Chris Dawson’s former student and babysitter has insisted the former Sydney rugby league player told her his wife was never coming back after she disappeared.
The woman, known only as JC, told the NSW Supreme Court on Friday Dawson, 73, who is accused of murdering his wife, Lynette, begged her to move into his house in early January 1982 because his wife had gone off with a religious sect and he needed her help to look after the couple’s two children.
Asked by defence barrister Pauline David if Dawson had made it clear to her that if his wife returned home, she would have to leave, JC replied: “Absolutely did not.”
JC, who claimed Dawson had treated her like a sex slave, said she moved into the Bayview, Sydney, house just a few weeks before she turned 18 because she felt she had nowhere else to go.
“I felt obligated. I didn’t feel like I had a choice,” JC told the court.
JC denied being happy Lynette was gone.
” I didn’t want the responsibility of cooking, cleaning, looking after Lyn’s children who she loved. I wondered where she was.
“I wanted her to come back so I could go and live my life as a 17-year-old.”
JC said she remembered thinking, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on here? What am I going to do? Why am I here?
“He (Dawson) couldn’t cook, he couldn’t clean, do the washing.”
JC said at one stage she had to look up a cook book to learn how to do mashed potatoes as Dawson and the two children sat at the counter watching her.
“It was an awful situation.”
JC denied creating an “entirely imaginary scenario” about her life with Dawson at the time.
Shown five photographs of her and Dawson on their wedding day in 1984, JC rejected the suggestion she had been the “quintessential beaming bride”.
“I think I resigned myself to the fact that I was not going to get away from him because I tried and he had pursued me down the street … I don’t feel as though I had a choice.”
Dawson and JC separated in 1990.
Dawson has pleaded not guilty in the judge-alone trial to murdering his wife.
The crown case against Dawson is that he killed his wife and disposed of her body because of his affair with JC.
Ms David claimed Dawson might have failed his wife as a husband, but he did not kill her.
She said the police investigation into Ms Dawson’s disappearance had been flawed and they had failed to follow up alleged phone calls from her and sightings of her after she had supposedly been murdered.
The trial before Justice Ian Harrison continues.
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