The Teacher’s Pet: A rookie reporter and a killer: how paths crossed, sparking 40-year fight for justice

Journalist Hedley Thomas is about to release his definitive book on the Christopher Dawson case – The Teacher’s Pet – after a 40-year obsession that ultimately led to a murder conviction.

Career-long bid for truth about Lynette Dawson … journalist and author Hedley Thomas at his Brisbane home. Picture: Justine Walpole

In late 1984, a Sydney schoolteacher by the name of Christopher Michael Dawson decided to pack up his life on Sydney’s northern beaches and start afresh on Queensland’s Gold Coast with his new young wife and children.

Dawson, a physical education teacher, was set to take up a new position at Keebra Park State High (Honesta quam Splendida: Honourable Deeds rather than Splendid Ones).

Keebra Park, in Southport, had a growing reputation for producing first-grade rugby league players, a perfect fit for Dawson who, with his identical twin brother Paul, had once played for the Newtown Jets in Sydney.

At that precise moment of Dawson’s sea-change, Keebra schoolboy Hedley Thomas, 17, left his studies behind and started work as a copyboy on the local newspaper, the Gold Coast Bulletin. The newspaper’s offices were just a few kilometres north of his old school.

Dawson and Thomas, in a ­sliding-doors moment, missed each other by a matter of weeks.

As Dawson prepared for the new school year, his first wife Lynette, having gone missing just three years earlier from the family home in Bayview Heights, Thomas was running typed copy and making coffee for the sub-editors over at the Bulletin on the Southport-Nerang Road.

So began what would become an almost 40-year dance between Thomas and Dawson. That wide-eyed copyboy would ultimately become intrigued, then obsessed, with the mysterious disappearance of Dawson’s first wife in Sydney in 1982, and in the end produce stories and a podcast that would see Dawson charged and convicted of murdering Lyn.

Thomas, now 56, an eight-time Walkley Award winner, will next week release his definitive book on the subject – The Teacher’s Pet. He remains haunted by the incongruous touchstones that intermittently bound him to Dawson over the decades.

“Two years after Lyn’s murdered, I’m finishing high school and I’m just starting at a newspaper, not as a reporter but a copyboy, and I’m praying I can become a reporter,” he said on Friday.

“At the start of my career I must have seen Dawson because he was the assistant coach at Keebra Park and I started as a cadet in sport. If Dawson hadn’t gone to Keebra Park as his first job after leaving Sydney, would it have triggered me? I was partly intrigued and interested in his story because of that. That he’d gone to teach at my old school. It was almost as if everything was fated.”

Fast forward to 2001, and Thomas, now an accomplished journalist, noticed a handful of Sydney newspaper reports on an inquest into the disappearance of nurse and childcare worker Lynette Joy Dawson.

Once again, Chris Dawson, was in the frame. He had moved on from Keebra Park and at that time was teaching at a girls’ school in Yeppoon on the central Queensland coast. In the wake of the brief inquest, Thomas headed to Sydney to investigate.

“Then another inexplicable event happens,” Thomas said. “I called a cop, Damian Loone (who had been investigating Lyn’s disappearance since 1998), who said to me: ‘mate, I’ve got permission to show you the whole brief’.

“That’s never happened to me before. I’ve never in my career had a police officer say – come into the police station and you can read the entire brief of evidence and take notes to write about it.”

That research resulted in the feature story “Looking for Lyn”, published by Thomas’ then employer, The Courier-Mail newspaper in Brisbane. It was the first substantial story on Lyn’s disappearance and probable murder. It also exposed Dawson’s questionable sexual behaviour with a student when he worked at Sydney’s Cromer High in the early 1980s.

Thomas said it infuriated both Chris and his twin brother Paul, also a physical education teacher in Queensland. That feature led to an investigation by the Queensland education department into Dawson. As a result, Chris lost his teaching job.

The dance continued through another inquest into Lyn’s disappearance in 2003 and then via the global juggernaut podcast on the case – The Teacher’s Pet – released in May 2018. It had been 34 years since the schoolboy and the teacher had almost brushed shoulders on the Keebra Park High School campus.

By December 2018, Dawson was arrested and charged with murder. “I’m not religious, but it’s almost like something else was going on in the universe to try and right a terrible wrong,” Thomas said. “It’s a story of karma. He nearly got away with murder.”

One story, four decades in the making. One reporter who couldn’t let it go.

Thomas is on the organising committee for his school alumni’s 40th reunion next year. It’s safe to say they’ll be discussing the former physical education teacher. And Thomas. And all that he did to right a wrong.

As they say at Keebra Park – Honourable Deeds rather than Splendid Ones.

The Teacher’s Pet by Hedley Thomas will be published on Tuesday by Pan Macmillan Australia.