It has been 43 years since a vulnerable girl with a beautiful smile wandered innocently around the playground of a northern beaches high school in Sydney with an invisible target on her back. A girl who was the stereotypical prey for a clever, manipulative pedophile. A popular top footballer; a PE teacher at Cromer High.
The girl was targeted not just because she was strikingly attractive, and not just because Chris Dawson had seen a polaroid photograph of the 16-year-old’s breasts, snapped by a friend with a camera at a party or visit to the beach when teenage inhibitions were freed by a bottle of Passion Pop or a couple of vodka and orange drinks.
She was targeted, then seduced and moulded into the subject of her 32-year-old teacher’s infatuation because she was close to defenceless. Her home life was a chaotic mess. Her mother drank, her stepfather was violent to her mother and to her. Trauma was always nearby in a tiny flat near the beach.
Dawson promised her protection, affection and a safe home.
But there was a catch: she became, in her words, his “sex slave”.
That girl would have her life ruined by Christopher Michael Dawson. Her friends tell me she never had another relationship after leaving him in 1990 – she could never trust anyone again.
But with Wednesday’s verdict in the carnal knowledge trial, she has now, finally, completed a circle of justice.
She has shown thousands of victims of sexual abuse that even after 43 years, it is possible to hold perpetrators to account and achieve justice. We will never know how many other women and men, inspired by her bravery, will follow in her footsteps.
For the past 33 years, since the marriage broke down in 1990, Dawson and his relatives have condemned his original accuser as an embittered former wife, determined to wreak revenge with lurid claims of underage sex and the cold-blooded murder of a loving wife and mother, Lyn.
Dawson, who angrily cursed “f..k, f..k, f..k” after he was found guilty on Wednesday, played the “bitter ex-wife” card at every opportunity. In one telephone conversation covertly intercepted by police in September 2018 when The Teacher’s Pet podcast series was unfolding, he told his brother Gary: “Why should the whole family be penalised for my stupid … ’cause I had a f..king affair but married the bitch?”
In June 2018 when allegations of the predatory conduct of teachers, including Dawson and his twin brother Paul, were being aired in the podcast, the younger of Lyn’s two daughters lashed out at the woman who, at 17, replaced her suddenly missing mother.
“Stepmother was a bitch,” she said. “She made up all these false lies, and then she screwed my Dad over. She’s got to live with that. I don’t want to be around all this negativity and this falseness.”
They were not lies. Dawson was not “screwed over”. He had sex with a schoolgirl, killed his first wife, and when the former schoolgirl wife raised her serious concerns, and as it all began to go awry, he tried to blame everyone else: her, the police, Lyn’s family and friends, me.
The evidence heard by District Court judge Sarah Huggett was damning. Just as it was in the murder trial before judge Ian Harrison. While the loyalty of Dawson’s flesh and blood – his siblings and their families, and one of his two daughters with Lyn – is understandable, they must surely now have grave doubts.
What now for the other teachers who preyed on teenage students around the same time as Dawson was planning, then executing, the murder of an adoring wife and mother?
From the police evidence I have seen, as well as from our investigations for The Teacher’s Pet and subsequent reporting, I have no doubt more than a dozen and perhaps 20 retired teachers from northern beaches high schools should be facing similar carnal knowledge trials.
Some of their alleged victims, beautiful, vulnerable girls just like Dawson’s accuser in 1980, are grateful she led the way.
They may not need to endure the stress of reliving the teenage experiences because she has achieved this result now.
Some, however, may now be confident enough to press charges.
And if they do, Strike Force Southwood’s Detective Sergeant Laura Beacroft will back them every step of the way.
In the meantime, they may take comfort from the fact that the fear of hearing a knock on the door and being made accountable after four decades of freedom haunts those teachers, every single day.
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