Erin Patterson, the Australian woman who served a beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms to her estranged husband's family, has lost her bid to overturn her convictions and will now die in prison after Victoria's highest court resentenced her to life without parole on Friday. The 15-minute hearing, at which Patterson, 52, appeared via video feed and showed no emotion, also saw the court grant the Director of Public Prosecutions' appeal for a longer sentence - because apparently a non-parole period of 33 years just wasn't quite the message the court wanted to send about serving poisonous fungi to lunch guests.

The court of appeal - justices Lesley Taylor, Stephen McLeish, and Peter Kidd - had heard arguments from Patterson's legal team and prosecutors in August. Patterson was originally sentenced last year to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 33 years for the murders of Don and Gail Patterson (her estranged husband's parents) and Heather Wilkinson (his aunt), after hosting them for lunch. She was also convicted of the attempted murder of Heather's husband, Ian Wilkinson, who survived the beef wellington after spending weeks in hospital - presumably now forever suspicious of pastry.

McLeish said the court granted leave to appeal on the first two grounds of Patterson's appeal but dismissed the appeal, along with the five other grounds raised by her lawyers. The DPP's appeal against the sentence, however, succeeded, as the original sentence did not properly reflect the seriousness of her offending. McLeish noted that Patterson sustained an intent to murder all four people for three weeks - from the time they were invited to the lunch, during the meal, and during the "protracted suffering and ultimate deaths that resulted."

The offending was "carefully planned and deliberate," McLeish said, and involved an "elaborate series of deceptions," including claims she had cancer, denying she had foraged mushrooms, and lying about the source of the mushrooms. "This offending was extraordinarily cold and calculated, and stands to be denounced in the strongest possible terms," he said. When the judges left court, Patterson stood, took a book from beside her, and walked off-screen - a departure that, unlike her lunch, required no cleanup.

In the courtroom, family members hugged and were emotional, while detectives involved in the case looked elated. Nobody commented outside court - possibly because there's no polite way to say "told you so."

Patterson must now apply to the high court for leave to appeal if she wishes to continue fighting her conviction or new sentence. She is one of only a handful of Victorian offenders sentenced to life without parole, and one of the only women in Australian history to receive the sentence - a distinction that, unlike a good beef wellington, comes with no possibility of parole.

During the August hearings, the court heard Patterson should have been given no possibility of ever being released, or a non-parole period so lengthy she was likely to die behind bars. Her lawyers argued seven grounds for appeal, including that allowing jurors to stay in the same hotel as police and the prosecution while deliberating over their verdicts in the triple murder trial represented a "catastrophic" failure of the justice system. Richard Edney, for Patterson, said the failure to properly separate the jury was a fundamental irregularity that denied her a fair trial. "What we say has occurred here in the applicant's trial was an inexplicable and perhaps still unexplained failure of a process," Edney told the court in August.

They also argued that trial judge Christopher Beale erred in ruling that photos and videos related to mushrooms found on an SD card in Patterson's home were inadmissible, as they tended to support her evidence that she foraged for mushrooms. During the hearings, Brendan Kissane KC, the DPP, said that even though Patterson would be in her 80s by the time she was eligible for parole, her sentence was still too lenient. When asked whether a longer non-parole period would essentially damn Patterson to dying behind bars, and had "some artifice of it being life with life," Kissane told the court: "It has its harsh aspect to it, of course, we accept that. But in our submission that is not a matter that is outweighed by the seriousness of the offending."