July 14, 2025 • 14 mins
While we wait for further developments in the case of Erin Patterson, we bring you an episode of our sister show, Life and Crimes. In it, host Andrew Rule delves into women who poison.
The Mushroom Cook team is Brooke Grebert-Craig, Laura Placella, Anthony Dowsley, Jordy Atkinson and Jonty Burton.
The Mushroom Cook is a Herald Sun production for True Crime Australia.
Go to themushroomcook.com.au for news, features, previous episodes and more
Subscribers get our bonus Sunday shows with crime reporter Anthony Dowsley. CrimeX subscribers: find this episode in your podcast feed
Subscribers to the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, Courier Mail, Adelaide Advertiser or News regional titles can listen through the App.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
High listeners. This is Brook Grubert Craig from the Mushroom Cook.
While we wait for further developments in the case of
Aaron Patterson, we thought would bring you an episode of
our sister show, Life and Crimes. In it, host Andrew
Rule delves into women who poison and if you want
true crime stories, search Life and Crimes wherever you get your.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Podcasts Andrew Rule. This is Life and Crimes today. We
come to you from a village in Wales, so if
the sound quality is not great, I apologize in advance.
The reason we're doing this is because I happen to
be in the UK at the same time that the
(00:44):
murder verdict came down in the Aaron Patterson Mushroom case,
and I have to say it is amazing how big
that story is in the UK. The BBC World News
coverage has carried the Eron Patterson trial faithfully most days,
and when the verdict came down earlier this week, the
(01:09):
BBC and other news services carried the story either at
the top of the bulletin or very close to it.
It's quite an amazingly thorough coverage and they're throwing to
their reporters in mar Will which they describe as a
small town in Victoria and give their viewers the full treatment.
(01:29):
And people here are very familiar with the case. It's
so pervasive here that it's even affected the way that
news magazines have selected stories. And last weekend, when the
jury retired to consider its verdict in the Patterson case,
obviously the guilty verdict, the Sunday Times magazine here ran
(01:52):
a massive magazine piece, not about the Mushroom case, but
about other cases in history women have poisoned men, and
they selected as the main example a story from one
hundred years ago in a Hungarian town where a group
of women got their heads together and decided that their
(02:14):
husbands were violent, drunken lunatics, which some of them obviously were,
and under the guidance of a local midwife who knew
a lot about poisons, they cooked up arsenic poisons by
boiling up flypaper paper that is made up for poison
flies and insects. It was made up in those days
(02:37):
using arsenic and US think it was a very common
item in household products that they'd use it for poisoning rats.
It was also used in some tonics for livestock. It
was relatively easy to get and the fly paper trick
was one that was used in Hungary and also by
poisoners in England and elsewhere. They popped the fly light
(03:00):
paper in boiling water for a certain time and then
strain it off, and the resulting mixture was heavy in
arsenic and they could use it to lace the target
victims their tea or their coffee, or their whisky or
wine or whatever it might be. And this group of women,
led by this midwife, over the span of eighteen years
(03:24):
from nineteen eleven until nineteen twenty nine, they killed at
least one hundred men, but the real figures might have
been higher. Of course, it was a time when post
mortems were not routine and probably not that accurate, and
so there were a lot of unexplained deaths that were
probably put down to heart attacks or whatever that went
(03:46):
unnoted at the time. But the real number of victims
in that eighteen year period might have been approaching more
like three hundred, and so we have here somewhat of
a history of poison of men by women who thought
it was the easiest way to get rid of the
men in their life that were causing trouble. And this
(04:09):
was something that was reasonably well known in England back
in the Victorian era, when there was a space of
poisonings from eighteen sixties onwards, often using that same flypaper
method of getting hold of arsenic or using rat poison
that was based on arsenic or other poisons that were
(04:31):
available on farms and households and refining them to get
the arsenic so they could poison people. None of them, interestingly,
seemed to be using death cap mushrooms. Obviously, the effect
of death cap mushrooms was known to people for centuries
that people would avoid eating them by trial and error,
(04:52):
animals and birds and everything else that fairly careful with
what's poison and what's not, and people, especially in the
country area, knew from a very young age which things
were edible and which weren't. But it's interesting that death
cap mushrooms don't come up a lot in the literature
(05:12):
of poisoning in the way that arsenic does. Interestingly, one
of the big poisoning cases in Victoria back home in
Victoria also involved arsenalk. Now this was the case that
some of our listeners will recall vaguely, and that's the
case of Lorraine Moss. The Bendigo housewife who back in
the eighties decided to poison her husband, Johnny. His real
(05:37):
name was Leonard Moss. He was known by everyone as Johnny,
popular figure at the local abatars where he worked. He
was a meat worker, a good guy apparently. I think
they had two or three daughters. They lived, you know,
quiet life in suburban Bendigo. But Lorraine Moss decided that
she no longer wanted to be with her husband john
(06:01):
but she didn't want to actually go through the routine
of divorceal things like that. She had started an affair
with one of his workmates, a guy called Robert White,
and her way out of this tricky domestic situation was
to get hold of some poison that was used. I
think this poison might have been used at the meatworks
(06:22):
to kill rats or things like that. But anyway, she
was able to get hold of the poison fairly easily,
and she started to lace her husband's sandwiches for his
lunch with the poison instead of making his own sandwiches,
which would have been wise. She had the habit of
making them, and she would sprinkle this powder in the sandwiches,
(06:47):
and it was noticeable that Johnny Moss got sicker and sicker.
This is in about eighty two eighty three, And in fact,
one day he felt sick and he didn't want to
eat his lunch. A couple of his mates had his
lunch instead, and they got very sick. In fact, one
of them was so sick that he couldn't work for months.
This is how potent this poison was. And Johnny Moss
(07:11):
would get very sick, and then he would be taken
to hospital, and Moss would make a great show of
being the concerned wife and all the rest of it.
And when he was in the hospital he would recover.
He would get hospital food and hospital care, and she
wasn't supplying the food anymore to him, and he would
gradually get better, and he'd come home and he go
(07:33):
back to work, only to sick him again, because of
course she would start poisoning his food again. Now this
went on for I think I said eighteen months, and
he died in early nineteen eighty four. John Moss's death
should have really sparked a searching inquest that would have
(07:54):
pointed to suspicious circumstances and pointed to Lorraine Moss's complicity.
But a strange thing happened. Lorrain Moss, not a terribly
intelligent woman, got very lucky for a while. It turned
out that there was a report made up about the
poisoning of Johnny Moss at the Austin Hospital. He'd been
(08:17):
sent down there and they'd done some tests and a
report was completed by the doctors and other medicas which
indicated that he'd been poisoned with arsening. Now, that report,
had it been produced at his inquest, would have pointed
squarely to Lorraine Moss poisoning her husband, and it would
(08:39):
have led to charges, and she would have been prosecuted
for murder or manslaughter at least homicide back then, back
when it all happened in the early eighties. But that
didn't happen simply because that report got lost, and in
the absence of the report, a very kindly coroner, a
coroner took it upon himself to say there was no
(09:01):
evidence that Lorraine Moss had poisoned her husband, despite the
fact that he clearly had been poisoned by something. And
so she got away with it, and she in fact.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Married her lover, Bob White or Robert White, and they
lived happily or unhappily in Bendigo forever after until about
twenty years later, Lorraine Moss did a silly thing.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Lorraine, for some strange reason, had it in her head.
She had this notion that once twenty years had gone past,
or something like twenty years a gone past, that she'd
be home clear that she couldn't be prosecuted. And she
must have been thinking about this because she brought it
up with one of her daughters. Lorraine Moss was talking
(09:54):
to her, I think her oldest girl, and said something
strange about, well, at least at this stage, I can't
be prosecuted over your father, or words to that effect,
and the daughter said, what do you mean. She said
enough to the daughter to suggest that she had had
something to do with poisoning the girl's father, Johnny Moss,
(10:18):
and the daughter took this in and understood what she said,
and she went to the police because she loved her father,
as did her sister, and she was shocked and horrified.
She might also have had her own suspicions because of
her mother's relationship with this guy.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
White that she married.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
So the daughter goes to the police, and the police
put her in touch with the homicide squad and the
homicide squad say, we want you to talk to your
mother about this, and they wired her for sound and
she spoke to her mother about the death of her father,
Johnny Moss, and the mother, Lorraine Moss, said enough to
(11:00):
her that was taped to essentially implicate her in murder,
and that was what led the homicide squad to charge
Lorraine Moss with the murder of her husband, Johnny Moss
all those years before. And I think we've visited this
story at least once in our time doing Life and Crimes,
(11:25):
and we'd be remiss not to point out that when
the homicide squad would visit Lorraine Moss to interview her,
which they did on more than one occasion, she would
always offer them a cup of tea, but those very
wise detectives would always decline it. They didn't want to
(11:48):
be poisoned as well. Regular listeners of Life and Crimes
will know that we have visited this topic in the past,
and that there are several women in Victoria who have
murdered their husbands and some have got away with it
and some haven't. But those who are interested in this
(12:09):
topic might revisit the episode where we talked about the
murders of a man called Utley, a man called Osland
again at Bendigo, and a third case which was out
near Paculum, where no one was convicted because the young
daughter of the woman who was the chief suspect put
(12:34):
her hand up late in the piece and said I'd
done it, I killed my dad, and that threw the
prosecution into a confusion and ultimately no one was convicted.
That's the case of Diane Griffy. Diane Griffy was the
wife involved there and in the other cases we had
(12:54):
Heather Osland and Margaret Utley, and those stories are well
worth looking up if anyone's interested in the ongoing topic
of women who kill. And that's Andrew Rule signing off
in the village of Pinelli in Pembrokeshire in Wales on assignment,
(13:17):
but always keeping an eye open for a story for
Life and Crimes.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald
Sun production for True Crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton.
For my columns, features and more, go to Heraldsun dot
com dot au forward slash Andrew Rule one word For
advertising inquiries, go to News Podcasts sold at news dot
(13:47):
com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts sold.
And if you want further information about this episode, links
are in. The description is.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Coported, perfected Can I Go
High listeners. This is Brook Grubert Craig from the Mushroom Cook.
While we wait for further developments in the case of
Aaron Patterson, we thought would bring you an episode of
our sister show, Life and Crimes. In it, host Andrew
Rule delves into women who poison and if you want
true crime stories, search Life and Crimes wherever you get your.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Podcasts Andrew Rule. This is Life and Crimes today. We
come to you from a village in Wales, so if
the sound quality is not great, I apologize in advance.
The reason we're doing this is because I happen to
be in the UK at the same time that the
(00:44):
murder verdict came down in the Aaron Patterson Mushroom case,
and I have to say it is amazing how big
that story is in the UK. The BBC World News
coverage has carried the Eron Patterson trial faithfully most days,
and when the verdict came down earlier this week, the
(01:09):
BBC and other news services carried the story either at
the top of the bulletin or very close to it.
It's quite an amazingly thorough coverage and they're throwing to
their reporters in mar Will which they describe as a
small town in Victoria and give their viewers the full treatment.
(01:29):
And people here are very familiar with the case. It's
so pervasive here that it's even affected the way that
news magazines have selected stories. And last weekend, when the
jury retired to consider its verdict in the Patterson case,
obviously the guilty verdict, the Sunday Times magazine here ran
(01:52):
a massive magazine piece, not about the Mushroom case, but
about other cases in history women have poisoned men, and
they selected as the main example a story from one
hundred years ago in a Hungarian town where a group
of women got their heads together and decided that their
(02:14):
husbands were violent, drunken lunatics, which some of them obviously were,
and under the guidance of a local midwife who knew
a lot about poisons, they cooked up arsenic poisons by
boiling up flypaper paper that is made up for poison
flies and insects. It was made up in those days
(02:37):
using arsenic and US think it was a very common
item in household products that they'd use it for poisoning rats.
It was also used in some tonics for livestock. It
was relatively easy to get and the fly paper trick
was one that was used in Hungary and also by
poisoners in England and elsewhere. They popped the fly light
(03:00):
paper in boiling water for a certain time and then
strain it off, and the resulting mixture was heavy in
arsenic and they could use it to lace the target
victims their tea or their coffee, or their whisky or
wine or whatever it might be. And this group of women,
led by this midwife, over the span of eighteen years
(03:24):
from nineteen eleven until nineteen twenty nine, they killed at
least one hundred men, but the real figures might have
been higher. Of course, it was a time when post
mortems were not routine and probably not that accurate, and
so there were a lot of unexplained deaths that were
probably put down to heart attacks or whatever that went
(03:46):
unnoted at the time. But the real number of victims
in that eighteen year period might have been approaching more
like three hundred, and so we have here somewhat of
a history of poison of men by women who thought
it was the easiest way to get rid of the
men in their life that were causing trouble. And this
(04:09):
was something that was reasonably well known in England back
in the Victorian era, when there was a space of
poisonings from eighteen sixties onwards, often using that same flypaper
method of getting hold of arsenic or using rat poison
that was based on arsenic or other poisons that were
(04:31):
available on farms and households and refining them to get
the arsenic so they could poison people. None of them, interestingly,
seemed to be using death cap mushrooms. Obviously, the effect
of death cap mushrooms was known to people for centuries
that people would avoid eating them by trial and error,
(04:52):
animals and birds and everything else that fairly careful with
what's poison and what's not, and people, especially in the
country area, knew from a very young age which things
were edible and which weren't. But it's interesting that death
cap mushrooms don't come up a lot in the literature
(05:12):
of poisoning in the way that arsenic does. Interestingly, one
of the big poisoning cases in Victoria back home in
Victoria also involved arsenalk. Now this was the case that
some of our listeners will recall vaguely, and that's the
case of Lorraine Moss. The Bendigo housewife who back in
the eighties decided to poison her husband, Johnny. His real
(05:37):
name was Leonard Moss. He was known by everyone as Johnny,
popular figure at the local abatars where he worked. He
was a meat worker, a good guy apparently. I think
they had two or three daughters. They lived, you know,
quiet life in suburban Bendigo. But Lorraine Moss decided that
she no longer wanted to be with her husband john
(06:01):
but she didn't want to actually go through the routine
of divorceal things like that. She had started an affair
with one of his workmates, a guy called Robert White,
and her way out of this tricky domestic situation was
to get hold of some poison that was used. I
think this poison might have been used at the meatworks
(06:22):
to kill rats or things like that. But anyway, she
was able to get hold of the poison fairly easily,
and she started to lace her husband's sandwiches for his
lunch with the poison instead of making his own sandwiches,
which would have been wise. She had the habit of
making them, and she would sprinkle this powder in the sandwiches,
(06:47):
and it was noticeable that Johnny Moss got sicker and sicker.
This is in about eighty two eighty three, And in fact,
one day he felt sick and he didn't want to
eat his lunch. A couple of his mates had his
lunch instead, and they got very sick. In fact, one
of them was so sick that he couldn't work for months.
This is how potent this poison was. And Johnny Moss
(07:11):
would get very sick, and then he would be taken
to hospital, and Moss would make a great show of
being the concerned wife and all the rest of it.
And when he was in the hospital he would recover.
He would get hospital food and hospital care, and she
wasn't supplying the food anymore to him, and he would
gradually get better, and he'd come home and he go
(07:33):
back to work, only to sick him again, because of
course she would start poisoning his food again. Now this
went on for I think I said eighteen months, and
he died in early nineteen eighty four. John Moss's death
should have really sparked a searching inquest that would have
(07:54):
pointed to suspicious circumstances and pointed to Lorraine Moss's complicity.
But a strange thing happened. Lorrain Moss, not a terribly
intelligent woman, got very lucky for a while. It turned
out that there was a report made up about the
poisoning of Johnny Moss at the Austin Hospital. He'd been
(08:17):
sent down there and they'd done some tests and a
report was completed by the doctors and other medicas which
indicated that he'd been poisoned with arsening. Now, that report,
had it been produced at his inquest, would have pointed
squarely to Lorraine Moss poisoning her husband, and it would
(08:39):
have led to charges, and she would have been prosecuted
for murder or manslaughter at least homicide back then, back
when it all happened in the early eighties. But that
didn't happen simply because that report got lost, and in
the absence of the report, a very kindly coroner, a
coroner took it upon himself to say there was no
(09:01):
evidence that Lorraine Moss had poisoned her husband, despite the
fact that he clearly had been poisoned by something. And
so she got away with it, and she in fact.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Married her lover, Bob White or Robert White, and they
lived happily or unhappily in Bendigo forever after until about
twenty years later, Lorraine Moss did a silly thing.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Lorraine, for some strange reason, had it in her head.
She had this notion that once twenty years had gone past,
or something like twenty years a gone past, that she'd
be home clear that she couldn't be prosecuted. And she
must have been thinking about this because she brought it
up with one of her daughters. Lorraine Moss was talking
(09:54):
to her, I think her oldest girl, and said something
strange about, well, at least at this stage, I can't
be prosecuted over your father, or words to that effect,
and the daughter said, what do you mean. She said
enough to the daughter to suggest that she had had
something to do with poisoning the girl's father, Johnny Moss,
(10:18):
and the daughter took this in and understood what she said,
and she went to the police because she loved her father,
as did her sister, and she was shocked and horrified.
She might also have had her own suspicions because of
her mother's relationship with this guy.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
White that she married.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
So the daughter goes to the police, and the police
put her in touch with the homicide squad and the
homicide squad say, we want you to talk to your
mother about this, and they wired her for sound and
she spoke to her mother about the death of her father,
Johnny Moss, and the mother, Lorraine Moss, said enough to
(11:00):
her that was taped to essentially implicate her in murder,
and that was what led the homicide squad to charge
Lorraine Moss with the murder of her husband, Johnny Moss
all those years before. And I think we've visited this
story at least once in our time doing Life and Crimes,
(11:25):
and we'd be remiss not to point out that when
the homicide squad would visit Lorraine Moss to interview her,
which they did on more than one occasion, she would
always offer them a cup of tea, but those very
wise detectives would always decline it. They didn't want to
(11:48):
be poisoned as well. Regular listeners of Life and Crimes
will know that we have visited this topic in the past,
and that there are several women in Victoria who have
murdered their husbands and some have got away with it
and some haven't. But those who are interested in this
(12:09):
topic might revisit the episode where we talked about the
murders of a man called Utley, a man called Osland
again at Bendigo, and a third case which was out
near Paculum, where no one was convicted because the young
daughter of the woman who was the chief suspect put
(12:34):
her hand up late in the piece and said I'd
done it, I killed my dad, and that threw the
prosecution into a confusion and ultimately no one was convicted.
That's the case of Diane Griffy. Diane Griffy was the
wife involved there and in the other cases we had
(12:54):
Heather Osland and Margaret Utley, and those stories are well
worth looking up if anyone's interested in the ongoing topic
of women who kill. And that's Andrew Rule signing off
in the village of Pinelli in Pembrokeshire in Wales on assignment,
(13:17):
but always keeping an eye open for a story for
Life and Crimes.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald
Sun production for True Crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton.
For my columns, features and more, go to Heraldsun dot
com dot au forward slash Andrew Rule one word For
advertising inquiries, go to News Podcasts sold at news dot
(13:47):
com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts sold.
And if you want further information about this episode, links
are in. The description is.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Coported, perfected Can I Go
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