Bright ending for Lyn’s close friend and neighbour

Julie Andrew, Lyn Simms’ friend and neighbour. John Feder/The Australian

Julie Andrew sees the end, and it’s bright.

Lyn Simms’ friend and neighbour at Gilwinga Drive, Bayview – where nature’s soundtrack from the cicadas is as deafening now as four decades ago when the two were young mums and close – views Chris Dawson’s sentencing on Friday as a finality.

A chance to move forward without this black cloud above and around her.

Around everyone.

A maddening, awful injustice is properly corrected. It should be over now.

“There’s a resolution to 40 years of doubt and fears and pain,’’ Julie told me from her terrace house in Balmain, far from the northern beaches and half a lifetime from her friendship with Lyn.

“The sentencing brings a tragic saga that you and I have been involved in to an end. That’s the final word.

“I have always maintained through everything I said about Lyn that she would never leave her children.

“I’m seeing my children, my grandchildren. We’ve all had our lives. Lyn hasn’t. Lyn has been 40 years dead.

“She comes into my head all the time. Three or four times a week, I have this overwhelming thought of her. And then I sort of think to myself, ‘it’s okay, sweetheart, you can rest – we love you’.”

During Chris Dawson’s murder trial, Julie made an impression on Justice Ian Harrison in Sydney’s Supreme Court. She must have made a powerful impression on Crown Prosecutor Craig Everson SC, too, because Julie was the first witness he called in what was a brilliantly run trial for the Office of the DPP.

In 2018, after I had recorded many dozens of hours of interviews and had no idea where, or with whom, to start telling Lyn’s story in the first episode of The Teacher’s Pet podcast series, it was Julie Andrew and her clear-eyed, firm but reasoned views that stood out and would lead the way.

Julie’s strong position in the podcast and then in the murder trial was that she was sure in 1982 and ever since that this was foul play, the murder of her friend Lyn. She described incidents and conversations with vivid detail.

Her certainty made her failure to act, her failure to alert police at that time, even as a former schoolgirl moved into Lyn’s house and bed, harder to fathom.

But Julie’s explanations for this were also compelling, in listeners’ ears and in the Supreme Court.

When we first met and she poured tea from a kettle which groaned and creaked on the gas stove, Julie described seeing Lyn in her dreams. Julie would be saying sorry to her in those dreams.

“I will always feel the pain of impotence, of the fact that I didn’t act,’’ she told me on Friday.

“And I’m sure I’m not alone in that. Her family were all much more connected with what was happening at the time.

“But in their case, this very clever narcissist was feeding them a line and they adored him. That’s his magic trick. That’s his skill. And you could see that even through the trial.

“He was dumbfounded that he was found guilty. He was like ‘How could they find me guilty. I’m Chris Dawson’.

“I think in my case … I failed to protect her. Because I didn’t know how. I didn’t know that I could or that I should.

“This happened 40 years ago when things were very, very different for women.

“And so now with the experience of a life long-lived – as an older woman, yeah, of course we do things differently.

“We protect women differently.

“But back then, it was not done to question people in authority – to question the police.

“So then nothing happened and it was all just sort of forgotten for years.

“I always knew something was going to happen, but I just didn’t know how.”

Justice Harrison’s sentence of 24 years with a non-parole period of 18 years will likely see Dawson carried out in a coffin.

Lyn has her name back. It’s Dawson no more. She’s a Simms again.

Julie Andrew, freed of her own sense of guilt for not having demanded a police investigation 40 years ago, sees not just closure but her young friend as she was in 1982.

“She’s eternally young. When I think of Lyn, she is that same person, that same gorgeous, fair-haired, smiley faced, gentle woman that I knew then. And it gives me great comfort.”