Erin Patterson, the woman associated with the incident where three people died from consuming a deadly beef Wellington, has fired off at reporters stationed outside her Leongatha residence.
The property had notices posted on the front fence, warning that journalists entering the land will be reported to the police for trespassing.
Patterson, who prepared the fatal meal, said she was frustrated with the media’s impact on her life over the past week and felt unfairly portrayed as a villain after the fatal incident.
“I lost my parents-in-law, my children lost their grandparents and I’ve been painted as an evil witch,” she said.
“The media is making it impossible for me to live in this town. I can’t have friends over. The media is at the house where my children are at. The media are at my sister’s house so I can’t go there. This is unfair.”
Although she’s believed to have been staying in Melbourne since the deaths, the signs on her property suggest she has returned to Leongatha.
The notice specifically instructs members of the media and their contractors to refrain from entering any part of her property marked by the boundary fence.
Ms Patterson was named a suspect by the police after cooking the meal containing poisonous mushrooms, which led to the death of her former parents-in-law, Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson.
No charges have been laid.
She provided a written statement asserting that she used a mix of mushrooms from various stores for the meal, including dried mushrooms from an unspecified Asian grocery store and button mushrooms from a supermarket near her home.
She admitted to not being truthful to the police about disposing of a food dehydrator, as her husband accused her of using it to poison the guests.
Deputy Police Commissioner Wendy Steendam clarified that the statement leaked to the media was not an official police statement but a document provided by Patterson’s lawyers.
Steendam criticised the leak of the statement as unhelpful to the ongoing investigation, emphasising that the police need to thoroughly investigate and understand the circumstances of the deaths using the available evidence.
“The matter needs to be dealt with by (police) … and determined by us thoroughly, what’s actually occurred, and using the evidence that we have to determine and understand exactly what’s happened and if we can explain what caused the deaths,” she said, via the Herald Sun.
“I don’t think it’s helpful to actually comment further on this investigation.
“It is an active matter and when we have more to say publicly, we’ll do that. But I think to speculate or to talk about the aspects of the investigation in detail is unhelpful.”