If you are a woman, and you have fantasised about murdering a lover, I would wager you thought about using poison. We are seven times more likely to use poison than a man — unless we are Vladimir Putin. Men kill more, of course, and are more likely to be killed. But in every other marker of physical violence, we lag behind them. Here, we catch up, and that should be a song in Chicago.
It’s arresting if you aren’t involved — death by poison stories are like bad childbirth tales — so the case of “Fungi fatale” Erin Patterson, the mushroom drudge of Leongatha, Australia, has travelled the world. She was found guilty of three murders and one attempted murder this week. Authorities decided not to charge her with the attempted murder of her ex-husband Simon, who was likely her real target. He was wary enough to decline her invitation to lunch.
The cognitive dissonance is riveting: superficially mild housewife and mother of two serves poisoned beef wellington, a formal, very respectable dish, with poisoned mushrooms to her former parents-in-law, and her ex-husband’s uncle and aunt, at a lunch to discuss Patterson’s fantasy ovarian cancer diagnosis.
The poisoner in the kitchen is the mad woman in the attic, escaped with a wooden spoon to stir her psychosis: femininity spoiled and home subverted. That is what the interest in Patterson amounts to: fear. She is a monster from a fairytale come to end you: the kitchen is a charnel house. What is up with Mama? Sexual frustration? Menopause? Rage? The apple in Snow White was, to its gormless heroine, a gift of love, not murderous envy. Perhaps Patterson’s victims thought the same, but her husband knew her better.
Lunch guests don’t expect death: food is love. But popular culture — Anthony Bourdain’s writing and the TV show The Bear — remind us that food is something else too: magic. It can do anything and be anything. Bourdain described his fury and longing for control before he killed himself. The cook says eat what I give you, and every tasting menu is homage to that. I have gagged on the rage of cooks. I have eaten rage made of turnip. Or it is thwarted love. Chef Carmy of The Bear wants to reanimate his family at every service, but happy this time. If “restaurant” is a corruption of “restore”, the poisoner’s table is the opposite: the removal of everything.
“The poisoner in the kitchen is the mad woman in the attic, escaped with a wooden spoon.”
Patterson shows what a woman can do if she is furious enough, and how she can do it — surprisingly easily. I can see foxgloves from my desk: enough to kill my family. The kitchen cupboards are filled with poisons. Katherine Watson’s Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and Their Victims, a study of cases from 1752 to 1914, describes the mothers, stepmothers, and wives who poisoned their husbands and children. It was a minor epidemic. Rebecca Smith killed eight of her babies because, she said, she couldn’t care for them, and was the last woman hanged in Britain for murdering her child. Beware of limiting women’s access to birth control. That’s Smith’s message.
Or the poisoner is a wife gone awry: the climax of a mad romance. Nannie Doss, America’s most famous serial poisoner was called the “Lonely Hearts Killer”. Doss met some of her victims through the personal columns and the Diamond Circle dating club: then she fed them rat poison and arsenic. In all, she murdered four of her five husbands. Is lonely the right word? The British poisoner Mary Ann Cotton was hanged in 1873: it is believed she killed four of her five husbands. She was famous enough for a nursery rhyme: “Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with string. Where? Where? She’s up in the air.” Where, of course, the witches are.
The duality of the poisoner — powerless, suddenly empowered — explains our fascination. She is everywhere in our culture: drudge and queen. She is Erin Patterson and Rebecca Smith, and Medea, and Empress Livia of I, Claudius. Claudius thought Livia was herself a poison: “They say a snake bit her once and died.” She is Cary Grant’s murderous aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace, case studies in unthreatening femininity — until they killed the lodgers. In J.K. Rowling’s Troubled Blood her poisoner is a nurse, and, Rowling writes, “to see the truth of her is almost impossible.” Rowling is canny: she could have been speaking of Erin Patterson.
If the poisoner has a duality, so does the poison. The foxgloves in my garden could kill me, or they could soothe. If taken in excess, many medicines, and almost all recreational drugs — the ones that give you pleasure — will end you, and there’s a metaphor for life itself. We have seen it in the agonies of British parliamentarians as they wonder — where does healing end, and death begin?
Erin Patterson thinks she is a drudge: a disappointed woman with an eating disorder. She isn’t, she is more. She’s the witch of Jung’s collective unconscious, though a bad one. She got caught.
