Erin Patterson can be seen nodding along at her barrister’s questioning, speaking with her hands, and staring at her legal team as she speaks.
Patterson said she was involved in the design of her home in Leongatha from the beginning.
She said she first designed it in Microsoft Paint, but was told by those designing the property that her design would never work.
“It modelled quite closely to how I wanted things,” she said.
“I saw it as the final house. Meaning, I wanted it to be a house where the children would grow up, [and] once they moved away from university and work, they would come back and stay for as long as they liked, bring their children.
“And I’d grow old there. That’s what I’d hoped.”
Patterson said that in July 2023, she was “comfortable” financially, which meant she could go to university – she had been accepted into a bachelor’s of nursing and midwifery at Federation University earlier that year but decided to defer it – without having to work a full-time job.
She said she had felt for some months that her relationship with the wider Patterson family, especially her in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, had deteriorated. She said her moving to a different town may have played a part.
“I’d come to have concerns that Simon was not wanting me to be involved too much with the family any more; perhaps I wasn’t being invited to some things,” she said.
Patterson said her relationship with Simon had been “functional” in 2023.
“From the start of the year to July, we mainly just related on logistical things like church, the streaming, the kids, but we didn’t relate on friend things, banter, like we used to. That changed at the start of the year,” she said.
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