in hospital
at night and that nurse comes in your room and
wakes you up. Hospital is not the place to go
for rest, right, Well, every time a nurse comes into
your room, they go back out to their desk and
they chart, they chart, they chart, they chart. Everything that
(33:14):
they do to you is written down, and God bless nurses.
I think that they are the unsung heroes in our society.
That's one of the things that they do. They not
only treat their patients that they're charged to care for,
but they chart and document it all along. And so
that's a long course for him to have been in
the hospital. And if he has undergone these surgeries, like
you had mentioned, these multiple surgeries, if anything had been
(33:38):
removed from his body at that point in time, Yeah,
I think that there's a high probability that they will
find perhaps some type of changes, tissue changes in his system,
particularly as the scene kind of metabolizes through that talks
and metabolizes through his body. And also if there are
(34:00):
any biological samples like blood that's left behind. They've had
enough time now perhaps that if they are thinking rethinking
the course of treatment, they're going to go back and
they're going to take a look at everything he has.
And here's the thing, Dave, if they're looking for death
cap mushroom toxicity for him, do you think for two
(34:21):
seconds he's going to say, no, you guys can't look
at my medical records. No, that's not what's going to happen.
He's going to say, here, where do I sign the release?
Now he's part of a death investigation, and that his
course of treatment is part of that. So they can
go back and begin to take a look at it.
They'll take a look at how he initially presented. They're
going to look at his history. Have you ever had
(34:42):
an event that occurs like this, that is even in
the more distant past, and people that were around him
at the time that this occurred, who had access to him,
if this was in fact a toxic event, who had
access to, say, his food supply at that moment in time,
And the police are going to look at every bit
of that period. And here's another thing. I would also
(35:04):
think that if there are any other cases out there
that might have geographic proximity to any of these events
that might share commonalities, you can bet your bottom dollar,
particularly if they're unsolved or unresolved clinically, they the police,
the prosecutor down there, they're going to take a long,
(35:25):
hard look at those cases too, Because Dave, this is
not something that happens every day. All right, It's going
to stand out like a sore thumb. But you know
that brings us back to where we started in this case.
You think about a medical model of investigation, and doctors
and nurses and healthcare workers yet they are clinicians there
to take care of us. But you know what else, Dave,
(35:48):
they're investigators. Everything they do, every place that they go
with a patient, every bit of treatment that they administer
to a patient is problem solving. And that's all investigations is.
It's problem solving. It's like a big puzzle. They're going
to be putting these pieces together. Let's wait and see
what happens with this case, because I for one, I'm
(36:08):
going to be fascinated to see what the end result
is and to see if this actually did result from
the weaponization of a musherer. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and
this is bodybags
Body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Some of the names
that I'm about to give to you kind of contra
up all kinds of warm feelings from the perspective of
(00:28):
fine food or food that I would consider comfort food.
Button chantraline, cremini, shaitaki. One of my favorites orscher snowpuff, portobella.
I love a good portobella sandwich, grilled porcini morale for
the you high dollar types out there. But you know,
(00:49):
the name that is not included on this list is
a scientific name. First off, it's called Amanita falloid, otherwise
known as a death cap. The death cap a mushroom
is so very lethal that once it is ingested, there
is a high probability that death will visit you in
(01:10):
less than about twenty four hours. Today we're going to
talk about arguably one of the more bizarre cases that
we've heard about. We're going to explore some of the
issues that may have occurred in a town in Victoria, Australia.
I'm Joseph Gott Morgan, and this is body bags. I
(01:31):
love mushrooms, Dave, I love them. This is how I
love them. I love them generally button mushrooms. I like
to take them fresh ones. Now I don't like them
out of the can because they're too salty, and they've
got that funky color that's almost gray. It's not very appetizing.
But I like to take button mushrooms and sautee them
in butter, onions and garlic, and then once I have
(01:54):
them just right, and after I have grilled my rib
I steak, I like to take them and pour them
over the top of that steak and maybe have a
few on the side and enjoy that flavor, that robust
flavor with a grilled steak. I don't know that there's
anything better. Maybe a hamburger with salted mushrooms. But boy,
(02:15):
I'll tell you what. You bring out the mushrooms and
you really really make my mouth start. A matter of fact,
hang on, we'll get my handkerchief out right now. Kind
of my mouth is kind of watering.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah, you're kind of freaking me out. How deep you've
gone into this, Joe. I'm a little concerned. But the
story has gained worldwide attention for its simplicity and diabolical nature.
Here it is in a nutshell. Joe Aaron and Simon
Patterson have been married for several years, They've got two children. However,
the marriages are working out, Aaron and Simon split up. Aaron,
(02:49):
hoping for reconciliation, reaches out and invites Simon over for
a big lunch with Simon. She invites her exen laws
soon to be exend laws, Gail and Don Patterson. She
also invites Heather Wilkinson and Ian Wilkins. That would be Wilkinson,
that would be Simon's and uncle. Ian Wilkinson is a pastor.
He's a much beloved pastor. And I think Aaron, in
(03:12):
her mind's I was thinking his family will be in
favor of staying together from that generation, if you stay
together for the kids or whatever. But what she doesn't
know is that Simon's family doesn't trust her. They really
are a little weirded out by Aaron Patterson. So as
this lunch is going on, this lunch of beef wellington
and mushrooms prepared for by a mushroom connoisseur, somebody who
(03:33):
knows how to forge, meaning find mushrooms out in the field.
She knows the right stores to shop for the right mushrooms.
She actually prepares this beef wellington garnished with mushrooms for
her soon to be accent loss, thinking there will be
a reconciliation, but instead, Simon doesn't show up and the
family basically turns on her in her mind's eye, and
they are not in favor of the dude getting backed together.
(03:55):
What happens next is the reason this story has gone worldwide.
Of the five adults sitting in that table partaking of
beef wellington garnish with mushrooms, three of them end up
dead and one ends up in ICU waiting on a
liver transplant. Only one was able to walk away from
that table. That person was Aaron Patterson.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
I find it interesting that she would prepare a meal
for these individuals, and it was within a very short
period of tom that you've got these individuals who begin
to display gastro intestinal discomfort.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
They were straight up poisoned at lunch. That's what I'm
going to be honest with you. We could beat around
the bush all day long. But the reason I pointed
out that Simon wasn't there and that the family was
not in favor of them getting back together is Aaron
knew that when they got there, she immediately knew that
this was not going the way that she wanted. And
next thing, you know, beef wellington and mushrooms deserved and
everybody gets sick.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Well, let me ask you. Did Aaron get sick?
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Joe, I'm I'm glad you asked that. I feel like Colombo.
According to Aaron, she got sick and that she too
went to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
But here's the deal.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
You've got these four elderly people.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Oh and by the way, just let me interject this.
The pastor you mentioned, this guy's on the list for
a liver transplant, so he's like in dire straits.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Well you may as well go ahead and say it.
The other three are dead, Joe, They died, and this guy,
the pastor. The only reason he's alive is anybody. Ian
Wilkinson is alive by the grace of God. That's the
only way you can look. They all eat the same thing,
so they all get sick and die. Ian, as you mentioned,
liver transplanted. The guy's barely hanging on. And Aaron Wilkinson,
(05:46):
she's not on her deathbed, she's not in the hospital.
She claims she got sick, and there is a report
that she did go to the hospital. If you and
I go out to dinner tonight and you make meat mushrooms.
I could probably go to the hospital and take a
good sick I could go in and complain about my stomach,
and I could do all of that for at least
twelve hours they put me in. Just by complaining alone,
(06:07):
I can make myself throw up, tell them anything I
needed to tell them. So her being in the hospital
doesn't mean very much to me because she doesn't have
any of the other symptoms everybody else has.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Yeah, and most of the time, if there's a toxic
substance that everybody is ingesting and it's impacting this many people,
there's a high probability that if anyone ingested it, they're
going to be equally as sick. As a medical legal
(06:51):
death investigator, in forensics, one of the things that we
look for is kind of from an epidemiological standpoint. You
look for or rogens of diseases. You look for origins
of medical conditions and what brought that back, particularly when
you're thinking about, say, for instance, a major loss of
life event, or you're thinking about something that brings about
(07:14):
an illness. Just think about any kind of pandemic. But
here we have in almost a microcosm where you have
multiple people, three of which die, and you have an
additional individual that is now on life support with his
liver essentially destroyed. We approach this from a medical model
(07:37):
when we're investigating these kinds of cases. It's not like commonly,
when you begin to think about gunshot wound or stab
wound or bludgeoning, you can kind of trace that back
to a single instrument that is used. But it's not
so simple when you begin to think about something that
is so toxic and incompatible with life, you really have
(07:59):
to put your thinking cap on and begin to examine
what you have before you and trying to determine because
it's not necessarily going to just immediately present itself. You
can't look at a body and say, well, look, this
toxin is present.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Now.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
There are certain things that you can look for, particularly
like with heavy metal poisoning, for instance, you can see
changes in the body and the pallor and all those
sorts of things, nail beds and all those things that
we look for. But if you're talking about something perhaps
like a poison mushroom, that's going to take a bit
more time to understand. Because as many cases, as many
(08:35):
kinds of toxic events that emergency room personnel have to
deal with that walk through the door, and clinical personnel
from a treatment standpoint, long term treatment, they don't encounter
poison vegetation like this, and certainly not something as glaring
as a poison mushroom.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
When I think about, what would I know if I've
sit down to eat and you're describing how much you
love the mushroom and you sit down to eat, would
they taste different? Do poison mushrooms taste different than non
poisonous mushrooms?
Speaker 1 (09:07):
No, I mean, and listen, I think probably a discerning
person that is really into mushrooms. You think about somebody
that forages for mushrooms. There are different textures and my
family are big on chanterline mushrooms. They love them, they
cook with them, they wait for these seasons to come in,
and they all have different textures and many of them
(09:28):
will be described as being kind of light and others
will be described literally as being very beefy when you
eat them, And a lot of that has to do
with texture and flavor as well. So it's like anything
else in the world, whether it's a bottle of wine
or a cigar, everybody has different things that they like,
and mushrooms are no different. But for this particular species
(09:50):
that we're actually talking about with the mushroom, and just
so you know, from Jump Street, we know that something
is afoot because the authority is actually identified the mushroom
as a species that is referred to as the death
cap mushroom, and it's highly toxic. But here's the thing.
It has to be ingested in order for it to
(10:12):
do harm to you. So it's not what we refer
to as a transdermal thing. There are certain species of
plant life in the world in which we encounter that
when you touch it, it can be transdermal. You know,
you can absorb it through your skin. And keep in
mind a mushroom is not necessarily a plant like we
think of. It's actually a fungus that's growing out of
(10:34):
the earth like this, and the death cap mushroom actually
has kind of this very interwoven network beneath the surface
of the earth that it's growing through. So you'll have
multiple of these sprouts coming up, but it's very distinctive.
And this is the thing. The wife in this particular
case aaron. She's known as a forager, and so one
(10:55):
of the hallmarks or a really good forager from mushrooms
is that you understand species, You understand the way things look.
And I beg any of you within the sound of
my voice to go and actually take a look at
the different species of mushrooms out there, and each one
of them are very, very distinctive. And the most common
is the button mushroom. It's white. Sometimes they're referred to
(11:17):
as white mushrooms around kind of a bulbous head the
death cap mushroom, though, Dave, this should be your first warning.
The cap itself spreads out rather wide. Think of a
rather substantial miniature umbrella, okay, And it's the thickness of
it is not as thick as, say, for instance, relatively
speaking as a portobello or a button mushroom. The cap
(11:41):
on it is kind of thin. But here's the thing.
It has this luminescent green color. When you see it
that first off, it doesn't look appetizing at all. I
know you don't like mushrooms, and none of them look appetizing.
But if you come across something that's green other than
maybe a green apple granny smith are green grapes, you're
(12:02):
not necessarily going to grab it up and stick in
your mouth. Well, and for somebody that does this, even
as a hobbyist, they're going to look at this thing
and say, you know what, that's probably something that I
ought to stay away from. Or they're going to look
at it and say, oh my gosh, that's a death
cap mushroom. We not only do I need to stay
away from it, I need to warn everybody that might
(12:24):
be in my little group that goes out and forges
for mushrooms that there are death cap mushrooms here. We
need to stay away from them.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Here we are, at this time and place where you've
got a forager. She is an expert on these things.
She knows what she's doing when it comes to mushrooms.
We've got four people at a lunch that doesn't go
her way, and all the adults at the table are
sick except for Aaron the Patterson, the woman who prepared it.
Her ex husband. Well, I don't like calling somebody X
(12:51):
when they're only separated, but I don't think there's any
real chance they're going to get back together. But they
are currently not together. Simon has no interest and getting
back together with his wife Aaron. And yet now we
find out and this is something that investigators pulled out.
How did these people get sick? Did you feed them
these mushrooms? Well, they started looking back in history. Has
(13:12):
she done this before? Do we have any other people
getting sick when she cooks? Sure enough? May twenty twenty two,
a year and two months before her husband Simon ended
up in the hospital with very similar symptoms.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
And that's amazing, because, Dave, if this is in fact,
and let's face it, this is almost a serialized event
when you think about it. Poisoners in and of themselves
are interesting birds, to say the very least. First off,
they're very stealthy. And here's the thing. In order to
poison someone, and let's just she has not been convicted
(13:50):
of having poisoned anyone. Let me see, not even charged yet. Yeah,
let me just say that very plainly. But here's the
thing with these poisoning cases. You almost have to be
an intimate to be within the circle of an individual,
because why well, you have to get close enough to
them to apply whatever toxin it is that you're looking
(14:12):
to get into their system. And what's the most effective
way to do that. Well, ingestion is the quickest way
to do it, because once you uptake this thing and
it begins to metabolize in your system. You're going to
have this onset and this horrible onset of nausea. It'll
be accompanied by vomiting. There'll be terrible intestinal pain. If
you've ever had severe intestinal cramping. It leads to severe dehydration,
(14:37):
just an unquenchable thirst. It's a horrible way for these people.
The course is very horrible, and they if they can
survive beyond I don't know the first six hours or so.
Guess what happens. There's a phase two that this kicks
into relative to the poisoning, and you think that you're
(15:00):
out of the woods. This is a scary part. You
might be in the hospital. They've hung an ivy on you.
They're pushing the necessary medications into your system. There's almost
like this dormant phase where this toxin is coursing through
your system. It's not that it's necessarily gone into a
dormant state. It's now working at a cellular level and
(15:22):
it cannot be detected until it gets into phase three.
And you know what happens. Then your liver begins to
shut down and we think about the pastor right the
sixty six year old, and your kidneys begin to shut
down at that moment time. And look, man, if you
have renal failure, renal failure is that's one of the
leading causes of death at an end stage phase with people.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
What is it?
Speaker 2 (15:45):
What is renal fail.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Renal failure means literally that your kidneys have shut down
and they can no longer appropriately process waste in your body.
So everything, all these toxins begin to back up in
your body. And isn't it interesting? Also a liver begins
to fail, so you go into what's referred to as
hepatic failure, which is just a fancy term for the liver,
(16:07):
and the liver begins to shut down. The individuals actually
begin to present with yellow skin color, and of course
we know that means they're in a state of jauntice.
If you've never seen anybody with jauntice, it's striking. And
when you see them, even what were the whites of
their eyes become yellow at that time too, And so
(16:28):
they're in a total system failure at this point in time.
It's a horrific way to die.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
How is it possible, Joe, that four people seemingly similar health,
three die, one survives. I mean that the fact that
the sixty six year old pastor is still alive. Granted
he's on a liver transplant list and things are not
looking good for him, But is it always obviously is
not always fatal. What are some things that would make
(16:53):
a difference, do you think?
Speaker 1 (16:54):
I think probably within this is an excellent point day
when you look at this, you think about survivability. This
pastor that you mentioned, he is sixty six. The rest
of these poor victims, they're well north of sixty six.
He's the youngest one in the group. And let's face it,
as you age, your systems become weaker than they were
when you were younger.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Would it be possible that the chef, the person who
prepared the dish, that they could, in fact, being substantially younger,
eat some of it, have some moderate symptoms, but not deathly.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
No, I don't think that that's possible, because if you
ingested this thing, from my perspective, if you ingested this mushroom,
which is arguably the single most toxic mushroom in the world. Okay,
there are no degrees to it. Really, I'm going to
be very curious to find out when her husband had
(17:54):
complained of this illness several months prior to this fatal
event that occurred at their home or at their former
family home there where they were getting together. I'd like
to know the symptomology that he went through and kind
of the progress now people can survive this. What's really
horrific about this kind of circumstance is that if she did,
(18:16):
in fact poison this group of people, she really took
a shotgun approach. She was indiscriminate, Dave. She blasted them
essentially with this toxic substance, and she really didn't care
who died. Maybe she viewed everybody in the room as
an enemy. Maybe she said, well, I'm going after the
one target, and if other people die as a result
(18:38):
of it, so bit. But she certainly didn't die. She
still survived.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
She's lived to tell the tale.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
I love history, I do unashamedly. I think probably one
of our most successful episodes that we had was probably
the examination that we did of Julius Caesar's autopsy.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Oh my goodness, that was crazy.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Well, let me throw another couple of names at you.
Emperor Claudius was a Roman empire, and in addition to
Emperor Claudius, Charles the six, who was one of the
holy Roman emperors. Take a while, guess what both of
these cats had in common.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Death by poison.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah, and not just poisoning, but death cap mushroom poisoning.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Oh, I thought you were messing with me.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
No, honest to God's truth. And Voltaire actually wrote about
Charles the sixth death as a result of ingesting death
cap mushroom. And it may have not have been a
homicidal poisoning, but he was on a hunting trip and
he ingested these. Claudius was in fact poisoned, lethally poisoned,
(20:04):
and common history and I think a lot of these
scholars concur that it was probably a death cap mushroom.
And these mushrooms have been known for years and years,
and they actually they were initially found in Europe, That's
where they kind of spring from. And I find it
it's fascinating to me the way these things travel across
the world, because you know the case of these poor
(20:27):
people down in Australia, I don't know that this species
of mushroom existed prior to that land down there being
inhabited by Europeans. And they can also be found in
North America as well. And again, what do we have
in common with that? Well, the first settlers of North
America were European, so it's and you know, over a
(20:49):
period of time, certainly these species will kind of evolve
within their environment. It might turn into a different species,
or it might vary slightly from say the European The
one thing that they do have in common is that
their level of toxicity and kind of what you're seeing
with them when they present at autopsy and certainly in
(21:10):
the clinical phase when you're doing an examination of the
records leading up to their death.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Let me ask you about autopsy. You mentioned that what
did it show up in an autopsy that it was
a death cab mushroom poison or would it just be
vague in that while they died from some poison, I mean,
is there a way to tell?
Speaker 1 (21:31):
This is one of the really cool things about a
case involving something that is ingested, like a fungus like this,
which a mushroom is, or some type of plant life
that we might see. One of the things that we
do at autopsy, Dave, and I don't know that many
people really think about this. When not only draw blood,
we draw urine and bile and vitreous fluid. We examine
(21:54):
the organs and take samples of those. One of the
tasks that you have to do at autopsy is during
the dissection. Just imagine the shape of a stomach. Okay.
You have the long tube that comes down the esophagus,
and you take a piece of string, okay, and you
(22:14):
make an incision beneath the esophagus where it attaches on
adjacent to where like the aord is and running down
the spine okay, and you tie that piece of string
off so that you've essentially tied off the top end
of the esophagus where it dumps into the stomach, or
(22:34):
the lower end of the esophagus, forgive me where it
dumps into the stomach. And then you cut, you transsect
across that where with a pair of scissors. Then you
go beneath the stomach where it dumps into the small intestine.
And here's the other part. You take a piece of
string and you tie off that bit that dumps in
(22:55):
to actually the small intestine, and you clip below that
so that when you pull up the stomach you have
a completely in cased sack. It's the stomach removed from
the body and that's the way we examine it. And
we'll take that entire stomach before we examine the contents,
and we'll put it in a scale, and the scales.
(23:15):
If you've ever been to the grocery store and been
to the produce section, that's what the scales look like
in the morgue, No more, no less, that's exactly what
they look like. We measure everything in gram, so we
would get a weight for the stomach where the contents therein.
We then go over to a sink that we have
in the morgue and we carefully hold the stomach above
(23:37):
a container in the sink and we gently opened up
the stomach by incision, and everything that's contained within that
stomach dumps into that container. Now, I know this is
horribly grotesque for people to listen to, but this is
part of medical legal debt investigation because once we have
all of those remnant that harshly digested food stuffs that
(24:03):
are in stomach, we can take that container and walk
over to the autopsy table, put it up on our
dissecting board, and very very carefully go through it and
we will literally try to identify every type of substance
that's contained within that gastric content. We'll also get a
fluid measurement on it too. We'll talk about how many
(24:25):
c ses of content for instance, you know, like a
c C is an increment of measurement that we do
injections with in a clinical standpoint, but we measure out
in ccs the amount that's contained in the stomach. And
we'll actually talk about color because you know, sometimes it'll
be green the contents of the stomach. It will be green,
it will be a bage. Sometimes you'll see reds. And
(24:46):
you can actually identify food stuffs within the stomach. I'll
give you for an example. The most identifiable food in
the human stomach that you can come across are actually
hot dogs because they're in a case, whether it's a
naturally occurring caseing or synthetic casing, and most people don't
chew them up very well, and you can look at
it and say, oh my gosh, that's a hot dog,
(25:08):
and easily easy to spot. Any kind of leafy green
vegetable matter like salads, most of that stuff's easily appreciable.
So with a mushroom, it's kind of spongy, right, so
as it would be chewed all right, you would still
see a remnant of that. Perhaps if you were keen
(25:29):
on this, you would hone in on something that resembles
a mushroom that's in there. And I say this because
this goes back to the investigation that the police would
have been conducting concurrently with the local corner. Because down
in Australia they actually still have a corner system. So
when they get together before the autopsy, if there's a
(25:51):
suspicion on the part of the investigators the police that
is death cap mushrooms have been used, then the corner
would begin to look at this at au time and
they would save every bit of the stomach content day.
They would put it in little clear plastic vials that
have a screw on cap and they would set it aside,
keep it in the refrigerator, keep it cool, and then
(26:12):
they would take a sample of this and they would
send it off. They would send it off to the
crime lab and it would be examined there. It would
be examined in the crime lab. Now you would have
to have somebody at the crime lab that can look
at stomach contents like this, and first off, they would
look at it from a taxonomy standpoint where they're identifying
what type of matter this is. Is it of some
(26:36):
type of non animal matter that has been ingested, So
it might be a fungus like a mushroom, or it
could be a leafy vegetable like a lettuce or whatever
it is. You think about the components contained within this
beef wellington dish, which mushrooms are actually a component of.
You think about a baked good, because beef wellington actually
(26:57):
has a crust on it, it's rolled up, and there's
beef contained in there obviously, and other vegetable matter, and
so you would be looking at this mishmash of stuff
that's in there. So you have to be very very
careful and once you've identified that mushroom, because heat is
not going to change it. So if this mushroom was
baked in, okay, that mushroom is not going to be
(27:19):
baked down to the point in a kitchen where it
would be unrecognizable from a microscopic standpoint. And if you
need further help, for instance, in a case like this,
I would suspect that a sample of this mushroom, and
this happens here in the US relative to the Smithsonian,
they would send a sample of this off to the
(27:40):
National Museum perhaps or to an organization that deals with
toxic plants, and there will be specialists on staff that
will specifically identify this, and if this case does go
to trial, they'll have these individuals testify.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
By it amazing that you can find all of that
out at an autopsy, and it makes sense that they
would be. There would be a lot of undigested stuff
in there. The people got sick right away, So even
if they are getting rid of the content, I mean
through expulsion, through vomiting and diarrhea and everything else, there
would still be enough left to determine what actually caused this.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Yeah, there would be. And keep in mind, and I
don't want to really discuss people with this, but you
have to understand one of the presentations with this toxic
event is gastrointestinal discomfort. Okay, so let's just kind of
take this stage by stage. Once it's ingested, this toxin
goes into the system. Now, how does it go through
(28:37):
into the system. Well, it's in the stomach first, It's
passed through the sophocause it's sitting in the stomach. Just
because we ingest something doesn't mean it just merely pauses
in the stomach and then goes into the small intestine
where absorption takes place and all this sort of stuff.
At that point, you still have absorption that's going on
in the stomach. With the triggering mechanism of this toxic event.
(28:58):
You have people that dive nausea. They can vomit, but
they'll also develop things like diarrhea. So you might have
it coming out of both ends, as they say, but
there would still be a remnant enough of this. And
here's another piece to this that's kind of fascinating. When
you have a toxic substance like this, it's not just
(29:20):
what has been ingested into the system through absorption through
the stomach and the small intestine and that sort of thing.
One of the other things that you look for is
that many times with a toxic substance, it will begin
to cause changes in the lining of the stomach perhaps,
(29:41):
and those changes that you see are associated and microscopically
they can be identified as being associated with certain types
of toxins. Okay, you might look at it and it
might look red and irritated, for instance, or inflamed, but
microscopically those changes sometimes can be very specific to specific
types of toxin. So once that stomach is removed, like
(30:03):
we were talking about just a second ago, you would
trim out part of that stomach itself and you would
preserve it and the physicians would take it and fix
it onto a slot. And part of that is I
guess you could refer to it as forensic histology. It's
really just histology, which is the study of tissues. So
then that's one of the things that pathologists do. Those
(30:25):
samples that we take from all of the organs in
the body. They would examine that microscopically over a period
of time and document those changes and they can testify
to that on stand Dave. Because forensic pathologists are pathologists
as well, and so they're experts in the area of
histology studying tissue, you know, because like things that come
(30:45):
out of surgery, if somebody has a gangrenous limb or
or cancers and all these things that are removed, pathologists
takes a look at all that stuff. So they're keen
on different types of tissues, and so that would be
examined as well. So you've got a myriad of things
that come into play here, and we haven't even mentioned
all of these people will have had some kind of
(31:06):
liver failure as well, and that can be demonstrated. And
it's very powerful when you think about it, because if
this thing were to go to trial, the pathologist could
actually put up several slides of what healthy liver looks like,
and then they take a slide and they show what
a damaged liver looks like from an acute poison event.
(31:27):
And it's going to be striking and they will literally
on the stand given an anatomy lesson, and it can
be very powerful.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
We probably want to be very clear that she has
not Aaron Patterson has not been charged. She has been
mentioned as somebody they're interested in based on how these
deaths occurred. Three out of the four dying, one still
in the hospital. But police they're playing this as they
get everything together. The one thing that you and I
both noticed, Joe, is the amount of Q and A
(31:55):
you and I have gotten privately away from here of
people asking about this particular case and poisoning. Is it
because using something we eat as a weapon, I mean
using a gun a knife that you know, you've got
a big deal there. You're talking about something that people eat.
When we began the program today, you were salivating talking
(32:16):
about mushrooms. Is that the fascinating part. You think that
people are going man something in my backyard. In this case,
the death cap mushroom could actually be used as a weapon.
And the bigger question, could they prosecutors, if they decided
to move forward with this, could they go back and
look at her husband Simon from fourteen months ago when
(32:37):
he was in the hospital in intensive care for twenty
one days with gastrointestinal problems. He had three surgeries while
he was in there. Could they go back and pull
slides from the different things that they were doing with
him and determined at this late date that he himself
was poisoned?
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, I think that they probably could. They've certainly for
any of my listeners that have ever been in the hospital,
think about all the times when you were in hospital
at night and that nurse comes in your room and
wakes you up. Hospital is not the place to go
for rest, right, Well, every time a nurse comes into
your room, they go back out to their desk and
they chart, they chart, they chart, they chart. Everything that
(33:14):
they do to you is written down, and God bless nurses.
I think that they are the unsung heroes in our society.
That's one of the things that they do. They not
only treat their patients that they're charged to care for,
but they chart and document it all along. And so
that's a long course for him to have been in
the hospital. And if he has undergone these surgeries, like
you had mentioned, these multiple surgeries, if anything had been
(33:38):
removed from his body at that point in time, Yeah,
I think that there's a high probability that they will
find perhaps some type of changes, tissue changes in his system,
particularly as the scene kind of metabolizes through that talks
and metabolizes through his body. And also if there are
(34:00):
any biological samples like blood that's left behind. They've had
enough time now perhaps that if they are thinking rethinking
the course of treatment, they're going to go back and
they're going to take a look at everything he has.
And here's the thing, Dave, if they're looking for death
cap mushroom toxicity for him, do you think for two
(34:21):
seconds he's going to say, no, you guys can't look
at my medical records. No, that's not what's going to happen.
He's going to say, here, where do I sign the release?
Now he's part of a death investigation, and that his
course of treatment is part of that. So they can
go back and begin to take a look at it.
They'll take a look at how he initially presented. They're
going to look at his history. Have you ever had
(34:42):
an event that occurs like this, that is even in
the more distant past, and people that were around him
at the time that this occurred, who had access to him,
if this was in fact a toxic event, who had
access to, say, his food supply at that moment in time,
And the police are going to look at every bit
of that period. And here's another thing. I would also
(35:04):
think that if there are any other cases out there
that might have geographic proximity to any of these events
that might share commonalities, you can bet your bottom dollar,
particularly if they're unsolved or unresolved clinically, they the police,
the prosecutor down there, they're going to take a long,
(35:25):
hard look at those cases too, Because Dave, this is
not something that happens every day. All right, It's going
to stand out like a sore thumb. But you know
that brings us back to where we started in this case.
You think about a medical model of investigation, and doctors
and nurses and healthcare workers yet they are clinicians there
to take care of us. But you know what else, Dave,
(35:48):
they're investigators. Everything they do, every place that they go
with a patient, every bit of treatment that they administer
to a patient is problem solving. And that's all investigations is.
It's problem solving. It's like a big puzzle. They're going
to be putting these pieces together. Let's wait and see
what happens with this case, because I for one, I'm
(36:08):
going to be fascinated to see what the end result
is and to see if this actually did result from
the weaponization of a musherer. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and
this is bodybags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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