Free Republic

It's the kind of story a mystery novelist might conjure. But for months, a real murder case has been playing out in a small Australian town where three people died after eating a family meal that was suspected to contain poisonous death cap mushrooms. The prime suspect in Leongatha, a country town some 84 miles southeast of Melbourne in Victoria, has long been seen as Erin Patterson, who hosted the lunch in late July whose four guests quickly fell gravely ill. The menu included a beef Wellington dish that Patterson said included mushrooms. Police arrested Patterson on Thursday; she...

Three hours after Dr. Todd Mitchell’s Dec. 3 flight from Beijing landed in San Francisco, a call demanded his immediate attention. Mitchell, 59, had spent two-and-a-half weeks in China, which has the most mushroom poisoning deaths in the world, sharing the treatment method he developed at Dominican Hospital. The call concerned a Santa Rosa hospital patient believed to have eaten deadly mushrooms. Principal investigator of an amatoxin mushroom poisoning clinical trial that has treated nearly 100 patients across North America in the past 10 years, Mitchell arranged for the patient’s overnight transfer to Dominican Hospital. This patient was the first...