Erin Patterson, the Australian woman convicted of killing three of her relatives with a beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms, will spend the rest of her life in prison with no prospect of release, after an appeal court in Victoria ruled against her on Friday.

The court decided two appeals at once. It dismissed Patterson’s challenge to her convictions, and it upheld a prosecution appeal arguing that her sentence was too light. The result was a resentencing: the 33-year non-parole period set by the trial judge was set aside, leaving a whole-of-life term.

Delivering judgment from the Supreme Court in Melbourne, Justice Stephen McLeish said the offending was “extraordinarily cold and calculated” and “stands to be denounced in the strongest terms”.

“In all the circumstances, after anxious consideration, we have concluded that the case involved such shocking criminality that it is inappropriate to fix a non-parole period,” he said. The murders, he added, “represented a cruel breach of trust to members of the applicant’s extended family”.

Patterson, 52, a mother of two, was convicted in July last year of three murders and one attempted murder. She had served the meal at her home in Leongatha, in regional Victoria, in July 2023. Don and Gail Patterson, both 70 — the parents of her estranged husband — died, as did Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, 66. Heather’s husband Ian Wilkinson, a church pastor, survived after nearly two months in hospital with critical organ damage.

Her lawyers had advanced seven grounds of appeal seeking a retrial, including an argument that jurors were housed in the same Morwell hotel as prosecutors and witnesses during the trial. The judges found no objective basis for a fair-minded person to doubt that the jury had done its job according to law, and held that disputed phone-location evidence was properly admitted as part of the prosecution’s wider circumstantial case.

Patterson was not in court. She watched by video link from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre at Ravenhall and showed no emotion as the ruling was read.

Context: Al Jazeera reports that an application to Australia’s High Court is her remaining appeal option. Hiru News, which carried the story in Sri Lanka, credits CNN as its source, so the Sri Lankan report and the CNN report are one account rather than two independent ones; SBS News and Al Jazeera reported the ruling separately.