Chris Dawson case: Lost records and sheer incompetence

In the wake of Chris Dawson’s murder conviction, questions have been raised about why it took a podcast to breathe life into an investigation abandoned by police for decades.

Retired NSW Police detective Paul Mayger. Picture NCA Newswire/ Gaye Gerard

In the wake of Chris Dawson’s murder conviction, questions have been raised about why it took a podcast by The Australian’s Hedley Thomas to breathe life into an investigation abandoned by police for decades.

Lost records, false sightings and sheer incompetence plagued police inquiries over more than 30 years.

The podcast series also pointed to a possible cover-up during the 1980s when the Dawson twins had strong ties to police through rugby league.

Police on Sydney’s northern beaches repeatedly turned a blind eye despite pleas that Dawson should be investigated for foul play.

There were exceptions - a handful of dogged cops believed there was more to the story.

But even after Lyn’s friend Sue Strath wrote to the NSW Ombudsman in 1985 asking the independent government watchdog to intervene, senior police insisted there were no suspicious circumstances.

Separate coroners found Lyn was murdered by Dawson but the former Newtown Jets rugby league star was never charged, the Director of Public Prosecutions citing lack of evidence.

NSW homicide squad detectives dropped an investigation in the early 1990s as a result of a purported sighting of her by a family friend.

Retired detective Paul Mayger, a homicide investigator based at Chatswood in Sydney’s north, was tasked in 1990 with investigating Lyn’s 1982 disappearance.

During the trial, prosecutor Craig Everson asked him why the investigation was suspended. Mr Mayger said he had raised with the DPP and the coroner a witness statement to police that Lyn had been seen a week after her disappearance.

“I was advised that unless we could refute that evidence, then the investigation probably shouldn’t proceed,” he said.

The purported sighting was by Dawson family friend Sue Butlin, who died in 1998.

Her husband, Ray, who gave evidence at the trial, was close to the Dawson twins as team manager of Gosford’s first grade team when the Dawsons coached in 1979.

He said his wife believed she saw Lyn while working at a fruit barn off the Pacific Highway at Kulnura on the NSW central coast.

Sue Butlin was adamant she had seen Lyn after her disappearance, he said.

Mr Everson asked Mr Mayger if he spoke to Ms Butlin.

“I did not,” he said.

He said he simply presumed someone from the missing persons unit of Mona Vale police had done so.

He also gave evidence that police records from the investigation into Lyn’s disappearance went into storage and couldn’t be found.

The storage of vital and sensitive police files at a Sydney warehouse turned into a “disaster” for the NSW Police Force, he said.

“There were boxes of records, stacked four and five high. Cardboard boxes from all of the crime squads, and they had been there on this concrete floor for some many months.

What files could be salvaged, he said, were handed over to detective Damian Loone.

Mr Loone, who retired last year, gave evidence that when he was assigned the investigation in 1998, he was given a one-page document.

In 2018, following the release of The Teacher’s Pet podcast, then NSW police commissioner Mick Fuller apologised to Lyn Dawson’s family for police failings in the botched cold case.

Homicide detectives began reinvestigating in 2015 and three years later took a new brief of evidence to the NSW DPP.

Dawson was arrested on ­December 5, 2018 and charged with his wife’s murder.