Chris Dawson murder trial: Old cops bring their heydays into court

In the grand wash of evidence that flows through a long trial, surprising and sometimes peculiar evidential flotsam races by and catches the eye.

Former Detective Paul Mayger leaving the Supreme Court in Sydney. Picture: NCA Newswire / Gaye Gerard

In the grand wash of evidence that flows through a long trial, surprising and sometimes peculiar evidential flotsam races by and catches the eye.

It was no different on Tuesday in the Chris Dawson murder trial in the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney.

After seemingly endless hours of cross-examination about, of all things, police stationery, a flurry of oddness entered the court dialogue. That oddness included tales of a clairvoyant getting ­visions about a woman’s murder by touching a heart-shaped picture frame, the use of oven mitts, the prolificity of hitmen in Sydney, and the downside of mirrored wardrobes in the bedroom.

But with every wash there is a parallel undercurrent, and one of those that was overlooked on Tuesday came in the form of retired police detective Paul Mayger. Mayger, in a no-nonsense navy suit and blue and yellow striped tie, took to the witness stand. He told the court he had joined the NSW police force in 1976 and retired in 2007. Nothing ostentatious there.

Periodically during his career he had been caught in the snare that was the investigation of the disappearance of Bayview nurse and mother Lynette Dawson.

Indeed, it was Mayger who travelled to the Gold Coast and conducted the first formal record of interview with teacher and former rugby league star Chris Dawson over his wife’s disappearance.

That was held on January 15, 1991, and a videotaped recording of it had previously been played during the trial. According to Mayger, the investigation was suspended in 1992.

But here’s the undercurrent. Very few in court on Tuesday would have known Mayger was instrumental in the arrest and conviction of the notorious Granny Killer, John Wayne Glover, who murdered six elderly women on Sydney’s north shore between 1989 and 1990.

Mayger, a detective senior constable at the time, was one of the officers who linked that string of murders to a single perpetrator. Glover was ultimately arrested and pleaded guilty. He was jailed and ordered never to be released. He hanged himself in jail in 2005.

And earlier in the week, the court was graced with the towering presence of Ian “Speed” Kennedy, the former Randwick rugby player who had gone to school with Chris and Paul Dawson at Sydney Boys High, and became a detective in the NSW Police Force. In his booming voice, Kennedy gave evidence that he never – as the Dawson brothers had alleged – told Chris Dawson at a school reunion in 1985 that Lyn was living in New Zealand.

Another undercurrent; Kennedy was one of the chief detectives who helped solve the horrific murder of beauty queen and nurse Anita Cobby, 26, in Sydney in February 1986.

Kennedy arrested one of the killers, Michael Murphy, at the point of a shotgun. He was reportedly asked years later if he had been tempted to pull the trigger. To which he replied: “There were children in the room.”

The great detectives will always be at the centre of or brush against the biggest cases. That’s what they do. It’s what makes them special. And fate had brought these two retired gentlemen into the orbit of a yet another murder trial, this one going back four decades. They came, they gave their evidence, they went.

Down the elevator and out into Queen’s Square at the northern tip of Hyde Park, just two elderly men disappearing into the crowds on a nippy winter’s day.