Chris Dawson has been found guilty of murdering his wife, Lynette.
Lynette disappeared from their Sydney home in 1982 and her body has never been found. The sole person who ever reported hearing from her again was Dawson, who claimed that she phoned him at various points after leaving him.
Lynette, the trial revealed, had suspected that Dawson had sexual contact with a teenage girl he’d recruited as a babysitter.
Chris Dawson did not give evidence at the trial. Among those who did give evidence was a woman known as “JC” – once upon a time, the teenage schoolgirl that Chris Dawson had become “infatuated” with when she was a student at the school where he taught.
JC went camping with her sisters and friends at South West Rocks in the north of New South Wales at the beginning of January 1982 – she called Dawson every day she was away from him, the court heard, because Dawson told her to. Then Dawson drove to South West Rocks to collect her. He told her: “Lyn’s gone, she’s not coming back, come back to Sydney and help look after the kids and live with me.”
It was found that Chris Dawson murdered Lynette while JC was away, on or around 8 January 1982. Dawson has always maintained his innocence and his lawyer has confirmed he will be appealing the conviction.
The story is notable not merely because it is sensationally grisly and impossibly sad. It’s notable because hope lurks for humanity within this lurid tale – and in two places.
The first is that while it took nearly 40 years for enough of an investigation into the murder of Lynette Dawson for Chris Dawson to face prosecution, it did happen, and justice is being done. It’s extraordinary to contemplate that a woman could vanish in the circumstances that Lynette did, and that two coronial inquests into her disappearance recommended “a person known” to her be investigated for her murder … and yet 40 years could pass before her husband faced trial.
But the world has changed in 40 years. The claims of men who are described by those who knew them as “a monster, a domineering control freak”, are not believed as they once were. The gruelling slog of feminist advocacy – in the courts, in the police, in the media and in ordinary conversation – has meant women’s voices are heard, their abusers are judged, the harms against them are recognised as harm.
The world has even changed in less than 20 years. In 2003, JC was still referred to as Chris Dawson’s “teenage lover” as opposed to what she was; a teenage schoolgirl who didn’t want to be there but had “nowhere else to go”.
The second source of hope in this story is the vindication it provides for the value of old-school investigative journalism.
The story of Lynette Dawson may also have vanished had it not been for journalist Hedley Thomas and his team creating The Teacher’s Pet, a 2018 podcast series that retold the story of the Dawsons with new insight and new evidence. Produced by Slade Gibson and published by the Australian newspaper in 2018, the dogged investigation made sophisticated use of the podcast format and earned an audience in the tens of millions.
Consternation in the wake of its popularity that the podcast didn’t bring more admissible evidence to light miss the point. The Teacher’s Pet made millions of people care about victims who may otherwise have been forgotten.
In 2018, a senior police source told Nine newspapers that “100%” renewed police involvement in the case resulted from “public pressure” after the podcast and the media and public interest that it stirred.
Attention. Activism. And now justice.
It is very least Lynette Dawson, and JC, deserved.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
