Australian woman Erin Patterson was on Monday found guilty of murdering three of her estranged husband’s relatives by deliberately serving them poisonous mushrooms for lunch.

The jury in the Supreme Court trial in Victoria state returned a verdict after six days of deliberations, following a nine-week trial that gripped Australia. Patterson faces life in prison and will be sentenced at a later date.

Patterson, who sat in the dock between two prison officers, showed no emotion but blinked rapidly as the verdicts were read.

Three of Patterson’s four lunch guests – her in-laws Don and Gail Patterson and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson – died in hospital after the 2023 meal at her home in Leongatha, at which she served individual beef Wellington pastries containing death cap mushrooms.

She was also found guilty of attempting to murder Ian Wilkinson, Heather’s husband, who survived the meal.

It wasn’t disputed that Patterson served the mushrooms or that the pastries killed her guests. The jury was required to decide whether she knew the lunch contained death caps, and if she intended for them to die.

The guilty verdicts, which were required to be unanimous, indicated that jurors rejected Patterson’s defence that the presence of the poisonous fungi in the meal was a terrible accident, caused by the mistaken inclusion of foraged mushrooms that she didn’t know were death caps.

Prosecutors didn’t offer a motive for the killings, but during the trial highlighted strained relations between Patterson and her estranged husband, and frustration that she had felt about his parents in the past. (AP)