Chris Dawson murder trial: Ghost of Princess Di casts shadow over the court

To all the things the murder trial of Chris Dawson has sucked into its vortex over six weeks, it has now added a royal visit.

Prince Charles and Princess Diana outside the Sydney Opera House on March 28,1983, the day of an alleged sighting of Lyn Dawson. Picture: Getty Images

To all the things the murder trial of Chris Dawson has sucked into its vortex over six weeks – everything from gangsters and drug dealers to a Gold Coast theme park – it has now added a royal visit.

And not just any royal visit. This was Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s 1983 month-long tour of Australia. It was Diana’s first overseas tour with her husband, the Prince of Wales.

Footage of the royals’ arrival at the Sydney Opera House on March 28 of that year showed adoring throngs cramming the famous building’s forecourt waiting for a glimpse of the glamorous Diana.

On that day, Elva McBay, a teacher and researcher, waited at the barricades outside the Sydney Hospital in Macquarie Street in the CBD alongside her husband to enjoy the impending royal motorcade.

McBay was good friends with Paul Dawson and his twin brother, Chris. She was also a fan of the Newtown Jets rugby league team, for which the Dawsons played.

On Monday, the court heard via former videotaped testimony from Ms McBay (she has since died), that while awaiting Charles and Di, she believed she caught sight of Lyn Dawson. This was one year and two months after Lyn had disappeared in January 1982.

She told the court that as the motorcade approached, she saw a woman near her duck under the barricade and cross the road. In the seconds she caught sight of the woman, she thought she recognised her, turned to her husband and said: “I think that was Lyn Dawson.”

McBay – elderly, sight-impaired and with a cloud of short white hair – said in her testimony that she later informed both Chris and Paul Dawson that she thought she’d seen Lyn in Macquarie Street.

She added that the Dawson twins were “two of the nicest people I’ve ever met” and that Chris was “quiet, placid, easy going, good fun” and she’d never seen him bad tempered or angry, a wonderful husband and father, and that his was “one of the happiest families I’d ever seen”.

So McBay’s alleged sighting, in the course of evidence before the trial, could be added to further sightings at a hospital at Curl Curl on Sydney’s northern beaches, a fruit barn on the NSW central coast, and at a bus stop on Victoria Road in the Sydney suburb of Gladesville.

This witness was one of a cavalcade to pass through Supreme Court 9D on Monday, including a former neighbour who had observed the Dawson twins jogging the Himalayan-calibre hills around Bayview Heights; the former detective, rugby player and schoolmate of the Dawson brothers, Ian “Speed” Kennedy; a woman who worked at the Katies fashion store at Warriewood Square back in the early 1980s who recounted in painstaking detail the banking schedule and payment methods used by the fashion chain; and, of course, the late royal watcher McBay.

It was a day of tying off loose ends for the crown, and it was prosecutor Craig Everson SC who declared: “We’re coming to the end of the prosecution case.”

Despite the Lazy Susan of witnesses from across this grand narrative, each from different periods and with their own snippets of memory, the theme of the end of things seemed appropriate.

It was Charles and Di’s tour of Australia almost 40 years ago that triggered the beginning of the rift in their marriage, due to the Princess of Wales’ monumental popularity eclipsing attention for her husband.

And we all know how that fairytale ended.