There was no dispute that Lynette Dawson, a married mother of two, disappeared from her family home on Sydney’s northern beaches 40 years ago.
What was contested during the murder trial of her former husband, Christopher Michael Dawson, was why she had vanished.
Did she leave to start a new life? Or was she killed by Dawson, a former teacher who was having an affair with one of his high school students?
On Tuesday, New South Wales supreme court Justice Ian Harrison found Dawson was responsible for Lynette’s disappearance – and guilty of murder.
The remarkable case was inextricably linked with a hit true-crime podcast that was awarded the highest honour in Australian journalism.
Dawson, 74, a former Newtown Jets rugby league player, pleaded not guilty and still maintains his innocence. His lawyer said after Tuesday’s verdict “he’ll certainly appeal”.
Police had been investigating the 1982 disappearance of Lynette Dawson when the Australian newspaper published its podcast series, the Teacher’s Pet, in 2018.
It was listened to tens of millions of times and cast a spotlight on police missteps in the case while portraying Dawson as a man who had escaped justice for killing his wife.
There was no body and no crime scene, but within months of the podcast being released, NSW police charged Dawson with murder.
Harrison found the lack of a body or a crime scene – despite the police excavation of a swimming pool and new tennis court at the matrimonial home – immaterial. He had been convinced by the prosecution’s circumstantial case, citing numerous lies he found Dawson had told after he killed his wife.
Harrison in his judgment said Dawson lied about wanting to stay in a relationship with Lynette Dawson. He lied about wanting to end the affair with JC, the teenager he had met when she was his student at Cromer high school.
Dawson offered alternative theories as to where Lynette could be, saying it would be odd if someone so intelligent happened to be brainwashed into joining a cult. He claimed to lay awake at night, wishing she would call. And he lied that she had called multiple times, but that each time nobody else was in earshot.
‘I am left in no doubt’
Harrison found the lies were meant to “deflect all or any attention away” from Dawson but had done the opposite – they helped demonstrate he was guilty.
“None of the circumstances considered alone can establish Mr Dawson’s guilt,” Harrison said. “But when regard is had to their combined force, I am left in no doubt.”
Dawson’s legal team had argued for a permanent stay on proceedings, arguing that the publicity generated by the podcast and the four-decade delay in prosecuting him meant he could not receive a fair trial.
His application, which he took all the way to the high court, failed, but Dawson succeeded in a separate application for a judge-only trial when the NSW supreme court agreed that “the nature of the podcast and its extremely wide distribution raises real concerns about the fairness of a trial” before a jury.
The prosecution’s case was that Dawson killed Lynette so he could continue his affair with JC.
The court heard the affair started when she was a 16-year-old student at the school where Dawson, then in his early 30s, worked as a PE teacher. She eventually moved into the family home in 1981 to help look after Dawson’s two daughters, who were two and four when their mother disappeared on 9 January 1982.
It quickly became clear Dawson and JC were in a relationship. Over the Christmas break in 1981, Dawson and JC even left together in a failed bid to move to Queensland.
The prosecution claimed that soon after this Dawson decided to kill Lynette as it meant he would be able to have an “unfettered” relationship with JC and retain ownership of assets including their home in the northern beaches suburb of Bayview, which would have been divided in the event of a divorce. She moved back into the home shortly after Lynette’s disappearance.
Crown prosecutor Craig Everson SC said Dawson had three motives for the alleged murder: his animosity towards his wife, which led to verbal and physical abuse; his infatuation with JC; and his desire to avoid the legal and financial consequences of divorce.
To prove Dawson had acted on these motives, Everson tried to fit together evidence he described as a “small piece of a larger mural of circumstances”, or as “a strand in the cable”.
Harrison found some of these strands less than convincing.
Of evidence that Dawson had once flicked Lynette with a tea towel in the presence of another babysitter, the judge said: “Some people might argue that it’s a pretty long drive through a dark night to contend that flicking someone with a towel is associated with killing them.”
Commenting on evidence from a neighbour that she had seen Lynette and Dawson arguing in their backyard near a trampoline, Harrison said: “If domestic arguments between spouses were indicative of somebody’s predisposition to kill their spouse, then we’re probably all in strife aren’t we?”
Harrison said on Tuesday he did not consider either of these claims – introduced by the prosecution as so-called tendency evidence to prove Dawson was capable of harming his wife – assisted him in reaching a verdict.
He said the tendency evidence did not allow him to make a finding about whether Dawson ever engaged in physical or non-physical domestic violence against his wife.
All the while, the podcast lingered in the background. According to evidence heard during the trial, it had even influenced the police’s murder investigation.
Police tapped Dawson’s phone specifically because of the podcast, hoping he might say something incriminating while discussing it with family or friends.
It did not work. Instead, police heard Dawson and his twin brother Paul ranting about the journalist involved, the Australian’s Hedley Thomas, whom they referred to as a “fucking wanker”, and speculating that JC should be the prime suspect, arguing she had the most to gain from Lynette’s death. There is no suggestion that JC played any role in Lynette Dawson’s disappearance.
The lead police officer in the case told the court he had had to take care when taking statements from witnesses to make sure they had not suffered “unconscious contamination” by listening to the podcast or from having been interviewed by Thomas for the podcast.
Some witnesses gave remarkable evidence. A man’s claim that Dawson asked him on a busy flight from the Gold Coast to Sydney in 1975 if he knew someone who could get rid of his wife was dismissed by Harrison.
Another man said he had spoken to a woman he was sure was Lynette at a pub in 1982, and she gave the impression she had deliberately left home without any belongings so that police would think she had been murdered by her husband.
“I’m not here just to muck around,” the man, who had convictions for armed robbery and drug offences, said under cross-examination from Everson. “I’m here because I believe what I say.”
Harrison dismissed the evidence in his verdict, remarking that given the man’s tough life he “could not be described as a feather in fortune’s cap”.
Dawson’s lawyers called other witnesses who also reported sightings of Lynette after it was alleged she was killed, including one who said they had seen her working as a nurse in a hospital near her former home.
Harrison found none of these sightings occurred.
The defence argument
Pauline David, for Dawson, had argued that not only was it possible Lynette was not dead, but the motives suggested by Everson did not hold up to scrutiny.
David said evidence that Dawson was violent or abusive towards his wife had been coloured by witnesses’ negative perceptions about him or contaminated by hearing the podcast or speaking to Thomas.
Dawson could have had a relationship with his wife while having sex with JC, she said, adding that loving two women at the same time was something the French did as “a national sport”.
The disappearance of Lynette did not eliminate a problem, but caused one, David said, as JC did not want to care for the Dawson’s daughters. Any financial benefit was eliminated by the cost of becoming a single parent.
It was true Lynette had made plans, including a surprise birthday party and arranging an artist to draw portraits of her daughters, but she had nonetheless decided to leave the family home without taking any belongings, David said.
Harrison found the making of these plans, and other reasons offered by the prosecution, were “strongly persuasive” when considered together.
These included that she adored her children, was mentally stable, had not taken any clothing or personal belongings with her, and remained hopeful of reconciling her marriage with Dawson, despite his affair with JC.
Harrison said that to accept submissions made by lawyers for Dawson that his wife had left the Bayview home of her own accord “without even a change of underwear” would be to replace reasonable possibility with “frail speculation”.
David also argued the officers involved in investigations into Lynette’s disappearance between 1998 and 2015 held a fixed view about Dawson’s guilt and ignored evidence that corroborated his statements or showed that his wife was alive.
“They are lying … they are corrupted,” she said.
“Their attitude to Christopher Dawson was significantly a prejudiced one.”
Dawson did not give evidence during his trial.
On Tuesday, while waiting for the courtroom to open, supporters of Lynette Dawson, including Thomas, gathered at the doors, pink ribbons in bows on their left breasts, handing a box of pink face masks down the queue.
Dawson stood around the side and to the back with about eight supporters, entirely removed from the throng and yet the main reason for its existence.
Many of those who travelled to court for the verdict appeared to be followers of the podcast, who had to be warned by NSW sheriffs not to take photos inside the court building.
“I suppose it’s an age thing,” one such supporter quipped. “But I find it hard to have a sheriff without a horse and a big white hat.”
When a jury delivers a verdict in a murder trial, they do not have to justify their decision. Harrison, by comparison, spent almost five hours on Tuesday delivering the reasons for his judgment.
Soon after the words “I find you guilty” were spoken, Dawson was taken into custody in a hushed courtroom 13A.
Next door, in the larger ceremonial Banco court, where the verdict was being livestreamed, the audience erupted in cheers.
– Australian Associated Press contributed to this report
