Suburban tragedy … but will Chris Dawson be found guilty of murdering wife Lyn?
Chris Dawson is a murder suspect like no other, so can the facts pin it on him now?
Every weekday morning for the past two months, Christopher Michael Dawson, 73, the former high school teacher, rugby league star and fashion model, shuffled into NSW Supreme Court 9D in Sydney – flanked by his legal team – and took his seat beneath the room’s white-faced wall clock.
Dawson, charged with murdering his wife Lyn, who disappeared without a trace in early January 1982, invariably wore, day after day in his trial, a grey or a dark navy suit and sat in a large fawn swivel chair on steel wheels.
For the duration of the trial, he barely moved in that chair, save the application and removal of his Covid mask. He rarely took notes. And he never smiled.
His trial was “judge alone” – that is, it was held before His Honour Justice Ian Harrison in the absence of a jury.
During the course of the trial, which began on May 9, Dawson literally witnessed the unspooling of his life, from marrying his high school sweetheart, Lyn, in 1970, through to the birth of their two daughters, his years of teaching physical education at Cromer High, his extra work as a part-time lifeguard at the Northbridge Baths and occasional garbo, the construction of the family home in Gilwinga Drive in Bayview Heights on Sydney’s northern beaches, and his exceptionally close relationship with his identical twin brother, Paul.
The trial narrative, however, quickly entered a darker corridor. Dawson, the court heard, had developed an infatuation with one of his Cromer students known during the trial as “JC”.
The attractive JC not only became the Dawsons’ regular babysitter, from 1980, aged 16, but briefly became a lodger in Gilwinga Drive in late 1981. Dawson had offered her safe haven from a troubled home life, and a stable environment in which to complete her HSC.
Where better than in a home that backed on to quiet bushland? And in the care of one of her respected teachers? By this stage, however, Dawson and JC were allegedly having sexual relations. He was 33. She was just 17.
Lyn accused JC of taking liberties with her husband, and the schoolgirl moved two doors down in Gilwinga Drive to Chris’s brother Paul’s place. According to the Crown, Chris Dawson at this stage wanted “unfettered” access to his lover.
So at the end of 1981, as Christmas loomed, Dawson packed a bag and fled north to Queensland to start a new life, with JC. The journey was aborted and the couple returned to Sydney. Chris Dawson went back to the family home.
Then by early 1982, JC went north again to the seaside village of South West Rocks on the NSW Mid North Coast for a holiday with schoolfriends and her sisters. She was having second thoughts about Dawson. He was then 33.
Purported sightings
On Saturday, January 9, 1982, Lyn, 33, who had supposedly gone shopping at some city markets in the morning, was later due to meet her husband, two daughters, her own mother Helena Simms and a family friend, Phillip Day, at the Northbridge Baths where Chris was on duty as a lifesaver.
According to Dawson, Lyn phoned him at the baths to let him know she needed a few days away to sort herself out. Lyn Dawson has never been seen or heard from since.
For decades, her disappearance on that distant morning was nothing more than a forgotten domestic drama that had played out behind the drawn curtains of Australian suburbia.
Dawson appeared to be the abandoned husband. But despite the speculation at the time – she had joined up with a religious group, she had skipped over to New Zealand, she was on the NSW Central Coast – she never got back in touch with her own children or her loving family.
In those first couple of years, there had been purported sightings of Lyn. Someone had supposedly glimpsed her standing at a bus stop in the Sydney suburb of Gladesville not long after she vanished.
A family friend saw a person who looked like Lyn in a crowd during the royal visit of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in Sydney in 1983. A man swore he saw her, dressed in nurse’s uniform in a northern beaches hospital in 1984. Nobody actual spoke to her.
Then a surprise witness at the trial said he had had a lengthy conversation in a pub at Warner’s Bay near Newcastle with a woman he said he was “200 per cent” certain was Lyn not long after her vanishing. Save the surprise witness, many sightings had been made by either members of the Dawson family or their close friends. There was never a single sighting by Lyn’s family, the Simmses.
Starting to falter
The backdrop to much of this extraordinary drama was the full cinemascope of the 1970s and early ’80s: suburban shopping malls, flared trousers, two-door Toranas, big sunglasses, Craven A cigarettes, crockpots and dinner parties, Cinzano and Lindeman’s Ben Ean, colour television, frocks from Katies, the Partridge Family, ABBA, teenage discotheques, barbecues and long summer days on Sydney’s northern beaches.
And while Chris and Lyn appeared to be the perfect couple – a lovely home with a pool, two beautiful children, good jobs, he a teacher, she a nurse – family, friends and neighbours saw signs in the late ’70s and into the ’80s that the marriage was starting to falter.
Did Lyn simply walk away from her life and start again? Had the pressures of motherhood and a philandering husband prompted some form of mental collapse?
Dawson alleged that his wife had called him on a few occasions after she went missing, saying she needed further time to sort herself out. Then there were no more calls.
Six weeks after her vanishing, Dawson officially reported her as a missing person. He published a note to her in the classified ad columns of the Sydney Daily Telegraph on March 27, 1982. It read: “Lyn I love you, We all miss you. Please ring. We want you home. Chris.”
At the time that personal note was published, JC was living permanently at 2 Gilwinga Drive.
Two years after Lyn supposedly walked away, Dawson married JC. They had a daughter together and moved to the Gold Coast to start a new life.
Months turned into years. And ultimately – even after two coronial inquests into the mystery of Lyn Dawson – decades.
It wasn’t until 2018 that Dawson was charged with his wife’s murder following a refreshed police investigation that coincided with the research and ultimate release of a podcast about Lyn’s disappearance by award-winning investigative journalist Hedley Thomas. The Teacher’s Pet was a global hit and to date has had more than 60 million “listens”.
As the podcast made its way to listeners across the planet, Chris Dawson was enjoying retired life on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. He was a grandfather. The happiness of his twilight years seemed assured. Then the world unexpectedly came knocking on his door.
What the podcast revealed, as did the trial, was the shadow beyond those suburban curtains up on Gilwinga Drive.
In Court 9D, Dawson sat through a litany of allegations that opened a window on seedy Sydney in the ’70s, when Dawson and his brother were star players for the Newtown Jets rugby league team.
That team included Paul Hayward, a man who would later be convicted and jailed for heroin importation. Hayward, it transpired, was brother-in-law to notorious multiple murderer, rapist and armed robber Neddy Smith, who sometimes joined Hayward for a drink at the Henson Park Hotel, the local watering hole for the Jets.
Another young player for the Jets was a man called Robert Silkman, who was good friends with Hayward and had in fact met Smith on one occasion at the Henson Park pub. It was alleged that Dawson, after an end of season trip to the Gold Coast in 1975, supposedly sought advice from Silkman on how to acquire a hit man to kill his wife. The theory was debunked by the defence.
The trial heard evidence from more than 50 witnesses, including former Bayview neighbours, several of Lyn’s work colleagues from the Warriewood childcare centre where she had worked, Lyn’s relatives, retired detectives who had worked on Lyn’s disappearance through the late ’80s, ’90s and into the 2000s, Dawson’s identical twin brother Paul and his wife Marilyn, his sister Lynette, and, of course, journalist Hedley Thomas.
One of the defence’s primary claims was that the work of Thomas and The Teacher’s Pet may have contaminated the memories of witnesses in Dawson’s trial. The majority had already given statements to police through the years before the release of the podcast.
He called Lyn ‘fatso’
Some of the most dynamic testimony came from the babysitter JC herself. She gave evidence over four days. Now in her late 50s, she was confident in the witness box despite recalling distressing moments in her relationship with Dawson.
At 2.51pm on Wednesday, May 18, JC entered the witness stand wearing a floral blouse, black slacks and black shoes.
She was asked how she had come to be in Dawson’s PE class at Cromer High in 1980.
“He told me he’d seen me in the playground the year before when I was 15 and decided he wanted to get to know me better because he was attracted to me and took my class,” JC told the court.
He left love notes in her schoolbag. He gave her birthday and Valentine’s Day cards with affectionate inscriptions.
In 1980, Dawson took JC home to Gilwinga Drive and she swam topless in the backyard pool.
When she lived in the house for a few weeks in late 1981, she said Dawson sang songs with double meanings around Lyn as a way of hurting his wife’s feelings. She told the court he called Lyn “fatso” and laughed.
On Friday nights, after Lyn had had a few drinks and fell asleep on the couch, Dawson and JC would have sex in the spare room.
Lyn twigged in early November 1981 and accused JC of “taking liberties” with her husband. The schoolgirl moved two doors down to brother Paul Dawson’s place. She lived there while she completed her HSC.
On December 23, Chris and JC packed up the car and headed to Queensland for a new life together. But the trip was almost over before it began. “I got sick on the way up, I had hives and a gastric disturbance,” she said. “I was very unhappy and I wanted to come, home; I missed my family.”
Sensationally, she recalled how Dawson had once driven her across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and into the western suburbs where he stopped at a hotel. She stayed in the car.
When he returned she alleged he said he’d gone in search of a hit man to kill Lyn but had decided against it because innocent people might get hurt.
When she was holidaying in South West Rocks in early January 1982, she spoke every day to Dawson on the phone. He had told her to call him at a specific time.
In one phone conversation she claimed Dawson told her that “Lyn’s gone and she’s not coming back”, and that he wanted her to come home to Bayview, look after his children and be with him.
Dawson drove 460km overnight from Sydney to South West Rocks, picked her up and took her straight back to Gilwinga Drive. She said it was around Sunday, January 10, or Monday January 11.
JC said they slept “in Lyn’s bed”. That the wardrobe was filled to bursting with Lyn’s clothes, including her underwear. JC noticed a small basket that contained Lyn’s rings.
Then life rolled on. And it was not what JC expected.
“I was 18, taking care of two children, having to learn to cook, having to learn to clean, being a substitute housekeeper, sex slave, stepmother, babysitter,” she told the court. The couple married in 1984 and separated in 1990.
In court, Dawson sat in that fawn swivel chair through all of this. He rarely removed his gaze from JC as she gave her evidence. Throughout the case, a variety of exhibits were shown on the court’s television monitors. They ranged from photographs of Lyn and Chris at school formals, on their wedding day and raising their children up at Bayview.
Then came the cards with their loving inscriptions that Dawson had given JC down the years. Lyn’s job application for the Warriewood childcare centre position popped up, her handwriting impossibly small and neat. There were entries from the diaries of Lyn’s mother Helena.
Even an old ABC TV Chequerboard documentary about twins from 1975, starring Chris and Paul Dawson, played up on those screens. Incredibly, the court got to see a three-dimensional Lyn who was interviewed for the program. She was attractive, young, clear-skinned, well-spoken and possessed a gentle laugh. It was heartbreaking.
Secret police telephone intercepts were also played to the court. They heard Chris and Paul Dawson speaking about the police investigations into Lyn’s disappearance, about detectives using ground-penetrating radar hoping to find Lyn’s body, and about how JC probably had more motive than anybody to get rid of Lyn.
On several occasions, they mentioned the possibility that their phones were tapped. Was this genuine eavesdropping by the police, or just theatre from the Dawson clan?
Observing Dawson since the start of the trial, with all this history entering the court – including moving images of his former wife – it was difficult to reconcile the elderly man with a rickety gait with the vital athlete and fashion model who appeared on those screens. Indeed, as the trial moved forward, he appeared more tired and less confident by the week.
In the last days of the trial, he could be seen through the glass of a small meeting room outside the court simply sitting with his hands palms down on his knees and with his eyes closed.
Ruthlessly efficient
Crown prosecutor Craig Everson SC concluded his final submission in the early afternoon of Tuesday July 5.
As Everson had shown throughout the murder trial, his argument was clear, logical, structured and ruthlessly efficient.
Dawson, the crown contended, had numerous motives to murder his wife, and at the heart of it all was his desire for JC.
He concluded: “A true verdict, according to the evidence, is guilty.”
At 1.58pm on that same day, defence barrister Pauline David rose to give her final submission and stated off the bat that Chris Dawson had not killed Lynette Dawson.
In fact, he didn’t even have a motive to murder his wife, she said.
She stressed to the court that her client had never been given the presumption of innocence. Everything he had said or done had been viewed “through the prism that he is guilty”.
She said Dawson had suffered this “forensic disadvantage … of a scale I’ve certainly never seen” since the ’90s.
Dawson may have failed his wife as a husband, David conceded, but he was not a murderer.
Somehow, His Honour Justice Ian Harrison managed to hold together a lengthy trial that had hit several head winds along the way.
For starters, it was centred around a 40-year-old case. Some witnesses had died before it had gotten to trial. Others were now elderly and memories were tested.
Near the middle of the trial, Everson came down with Covid. And proceedings were momentarily delayed due to the funerals of two leading Sydney legal figures. And in the final hours, a fire alarm cleared the building in Queen’s Square.
Still, with the crown, the defence, the media, court officials and the public gallery all trial weary – Harrison’s energy appeared undiminished – it all finally neared an end.
The fate of Christopher Michael Dawson will soon rest in the hands of the judge.
Court sources say it may take him a month or two to arrive at his decision and publish his reasons. When he does, all parties will return to Court 9D and Dawson will know in that instant whether he’ll be walking out of that room a free man. Or not.
The verdict may be made public in time for Lynette Joy Dawson’s birthday; September 25, 1948.
She would have been 74.
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