How do you tell a story that not only everyone already knows, but also everyone might just be fatigued by the time you tell it (again)?
That was the issue facing the director behind Stan’s Revealed – Death Cap Murders. In a moment of true, yet macabre, serendipity, the streaming giant chose today of all days to drop the trailer – on the very day Erin Patterson is set to be sentenced.
But for the filmmakers, the story was never supposed to be about hype. It was born out of a simple desire: to cover the case.
The original idea
When Emmy-nominated director Gil Marsden first pointed his camera towards Leongatha, Victoria, he thought he was just covering a case.
“We started the development process pretty much like a couple weeks after the tragedy happened,” Marsden told Mediaweek.
“And so we went down right away. Obviously, the story was already bubbling up. And then we just kept our finger on the pulse down in the community. We went down and filmed a bunch of times during 2024. Just trying to really like hone in on what it was like to go through the kind of circus that happened.”
What began as a small crew trip to a rural town would eventually became Revealed – Death Cap Murders.
“When Patterson was charged and went to trial the story just went to a whole new place,” he explained.
“The amount of twists and turns that happened through that process was incredible,” he said. “We filmed for a really long time, and then we filmed for a very fast time at the end.”
The edit, Marsden said, was “one of the fastest in my career”. “But we’re really proud. We wanted to get out while people were still talking about it, but we wanted to make sure that we didn’t cut corners.”
And that editing process is still ongoing.
With Patterson’s sentencing due to take place today, Marsden confirmed the series ending has been left unfinished to accomodate the decision.
Filmmaker Gil Marsden.
Beyond fatigue
While everyone thinks they know the story of Patterson. Marsden’s series argues otherwise.
“I think we’ve balanced those two interests pretty well,” he says. “We wanted to get out while people were still talking about it, but we wanted to make sure that we didn’t cut corners. We weren’t hollow, we weren’t shallow.”
The result is a series that moves past media frenzy to capture something deeper: the grief of a community, the complexity of a crime, and the unanswered questions that remain long after the headlines fade.
Building trust with a grieving town
From the beginning, the director said, transparency was essential.
“There’s a certain degree of trust and a certain degree of openness that comes from that,” Marsden explained.
“You have to work hard to build trust and you have to work hard to get people to sit in that chair. But once they’re there, in many ways, I think they’re ready to be open.”
Marsden remembered how the community in Korumburra was ‘wary’ of cameras. “There were people who didn’t want to talk to us, and we respected that. We didn’t want them to turn around a corner and see us and go, oh God, this again. So we were very transparent, from the beginning all the way through to the end.”
That sensitivity, Marsden says, was recognised.
“We’ve had a lot of feedback from members of the community that appreciated that approach. I think we did the best we could in what is a really traumatic and difficult environment – and for a community that really is ready for this story to move on.”
Erin Patterson in a still from Stan’s Revealed – Death Cap Murders.
Silence and unanswered questions
Marsden still remembers the long months of nothing.
“The biggest shock was how long it took for there to be any more information, not just for us, but for the town itself. The police had basically left the town by the second week of August. And then it wasn’t until the second of November that new information breaks, for the public, but also for the town and the families,” he said.
That vacuum only added to the speculation. “They were trying not to gossip, but there weren’t any facts coming. And I think that’s a big part of why the story really became much bigger – because there was this void of information.”
Leading voices and new perspectives
To tell the story, Marsden and his team brought in The Age journalists John Silvester and Marta Pascual Juanola, who had been reporting closely on the case.
They are joined on screen by doctors, psychologists, toxicologists, local residents, and people who once knew Patterson – former colleagues, classmates and flatmates.
The aim, Marsden insists, wasn’t just to revisit what everyone already knew. It was to understand how the tragedy rippled through a small town, and why it kept such a tight grip on the national imagination.
But, Marsden said, even now, after a guilty verdict, one question hangs over the case and keeps him up at night: why?
“You look into darkness because you want an answer,” Marsden says. “Even if we have a verdict, even if we have evidence, even if we know what happened – we know who, we know what, where, how – but we don’t know why.”
Perhaps we never will.