The Teacher’s Pet: Hedley Thomas reveals how podcast investigating Lyn Dawson’s disappearance was made

Hedley Thomas reveals the lengths he took to try and uncover the truth about what happened to Lyn Dawson. See how you can listen to his smash hit podcast now.

Making The Teacher’s Pet was a wild ride of stress and pressure, investigative journalist Hedley Thomas says as the podcast is re-released to Australian audiences.

The worldwide smash hit was taken down in Australia for legal reasons after Chris Dawson was charged with murder — but after his conviction on Tuesday it is now available again.

Thomas said he was a novice podcaster in 2017 when he began the project, revisiting a cold-case that had haunted him since he was a young feature writer at the Courier-Mail newspaper.

Journalist Hedley Thomas was scrutinised for his podcast The Teacher’s Pet. Picture: Getty Images

“I’m not an audio expert, and some of the audio sounds pretty raw and rushed,” Thomas said from the studio where he is overseeing a comprehensive re-editing of the podcast.

“I’m recording in my car, I’m recording on the deck, you’ll hear our dog Molly squeal at times, and the dishwasher door closing. It was a bit haphazard, so I ask people to bear with that,” he said.

“(Producer Slade Gibson) did a remarkable job with some pretty dodgy audio from me and with incredible deadlines, because we were producing an episode a week sometimes. And after about episode five, we had nothing. An episode would drop on a Friday or a Thursday night and then I’d start with a blank canvas.

“I was doing more interviews because people were coming out of the woodwork to talk to me. It was impossible to stop, but incredibly difficult to keep up with it all, and we knew we just had to get to the finish line.”

Chris Dawson & wife Lynette. Picture: Supplied

After Dawson was charged with the murder of his wife Lyn, Thomas and The Australian’s editors decided in 2019 to take the podcast down for Australian audiences.

Dawson mounted a sustained legal campaign for freedom, going all the way to the High Court with the argument he could not possibly get a fair trial because the podcast had prejudiced any possible jury pool.

All his claims were ultimately rejected, but only after Thomas had been required to hand over to Dawson’s defence lawyers all his notes, recordings and scripts.

“The podcast and my work came under an enormous amount of scrutiny. There were subpoenas that were all-encompassing, and there were days of cross-examination in the Supreme Court, which were not pleasant,” Thomas said.

“As a result of all of that I didn’t want to listen to The Teacher’s Pet for a while; revisiting it was just a bit stressful.

The Australian’s podcast The Teacher’s Trial – which will soon hit five million worldwide downloads – has included snippets of the original Teacher’s Pet audio, and Thomas said he’d enjoyed the process of listening again to his original work.

“I’ve been able to go back into all the episodes, listen to them again and just remember what a wild ride it was.”