The trial that consumed a nation

Erin Patterson has been found guilty.

Now, everyone can pore over newly released court documents related to the murder trial: the surveillance footage of Patterson dumping the dehydrator in the days after the murder. The call a doctor made to triple zero, letting them know Patterson had discharged herself from hospital against medical advice, even after having consumed deadly mushrooms.

Then there’s the media cannibalising its own coverage through pieces that turn the media’s gaze on itself: the story about a custom camera rig that managed to photograph Patterson from inside a police van as she stared “dead-eyed” (the newspaper’s words) into the camera. Also, blow-by-blow replays of Patterson fronting the media pack and shedding apparently non-existent tears in her one and only media appearance shortly after the deaths of her parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson.

I’m eating it all up. And I’ll have second and third helpings, please, of any columns penned by psychologists about female serial killers or narcissistic personality disorder.

The trial has consumed the nation. We can’t stop obsessing over all the eccentric details: death cap mushrooms, an ugly divorce, ambivalence about in-laws, the fact that Patterson served her own meal on a different coloured plate to her other guests.

Patterson is now a convicted triple murderer and so fair game, we think, for our lurid interest. We want to gorge on the details, fatten ourselves up with many morsels of incriminating evidence.

Doesn’t the information overload make you feel sick?

True crime is an object of horrified fascination. But what’s wicked – though we shrink back from unironic use of that word – is the perverse delight we feel when the greedy guts inside me, and perhaps inside you, just can’t get enough of it.

This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.