Fired Palm Beach Gardens police officer of viral ‘unhinged cop’ video wins her job back
A city attorney called Officer Bethany Guerriero’s actions ‘an absolute abuse of authority.’
PALM BEACH GARDENS — A police officer who was deemed ethically and emotionally unfit to serve in law enforcement has won back her job at the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department, despite pushback by city officials.
The police department fired Bethany Guerriero in 2023 after her filmed encounter with an unarmed man went viral, spawning a series of “unhinged cop” videos that generated more than 10 million views online. The agency defended its decision to fire Guerriero at a recent arbitration hearing, calling her actions “an absolute abuse of authority in every possible way.”
The local chapter of a police union said the barrage of negative online attention caused Guerriero’s supervisors to overreact, firing her in violation of her labor rights. Guerriero’s attorney, Rick King, confirmed Friday that arbitrator Richard Miller agreed with the union, ruling in the officer’s favor and paving the way for her reinstatement.’Unhinged cop’: Ex-officer of viral video wants victim’s lawsuit dismissed. How the judge ruled.
King did not say whether Miller overturned Guerriero’s penalty because he found her actions appropriate, or because the department took too long to mete out her punishment. When asked whether Guerriero intends to resign on her own terms, with her benefits intact, King disagreed.
“She’s going back to work,” he said.
The arbiter’s decision is a win for the officer but not the end of her troubles. Ryan Gould, whose arrest prompted Guerriero’s termination, accused the officer in a federal lawsuit of excessive use of force and unjustified arrest. The trial is scheduled to begin in a West Palm Beach courtroom on Sept. 9.
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There, jurors will decide who was at fault for the brief and bizarre encounter between Guerriero and Gould on May 9, 2023.
Guerriero’s account of arrest refuted by video evidence
They met one another in the parking lot of the Sabal Ridge apartment complex along Military Trail in Palm Beach Gardens. Gould called 911 minutes earlier to report his neighbor for threatening him with a gun. Within seconds, he found himself staring down the barrel of Guerriero’s department-issued one, too.
Guerriero said she didn’t know when she pulled into the apartment’s parking lot whether Gould was the gunman he’d called to report. Though Gould wore only swim trunks and Crocs, Guerriero said she thought he may have concealed a weapon in his pocket or beneath the towel on the ground behind him.
She told Gould to keep his hands out of his pockets and drew her gun after he reached into one anyway to take out his phone. She held him at gunpoint for 12 seconds, appearing to grow angrier the more he insisted that he was a victim, not a suspect.’Never seen someone act like that’: Report offers details on firing of Palm Beach Gardens officer who held man at gunpoint
After holstering her gun, Guerriero made Gould lie bare-chested on the pavement while she handcuffed him. When asked why he was being arrested, Guerriero called him a “punk,” ridiculed his painted toenails and told him repeatedly: “Shut your mouth.”
“I’ve been here for 20 years, punk,” she said. “I’m in charge. Not you.”
She told her companions later that Gould was “possibly drugged” and kept reaching into his pockets despite her commands to stop — all of which was refuted by footage from the officer’s body camera and the apartment’s surveillance camera.
Guerriero’s colleagues pulled Gould from the Palm Beach County Jail while he waited in line to be booked, still bare-chested, and drove him back home.
Police department declined to comment on Guerriero’s reinstatement
According to a transcript of the arbitration hearing, Palm Beach Gardens officials were adamant that Guerriero not rejoin the force.
“She’s not stable,” said Robert Norton, the late attorney who represented the city during the hearing. “She cannot run around with the authority of a law-enforcement officer — which is enormous, and we want it to be enormous. She can’t do that. She cannot be a law-enforcement officer in this city.”In her own words: Ex-officer Bethany Guerriero of viral ‘unhinged cop’ video explains why she held man at gunpoint
He described a pattern of emotional and ethical lapses that began in 2019, the year “she went into an abyss.” This included Guerriero’s decision to use a high-security police database to snoop on someone she believed was in a relationship with her ex-wife.
A sergeant who investigated the case found that Guerriero was “prone to becoming enraged and has a history of emotional tantrums,” Norton said. He pointed to another arrest Guerriero made in 2019, using language so foul and inflammatory that she was suspended for two days.
“Guerriero should reacquaint herself with the department’s core values of respect, accountability and professionalism,” the attorney said.
King disagreed. He told Miller that the proper discipline for Guerriero’s behavior was “someplace between a stern look and this termination,” quoting Gary Lippman, a former attorney for the Palm Beach County Police Benevolent Association.
Guerriero, like King, maintains she had probable cause to arrest Gould. However, she has said that a cardiac incident likely contributed to her conduct that day. While still at the apartment complex, Guerriero reported worsening pain in her chest and was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where she spent two days on the cardiac floor.
Guerriero earns more than $101,000 annually. Prior to her termination, she belonged to the department’s hostage-negotiation team and was praised in several employee reviews for her composure during stressful situations.
Javier Garcia, a major with the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department, declined to answer questions about Guerriero’s reinstatement, including whether she would rejoin the hostage-negotiation team.
Who is Erin Patterson, the host of Australia’s infamous mushroom lunch?
By Elise Kinsella and staff
Tue 8 JulTuesday 8 July
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If you walk past the imposing Corinthian columns that welcome you to the State Library of Victoria, then head all the way through to the grand old building’s archives, you can find what is possibly the first reference to Erin Patterson in the media.
It’s here, on a microfilm copy of The Age newspaper from early 1992, that you’ll see Erin’s name, and a code for the science course at the University of Melbourne for which she’d just been offered a place.
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Back then, she was Erin Scutter — a teenager who was decades away from facing charges of murdering three people with a beef Wellington lunch containing death cap mushrooms.
In scarce public references, in social media accounts and from her time in the witness box, a picture emerges of a woman who shifts and morphs depending on who is telling the story.
There’s the RSPCA worker who found love in a Melbourne council building. The air traffic controller whose behaviour is derided by some colleagues. The one-time bookstore owner in rural Western Australia. The would-be nurse. The mushroom forager.
Then there’s Erin Patterson, the star of the courtroom — her sketched portrait featured on TV bulletins and news websites around the world.
From the court, we learn about Erin the self-described Christian who is accused of mocking her religious in-laws, and Erin the social colleague who’d go for drinks with workmates.
In rural Korumburra, where she settles to raise her children, a picture emerges of a dedicated mum, a community volunteer and a liar furious with her ex. But she is also plagued by low self-confidence, and drifts from studying one university course after another.
So who really is Erin Patterson, the mushroom cook behind the fateful lunch?
An academic upbringing in Melbourne’s suburbs
From the courtroom in the regional Victorian town of Morwell, Erin’s mind turned back to the suburbs of Melbourne.
“When I was a kid, Mum would weigh us every week to make sure we weren’t putting on too much weight and so I went to the extreme of barely eating,” Erin testified.
It’s here in childhood, Erin said, that her lifelong battles with eating disorders and low self-esteem began.
“I’d been fighting a never-ending battle of low self-esteem most of my adult life, and the further inroads I made into being middle-aged, the less, less good I felt about myself,” she said.
Eating disorder resources:
- The Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673 or webchat.
- Eating Disorders Foundation Victoria
- Eating Disorders Families Australia — 1300 195 626
- Professionals Credentialed in Eating Disorders
- Lifeline on 13 11 14
- Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800
Despite such feelings, many of those who know Erin remember her as smart and witty.
She was raised in a brick home in a quiet leafy street in Glen Waverley, a middle-class suburb, deep in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs.
Gumtrees lined her family’s front yard, with parklands and horse-riding trails not far away.
Hers was an intellectual family. Her mother Heather Scutter was a much-respected lecturer at Monash University and expert in children’s literature.
She wrote books and academic articles, and gave interviews — including to the ABC. Many former colleagues remember the academic as a lovely co-worker who was dedicated to her job, but not someone they socialised with.
Erin’s father, Eitan Scutter held director roles in multiple Australian companies, including in his home state of South Australia, and at Eden in NSW, where he later retired.
And while Erin was offered a place to study the subject at the University of Melbourne, her sister Ceinwen worked as a scientist at Monash University.
But Erin was no scientist.
Former colleagues remember ‘aggressive’ and ‘strange’ co-worker
Sitting in a bright pink top, in the centre of the photo, the serious face of Erin stands out.
It’s from 2001, and Erin was sitting for an Air Services class photo that shows all the trainee air traffic controllers from that year.
She was in her mid-20s — and it was taken after she’d left her science course and, according to her ex-husband Simon Patterson, studied accounting.
But in a lifelong pattern, she’d drifted onto another career.
She’d taken the notoriously difficult test to become an air traffic controller and had been one of the few to make it through to the training program.
If you speak to people who worked with Erin during this time, you can guarantee they’ll have a story to tell.
Unlike later in her life, Erin caught the attention of others.
The accounts of some colleagues — who the ABC confirmed worked with Erin at the same Melbourne office but declined to be identified — paint a picture of her as a solitary young woman, an odd loner, while others remember someone who was abrupt and abrasive.
One former colleague who spoke to the ABC described Erin as “a little bit strange”.
In the small training group of 14 people, they said, the air traffic controllers became close, like a second family.
According to her former colleague, Erin was the only person who declined all invitations to social activities.
“We always joked and supported each other, she was never part of that,” they said.
That colleague remembered a bright young woman: “She was clever, she is no dope.”
But she didn’t make friends during her time at Air Services Australia.
Three former colleagues said some would call her “crazy Erin” and “Scutter the nutter” behind her back.
At one point, Erin made a bullying complaint against another air traffic controller, one former colleague said.
Another former colleague, who also didn’t want to be named for work reasons, remembered a more hostile version of Erin Scutter.
“She was quite aggressive in the way she spoke to people,” they told the ABC.
They spoke of a tension while dealing with Erin, where they were always unsure how she would act.
“She wasn’t necessarily always unpleasant to be around but you tended to be wary that she could snap or say something unpleasant at the drop of a hat,” they said.
“I think that she is clever. She’s crafty, but she’s not as clever as she thinks.”
A third former colleague said during her time at Air Services, Erin would call into the air traffic control centre pretending to be another worker and say they were sick.
They thought it was part of a plan Erin had to pick up lucrative shifts covering the sick leave of others.
Another remembers Erin giggling in a corner of the room when a confused air traffic controller was being quizzed by her bosses, who asked: “Why are you here? Didn’t you call in sick?”
They suspect Erin was behind a phone call to the bosses earlier that day, as a prank.
‘Witty’ Erin meets her future husband
She wasn’t an air traffic controller for long.
Within three years of entering the industry, she was working in animal management for the RSPCA, based in the City of Monash’s council building back in Melbourne’s south-east.
It’s here, in 2004, that she met a council engineer, Simon Patterson.
For this stage of her life, it is Erin and Simon’s own narrations given to the court that we must rely on.
“He was friends with people I had become friends with, so we would come up against each other at lunch or after work drinks, that sort of thing,” Erin told the court.
They started dating and went camping with mates.
“We had other friends, not Monash friends, that he would do that with, and I was included in that,” Erin said.
Simon said he was drawn to Erin’s lighter side.
“I guess some of the things that attracted me to her in the first place was definitely her intelligence,” her estranged husband testified.
“She is quite witty and can be quite funny.”
In the same year Erin met Simon, she had her first serious brush with the law.
In June 2004, Erin was almost three times over the legal limit when she was involved in a drunken crash at Glen Waverley.
Court records reveal she was driving an unregistered car and didn’t stop after the crash or give her name and address. She was also driving 35km/h over the speed limit in a 60 kilometres per hour zone.
Erin pleaded guilty to five charges and was convicted and fined $1,000, which she elected to pay in $40 monthly instalments.
Her licence was cancelled and she was disqualified from driving in Victoria for two and a half years.
A $2 million inheritance changes everything
Three years after they first met, Simon and Erin Patterson were married, with his cousin walking her down the aisle.
Erin’s parents weren’t at the wedding. She told the court they were on a holiday — “in Russia, on a train”.
It marked the start of a very significant period of her life.
Her paternal grandmother Ora Scutter died in Adelaide in July 2006. In her will, she left her house to a grandson, with the rest of her significant estate divided between her two sons (including Erin’s father) and seven grandchildren.
Simon told the trial Erin’s share of the estate ended up being worth about $2 million — disbursed across an eight-year period starting in 2007.
Soon afterwards, Erin and her husband quit their council jobs and began travelling around Australia.
When they reached Western Australia, they could buy a house without a mortgage. They lived in Perth, and also in York. At one stage, Erin opened a second-hand bookstore in the small rural town of Pemberton, where her husband worked with the local council.
But they didn’t hang around there for long, and few residents contacted by the ABC remember much about the one-time bookstore owner.
When her mother passed away from cancer in 2019 — eight years after her father had also died from cancer — the entire estate was left to Erin and her sister.
It wasn’t small. The parents’ beachfront retirement home in Eden sold for $900,000.
The money from the inheritances allowed Erin and Simon to provide interest-free loans — worth hundreds of thousands of dollars — to his three siblings and their partners, so they can buy houses.
Yet just how close Erin was to Simon’s family — and what the relationships were like between her and the four poisoning victims: her in-laws Gail and Don Patterson, along with Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson and her husband Ian Wilkinson — has been probed throughout the trial.
There are differing versions.
There’s the caring — if somewhat needy — daughter-in-law, who loved and respected Simon’s family, according to Erin’s testimony.
Erin told the court her bond with Gail and Don Patterson was particularly close just after the traumatic birth of her son, while she was in Western Australia.
The couple travelled to Perth to be there with Erin and Simon, and supported their transition to new parenthood.
“I remember being really relieved that Gail was there because I felt really out of my depth,” Erin said.
“I had no idea what to do with a baby and I was not confident and she was really supportive and gentle and patient with me.”
Ahead of the birth of their second child, Erin and Simon relocated to Korumburra because she said she wanted to be close to his parents — even staying with them when they first moved to Gippsland.
After the birth, it was Don and Gail who brought Erin’s son to meet his sister in hospital.
Simon testified that Erin and his father “shared a love of knowledge and learning and an interest in the world, and I think she loved his gentle nature”. His parents “were really active in maintaining a good relationship with Erin”.
While Erin agreed with crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC that her relationship with Heather and Ian Wilkinson was neither close nor negative, she described the couple having ongoing roles in her life.
“Ian had been my pastor for years and years and I would see and speak with Ian and Heather a lot after church,” she said.
For the most part, Erin appeared settled in Gippsland.
Online, she followed social media updates of amateur theatre productions in the region. She told the court about how she applied to study nursing and midwifery at university (a course which she never commenced).
At one stage, she edited a local newsletter. She joined a Facebook group discussing the conviction of Keli Lane — who was jailed over the murder of her baby daughter — and followed the Instagram account of a podcast examining the allegations involving Jeffrey Epstein.
But the testimonies of other family members described Erin as drifting from the family in recent years, as tensions between her and Simon rose.
Private venting during times of family tension
Erin said she was hurt when she thought she was a last-minute invite to Gail’s 70th birthday celebration in the months before the fatal lunch.
“I felt hurt because I thought I’d been left off the invite list,” she testified.
There were also suggestions of the tense and strained relationships presented to the jury by prosecutors in screenshots of rants made by Erin to online friends about “deadbeat” Simon and his “lost cause” family.
From the first year of their son’s life, Simon and Erin went through a number of short-term separations, before a more permanent split and financial settlement was reached in 2015.
Simon told the court the pair remained close. They shared custody of their two children, went on family holidays together and had “chatty” communication.
But in 2022, Simon filed a tax return where he listed himself as single — the result of a mix-up with his accountant, he said.
This changed his relationship with Erin, who claimed child support through the federal government agency.
Simon said the agency told him to stop paying for school fees and medical bills he had been previously covering, a move that upset his increasingly estranged wife.
It is a tension of which the couple’s children and wider family were all aware.
Simon’s brother, Matthew, said that in the two years before the fatal lunch, Erin had missed some family events and her attendance at other events had been briefer.
Erin’s own online messages to friends, shown in court, showed the deep frustrations she sometimes felt after the breakdown of the relationship.
In one, amid discussion of child support issues, she described Simon’s family as a “lost cause”, before saying she wanted “nothing to do with them”.
In a further exchange about his family, she said “f*** em” .
During another a group chat, she said “this family, I swear to f***ing god”.
“Why isn’t she horrified her son is such a deadbeat that I had no choice but to claim?” Erin wrotes to a friend, referring to her mother-in-law.
In court, Erin told the jury she was “ashamed” of the way she’d spoken in those messages, but they reflected moments of frustration in what was otherwise a loving relationship with her in-laws.
After a jury verdict, Erin’s next chapter yet to be written
In the end, it was the jurors listening to the evidence who had to sift through the stories, and all the different accounts, of Erin Patterson.
To weigh up the evidence and consider the importance of an estranged wife venting online, an accused murderer insisting on her innocence and the conflicting accounts offered by Erin and other witnesses.
The trial is now over with convictions of murder and attempted murder handed down.
Three decades after that first minor newspaper reference, Erin Patterson has become a name steeped in infamy.
