2023-08-09 06:30:02
SYDNEY (AP) — Australian police were trying to determine how three people died and a fourth became critically ill following apparently eating wild mushrooms at a family meal.
Homicide detectives were investigating the case. Police have interviewed the woman who they say prepared a meal at her home on July 29 but she did not become ill. The police released her without charging her, although she indicated that she remained a suspect.
Speaking to the media outside her home in the town of Leongatha, Victoria state, the woman said she did not know what had happened.
“I didn’t do anything,” he told Network Nine on Monday. “I loved them and I am devastated that they are gone.”
The woman declined to answer questions regarding which meals had been served to which guests or the origin of the mushrooms.
Victoria Police Detective Inspector Dean Thomas said it was unclear what type of mushroom the guests had eaten, but the symptoms were consistent with an amanita phalloides, an especially deadly variety.
He noted that it would take a while to determine what happened, and that police were keeping an open mind.
“It might be very innocent but then once more, we just don’t know,” Thomas said.
The woman had welcomed her in-laws, Gail and Don Patterson, both in their 70s, into the home. Both died in area hospitals. Also at the meal were Gail Patterson’s sister Heather Wilkinson, 66, who died, and her husband Ian Wilkinson, 68, a Baptist pastor who remained hospitalized this week in critical condition.
Thomas said the woman who prepared the meal was estranged from her husband, though police had heard the relationship was cordial. The woman’s children were also in the house during the meal, but they did not eat the same thing, according to police.
Detectives searched the woman’s home Saturday and took several items. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, police were also carrying out forensic tests on a food dehydrator found at a nearby dump to see if it was related to the case.
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