Shanelle Dawson honours her murdered mother Lynette

Lynette Dawson with baby daughter Shanelle

“Why didn’t you divorce her? Let those who loved and needed her keep her? (Was it) because of money? For God’s sake.”

Shanelle Dawson honoured her mother Lyn on Thursday in the most poignant, moving and courageous way.

With equal parts anger and sorrow, she stared down her convicted murderer father, Chris Dawson, in a Sydney courtroom.

Shanelle explained to her father and to Justice Ian Harrison how the rippling ongoing impacts of the cold-blooded killing of a doting mother have profound and ongoing impacts, four decades later.

Shanelle was aged 4 in January 1982. She was just weeks from starting preschool when her mother disappeared from her life, her home, her family and friends, never to be heard from again.

Lynette Joy Dawson was last seen by anyone on the night of Friday, January 8, 1982. She was murdered soon afterwards. Perhaps within minutes, perhaps a few hours, of an unusual telephone conversation with her mother Helena.

Shanelle Dawson, left, outside the Federal Court in Sydney on Thursday. Picture: Jeremy Piper

Their chat on that fateful Friday evening was unusual for two reasons.

Lyn told her mother that her marriage was not doomed after all – Lyn was confident that the counselling she and Chris went to that same day had somehow changed everything.

She must have been persuaded by her teacher husband that his lustful obsession with his former student, the family’s teenage babysitter, had finally fizzled out.

The other unusual thing is that Lyn, who was not a drinker, sounded “half sozzled” to her mother Helena.

Lyn must have died a short time later. And most likely in the family home at Gilwinga Drive, Bayview, as the noisy cicadas laid down summer’s soundtrack.

Shanelle has pictured the murder scene from that night

Chris Dawson. Picture: Damian Shaw

too many times. It has haunted her in her waking hours and in her sleep. Unlike her younger sister, Shanelle is sure of her father’s guilt.

She has been to clairvoyants and spiritualists for answers. She has traipsed lonely ground looking for her mother’s remains.

As she bravely told the
court through her tears, her life has been marked by deep emotional wounds and damage for many years.

The lies her father told her – “your mother went away and doesn’t love you enough to return” – were crippling.

One of Chris Dawson’s most cruel acts after murdering his wife Lyn was his campaign to persuade her parents, her siblings and her two little girls that she was alive.

Shanelle’s capacity to trust, to believe in people, irrevocably damaged her relationships with friends, partners and family.

She tried to shield her own adorable little girl from the truth of her family’s dark past.

Until the youngster’s friend blurted it out one day – “Your grandmother was murdered by your grandfather.”

“She had many questions and anger, confusion and grief. She kept asking me, ‘why did he do that?’,’’ Shanelle told the court.

“The same question that’s tortured me over and over now for many years.”

Shanelle implored her father to answer her questions.

Tell her where her mother’s remains are.

Admit to her his guilt.

But nobody expects that Christopher Michael Dawson ever will.

He did such a good job of convincing many others for years that Lyn had simply walked away from it all, he’s convinced himself of this lie, too.