Chris Dawson ‘groomed me and then made me his sex slave’

JC, as she is called in court, said by the end of her stifling and at times violent relationship with schoolteacher Christopher Dawson, she feared for her life.

JC arrives at the Supreme Court in Sydney on Thursday to continue giving evidence Picture: Damian Shaw

Former schoolteacher Christopher Dawson’s babysitter has declared that he groomed her when she was a child then turned her into his “sex slave” after allegedly murdering his wife, Lynette.

In a second dramatic day of evidence, JC, as she is called in court, said by the end of her stifling and at times violent relationship with Mr Dawson, she feared for her life.

She testified that he had moved her into the family home just days after Lyn went missing, and from that first night and onwards she slept in the marital bed.

Lyn’s underwear, clothing, diamond rings and other belongings were still in her bedroom, and JC was told she could keep anything she wanted.

On January 15, 1984, two years after Lyn vanished from Sydney’s northern beaches, JC married Mr Dawson, her former high school physical education teacher.

She said behind the smiles in the wedding photographs provided to Mr Dawson’s Supreme Court murder trial on Thursday was a far more sinister story.

As the guests were leaving, her brand new husband grabbed her around the neck with both hands, she said.

It was “frightening” and happened “for no good reason”.

Another photo of JC displayed on screens in the courtroom was taken on February 11, 1982, her 18th birthday.

Chris Dawson and JC on their wedding day, January 15, 1984

It was a month after Lyn went missing, and JC was standing inside the home that Chris and Lyn built at Bayview in Sydney’s northern beaches.

“Could I just make a comment about that? Those clothes are Lyn’s clothes that I’m wearing,” she said.

A third photo was from December 23, 1981. It was the day she and Mr Dawson, who was twice her age, packed their belongings into his car and headed off “to start a new life” in Queensland.

They turned back when JC became sick and regretful. She didn’t want to run away and leave everything and everyone she knew.

She didn’t want to be with Mr Dawson at all, she told the court. “There was a lot of pressure to stay with him. I was just a child and I didn’t want that.”

In early January 1982, JC travelled to South West Rocks, 450km north of Sydney.

She called Mr Dawson every day because he asked her to. He “wanted to know exactly what I was doing” and said “he couldn’t live without me”.

Then he told her: “Lyn’s gone, she’s not coming back.”

The next day, he was at South West Rocks in his Toyota Corolla station wagon at dawn. She and her sister left in the car.

JC arrived back in Sydney around January 10 or 11.

Lyn was allegedly murdered on or around the night of January 8.

JC became “the live-in babysitter slash mother”, taking care of Chris and Lyn Dawson’s two young children, then four and two, she said.

“Having to learn to cook. Having to learn to clean. Having to learn to be the substitute housekeeper, sex slave, stepmother, babysitter. Slave. Just a slave,” she said.

In December 1984, they moved to a 3ha bush block in Yawalpah near Dreamworld on the northern Gold Coast.

JC called it “the compound”.

It had a 2m-high chain wire fence around it.

“I felt like a prisoner there,” she said.

JC on December 23, 1981, the day she left Sydney with Mr Dawson to start a new life

JC wearing Lyn’s clothes in the Dawson family home

Chris Dawson’s twin brother Paul moved to Queensland at the same time.

JC was by then 19 years old and heavily pregnant. She had her daughter on January 8, 1985.

She said she realised how different her feelings were for her baby from her feelings for Chris and Lyn’s two daughters.

A card given to JC by Chris Dawson

Mr Dawson wanted her to be the mother for all three girls, and she didn’t feel that way.

She had never had a boyfriend before Mr Dawson, and hadn’t ­realised other women’s lives weren’t like hers until she met mothers at a playgroup.

When she came home and questioned Mr Dawson about it, “he forbade me going” and cut up the credit card.

She once bought a G-string and put it on for Mr Dawson, who told her she would only wear it for him. She told him she’d wear it whenever she saw fit.

“He got physically violent … and he ripped them off me. I was frightened,” she said.

Mr Dawson told her Lyn “went away with religious” ­people”.

When she pressed him, he said Lyn had been in Perth and was seen on the central coast.

As their marriage disinte­grated, she went to see a lawyer in 1989. Mr Dawson had always said “You won’t have anything if you leave me”, and she wanted to know for sure.

Around the same time, she confronted him.

“I said ‘You got rid of your first wife, you could easily get rid of me’,” she told the court.

A card given to JC by Chris Dawson

“He stood completely still … and said ‘Don’t say things like that’.”

JC left Mr Dawson in 1990 and returned to Sydney with her daughter. The same year, she met up with Lyn’s brother Greg Simms and his wife Merilyn at their home on the NSW central coast.

JC said she told them about Mr Dawson trying to get a hitman.

She testified about the same incident in court, saying that in October or November 1981 Mr Dawson drove her across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to a ­location where she was told to stay in the car.

Mr Dawson returned after what could have been 15 or 20 minutes. “He said, ‘I went inside to get a hitman to kill Lyn. But then I ­decided I couldn’t do it because innocent people … could be hurt,’ ” she said.

Mr Dawson took notes across the other side of the courtroom as JC gave her evidence and faced extensive cross-examination.

She accepted there was an inconsistency – in a police statement in 1990, she had said Mr Dawson told her about the hitman two weeks after they went for the drive.

Defence barrister Pauline David repeatedly asked JC if she was lying as part of a mission to destroy Mr Dawson.

“He’ll destroy himself for what he’s done to people … to me … and to Lyn. I’m telling the truth,” JC said.

Mr Dawson had behaved ­“inappropriately by favouring me, by brushing up against me” in the classroom as he walked past when she was a student, JC said.

“To me, that’s grooming.”

Cross-examination of JC will continue on Friday.