When Shanelle Dawson was just four years old, her parents were at the centre of a suburban tragedy when Lyn Dawson suddenly went missing. Her mother’s disappearance would not be classified as murder until 2001, with her father eventually held responsible for the crime in 2022.
Just hours after her mother disappeared from her life, Shanelle’s teenage babysitter, Joanne Curtis (whom she refers to as “J” in her new book) moved into her mother’s bed, wore her mother’s clothes, and (from 1984), her mother’s wedding ring.
“I felt unloved by J,” Dawson writes of her reluctant stepmother, who was her father’s student (at Cromer High School on Sydney’s northern beaches) when they began their relationship. “She didn’t want to be my mother and she certainly wasn’t.” Curtis would divorce Chris Dawson in 1993.
