‘My mother poisoned my father, and I had to live with the aftermath’ |
‘My mother poisoned my father, and I had to live with the aftermath’
February 20, 2026 — 11:50am
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They were more like sisters than mother and daughter because there was only a 17-year age difference.
Tracey Moss adored her mum, Lorraine. “To me, she was very beautiful, with straight, shoulder-length, mousy brown-coloured hair, much like mine,” she recalls.
She also loved her dad, John, who with his swept-back rocker-style black hair resembled an Australian larrikin version of Elvis. Tracey remembers family camping trips, teasing John about his concealed bald patch, and growing up in what she believed was a loving family.
Long before Erin Patterson used poisoned mushrooms to kill three family members and nearly a fourth with deadly homemade beef Wellingtons, Lorraine was lacing her husband’s food with arsenic.
In the Patterson case, it would take just days for her three victims to die. In the Moss case, it would take more than five agonising years in what a homicide detective would later describe as “cold-blooded torture”. When he died, John Moss was found to have 80 times the normal level of arsenic in his system.
As his health collapsed, he developed a tolerance to arsenic, until he ingested four massive doses in the eight weeks before he died.
Now, 42 years later, Tracey is ready to tell her story. How she became estranged from her mother, how she had to live with rumours that she was responsible for the death, the years not knowing what had happened to her father, and the battle to win back custody of his grave from the woman who killed him.
It wasn’t a shotgun wedding, but close to it. Lorraine was 17 and already pregnant; Johnny was 21 and working at a local meat-processing plant.
They had met only months earlier in 1965 at the Golden Square Fire Brigade country dance.
They had two girls and a boy in four years and bought a weatherboard home in Upper Road, California Gully, Bendigo. He worked at Mayfair Hams & Bacon in the gut line, where his job was to open up slaughtered pigs.
He was tough, having survived a near-fatal road collision, and was rarely sick.
In November 1978, he became ill, and began to suffer from unexplained night sweats, stomach cramps and diarrhoea. After he........