The terrifying convergence of beef Wellington, Midsomer Murders, X-Files, and that one time John Nettles liked my Tweet.
It's a real stretch, believe me.
There are only two glorious moments that I remember back on my old Twitter account: getting a like from British actor John Nettles, when I said that I only watch Midsomer Murders episodes that he was in, and when Kenny Rogers liked a tweet that said the lyrics to his song “The Gambler” had all the life advice you needed.
Kenny Rogers is not part of today’s story, nor is John Nettles, really, all of which inelegantly brings me to the recent beef Wellington murders that happened Down Under, mixed in with other bizarre conclusions that will leave you confused.
Beef Wellington, incidentally, is the only non-chicken food I ate while on a cruise, and I only did so because the rest of the table joked about how they could predict my order. Frustrated that they’d caught onto my life hack of always ordering chicken, I randomly chose beef Wellington with no idea what it was.
Beef Wellington, for those not familiar, is one of the few tasty dishes that comes from Britain. (Shepherd’s pie is another, but I cannot lend support for bangers and mash.) The dish consists of a tender filet of beef coated in a mixture of chopped mushrooms, herbs, and shallots cooked to a paste and, in my case, on the cruise, combined with a fine bacon, all wrapped in a flaky puff pastry shell. It’s a dish that, for a moment, mildly makes one regret the Revolutionary War, but only for a very brief, brief moment.
That cruise ship beef Wellington was delicious, but I’ve always been wary about mushroom-infested food dishes because:
The idea and actual texture of mushrooms is gross. All mushrooms look alien and infective, like asparagus. These things remind me of the X-Files episode “Firewalker” (S2E9) in which a silica-based life form burst forth from the necks of volcanic scientists, a strange mix of the creature from Alien and giant asparagus, and all kinds of awful. (This X-Files-based fear of mushrooms and asparagus is only second to checking the toilet for flukes at unknown restrooms in the episode “The Host,” S2E2).
The Midsomer Murders episode “Destroying Angel” (S4E2), in which, among the usual randy behavior depicted by the most benign people in the villages of Midsomer, a deadly mushroom (called the destroying angel) is sneaked into the cooking mix, bringing about the terrible death of one of the characters named Tristan Goodfellow who, as it turns out, was not a good fellow. This is where John Nettles comes into our story today, though in his defense, he really does not.
In the recent and real-life beef Wellington murders, Erin Patterson, the Aussie who was convicted of murder by mushroom, used death cap mushrooms to turn her delicious meal deadly.
Patterson, 50, was found guilty by a jury of murdering three relatives with a fatal family meal in the small Victorian town of Morwell on 29 July 2023. She was also convicted of the attempted murder of a fourth person, who survived the meal.
The mushroom trial that gripped the country, and much of the world, heard evidence suggesting Patterson hunted down death cap mushrooms from nearby towns, before attempting to conceal her crimes by disposing of evidence and lying to authorities.
Three people died in hospital in the days after the meal. (July 7, 2025, BBC)
Death cap mushrooms vary somewhat in appearance, but their effect on the human body is resolute. They destroy the liver and kidneys and, because they cause most of the mushroom deaths in the world, are the deadliest. They are, unfortunately, easily mistaken for more edible varieties.
For those wondering about the mushrooms next on the deadly list, we come to the aforementioned destroying angel, of Midsomer Murders fame —a tall, flat, white mushroom found mainly in Europe and North America. From there, we have the orange-brown deadly webcap and IKEA-beige autumn skullcap. The list goes on, and it’s a list full of shrooms that can be mistaken for a safe, tasty variety. For many, the symptoms of eating these fungal homicidal maniacs don't hit right away, setting in 6-24 hours later, which makes it difficult to pin down what's going on. The agony from this is unreal, a painful shutdown of the body.
Mushrooms kill through amatoxins, an alkaloid and potent peptide that stops protein synthesis in your cells and aggressively attacks your liver and kidneys. You cannot cook this danger out of the mushroom. Tiny amounts can kill. Short of a liver transplant, there's little to no effective antidote or treatment.
The inability to cook/freeze/fry amatoxins out of mushrooms reminds me of prions, infectious misfolded proteins that cannot be destroyed by cooking meat. Everything I know about prions and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal prion disorder, comes from the X-Files episode “Our Town” (S2E24) in which the people aren’t just eatin’ chicken. We’ll just leave it at that. But the inability to cook prions out of meat is one reason that several people in my circle of acquaintance no longer eat deer meat. The increasing spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) among the deer population is concerning.
Let’s get back on track.
Based on the trial proceedings, Patterson cooked up a meal of beef Wellington for her ex-husband's dad, mom, and the mom's sister and husband. The ex-husband was invited and had planned on coming, but backed out at the last minute though I have to imagine he was the target du jour.
Though Patterson claimed that she purchased her mushrooms from an Asian grocery store in Melbourne—no, she couldn’t remember which, yes, she paid cash—investigators discovered that prior to this alleged shopping trip, concerned folks had discovered the deadly death cap mushrooms in two nearby towns and had pinned their location and a warning in the iNaturalist online plant database.
The iNaturalist site—which I signed up for upon researching this story and found completely addictive and exciting and ended up wasting several hours uploading photos of weird mushrooms and bugs from past hikes and camping trips—is a “social network designed for naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists to map and share observations of biodiversity across the globe.”
Think of it as a crowd-sourced observation of the natural world around the globe, providing scientists and researchers with valuable information they can use. Scientists interested in tracking anything—including these dangerous mushroom species—and understanding their global distribution find iNaturalist very useful. Foragers or hikers can also use this information as a warning to stay away.
I say that because pinning the specific location of deadly mushrooms might sound like a bad idea, even though it was intended for good. As you can imagine, I have zero interest in mushroom foraging, but what people were doing on iNaturalist truly was intended as a public service. Some locales that are aware of the presence of these quaint little killers put up warning signs against foraging or general mucking about.
One person’s warning to stay away is another one’s destination.
Evidence suggests Patterson located those posts on the iNaturalist website, and her phone indicates she traveled to those locations. Her phone also ratted her out by showing that she traveled to buy a food dehydrator on the way home from those visits. Investigators later discovered photos on her phone that showed what appeared to be death cap mushrooms, characterized by their large, whitish caps and black, accordion-like undersides, sitting on a kitchen scale.
Since a small amount will do the trick, I'm not sure why Patterson was weighing the mushrooms. Perhaps she was considering her beef Wellington recipe and how much she needed to mix with regular mushrooms to cover the taste of the death cap, though, just as in the Midsomer Murder episode, the taste is supposedly pleasant and "mushroomy,” which is why I choose not to develop a taste for mushrooms.
Though Patterson denied owning a dehydrator, a device of which I have two, police found the instruction manual in her kitchen drawer. Even worse, she posted to a true crime Facebook group boasting about using it.
I do not understand today's criminals. To be clear, I don’t understand yesterday's criminals, either, but at least they didn't boast about their crimes online.
Investigators located photos of her throwing away her food dehydrator at a public dump site just a few days after the poisonous lunch had been served. They found the dehydrator, covered in her fingerprints and with traces of the death cap mushrooms.
An obvious question at this point, one that any reasonable reader of classic whodunit fiction would be thinking, is how to explain why you were the only one not to get sick after eating a meal. Most stories, including Midsomer Murder "Judgement Day" (S3E3) have killers who wisely use a poison that can be survived at small doses, and dose themselves ever so slightly so they can throw off suspicion.
John Nettles won't buy it, mind you, but it's an MO.
Patterson refused to have her and her children get medical treatment even though she claimed they ate the beef Wellington also, and said she felt ill. Eventually they were tested and there were no traces of death cap. Somehow, miraculously, the mushrooms from the unknown vague Asian grocery story that were deadly and accidentally mixed into the meal had only landed on ex-in-law plates.
As a haphazard cook and consummate bumbling host, I'm trying to imagine how that dinner went. How do you casually guard the right people from the wrong food without raising suspicions?
I'm writing this in maybe a way that's too lighthearted, because the real truth is that three people died a horrid death, and a fourth is permanently damaged. What the motive was to inflict this is unclear, though, considering it was her ex-husband’s family, I think we can all come up with ideas. What bothers me so much about these murders is the cold-blooded nature of it that came through carefully prepared food.
Cooking is an act of love.
Yes, sometimes it's an act of grumbling and annoyance and trying to find 93 different ways to prepare chicken, but if you are a cook, you understand what I'm saying. You are cutting up food, stirring sauces, waving a dishtowel at the smoke detector, and you are thinking not only about what you are doing but how it will taste. You’re thinking about who it is for and if they will like it and if your meal will have a nice selection of macronutrients (fats, proteins, carbs).
To cook with hate is shocking to me.
Granted, anyone eating some of my kitchen-time failures might think I’ve done it before, but I assure you that the intention is different.
To weigh and carefully cut up and cook death, wrapping it in a puff pastry and sauce, serving it up with a smile, watching the first bite with the knowledge you've killed them even if they don't know it yet—I can't imagine that.
It’s the coldest of the cold.