A Recipe for Murder is Duncan McNab’s 13th book. Photo: Supplied.
Like so many around the world, Duncan McNab was immediately hooked by news that three people had died, and another was fighting for his life after a family lunch in a small town in country Victoria.
It led the former NSW police detective to begin his 13th book, Recipe For Murder, which explains in forensic detail how events unfolded and the poisonous truth behind convicted mushroom murderer Erin Patterson.
The case piqued his interest because it was so unusual.
“I saw a terrible accident had befallen three people from a town I had never heard of,” Mr McNab said. “When I saw her doorstop interview, I thought this is interesting and my publisher and my agent, like so many people, were grabbed by the story.”
The private investigator and investigative journalist started writing in December 2023 shortly after Ms Patterson was arrested and charged.
Mr McNab said it was the strangeness of the story that drew global interest. “How could you willingly believe someone would poison four family members?”
While he was in Morwell following the 10-week trial he bumped into people he knew from the UK media.
“It was quite extraordinary. People were travelling from Melbourne every day to watch the trial,” he said. “It captured the imagination. The sheer ordinariness of the people involved. Those people killed could be your neighbours and as you dig in, you get more and more consumed by the story.”
When writing books, Mr McNab always visits the place where the crime happened.
He visited Leongatha and Korumburra in 2024 as part of his research.
“I had friends visit Western Australia where she had lived and also in South Australia where she had family and I spent time in Melbourne where Erin grew up and where she and her husband went to university, so we were walking around her life,” he said.
There were fast-track hearings in August 2024 which media were not allowed to report but they enabled Mr McNab to see her husband Simon and his uncle Ian Wilkinson on the witness stand. He observed the way they walked and talked and their demeanour.
The trial commenced on 29 April 2025 in Morwell in the heart of Gippsland’s open-cut mining country.
Although he smelt “a very large rat from the very beginning”, he kept an open mind to avoid confirmation bias and watched the evidence unfold.
“A lot of it was unravelling. It was the burning question of the individual beef Wellingtons,” he said. “That was the eureka moment. That is how it happened.
“When we got to the court, I thought the high probability is she is absolutely guilty, but does the evidence rack up to beyond reasonable doubt?
“Even on the day she was convicted people were wondering what the jury would do,” Mr McNab said. “I was 60/40 for conviction but could there be a hung jury, or could the jury acquit her?”
Mr McNab said it took a very unusual person to do what Ms Patterson did.
Ms Patterson’s face at the news conference is etched into his memory and he is staggered by the sadness she has wrought on her family, especially her two children.
Recipe For Murder was first published in Australia and New Zealand and is now out in the UK. It will be published in North America in July.
Mr McNab predicts there will be more interest in the case when Ms Patterson’s appeals against her convictions are heard. Victoria’s Director of Public Prosecutions has also filed an appeal against her life sentence with parole, describing the sentence as “manifestly inadequate”.
“There is a way to go with this story,” Mr McNab said. “Maybe we will have to do an update to the book.”
Mr McNab will talk about Recipe For Murder at the Quantum Brewery in Moruya at 5:30 pm on 19 June and at 11 am and 5 pm on 20 June at Tathra Hotel’s Headland Theatre as part of the Fungi Feastival.
