Chris Dawson trial: Day of legal drama, complete with monologue and a finale of tears and cheers

Chris Dawson did not look like a man taking in his last few hours of freedom.

Chris Dawson arrives at the Supreme Court in Sydney on Tuesday. Picture NCA Newswire/ Gaye Gerard.

He did not look like a man taking in his last few hours of freedom.

Just after 8.30am on Tuesday, Christopher Michael Dawson, 74, older brother Peter and legal counsel Greg Walsh entered Queen’s Square, at the foot of the NSW Courts building in the Sydney CBD.

The square had for hours been dotted with television camera tripods, the white discs of light reflectors and reporters. The Dawson camp would have expected as much, this being verdict day.

But into the square they came, as they had done every day of Dawson’s 10-week murder trial earlier in the year. Nothing seemed amiss.

This time, though, a huge media scrum formed around them, a shuffling throng of microphones that edged its way slowly towards the court entrance. It was a perplexing moment because walking at the edge of the scrimmage was Chris’ identical twin Paul, in a dark, large-checked suit. Paul didn’t ­attend a day of the trial, but here he was supporting his brother on this day of judgment.

As the media phalanx made slow progress across the square, Paul Dawson flanked it all the way to the courthouse steps when he was accidentally bumped by a TV cameraman. He immediately lashed out and shoved the cameraman in the back. Then the melee dissipated.

Upstairs on Level 13, the Dawsons and their supporters, mostly women, gathered on the western side of the court. They were relaxed. Peter Dawson led a conversation that elicited laughter from those around him. A reporter ­approached and both Peter and Chris Dawson shook his hand warmly. They had a yarn.

There was absolutely no hint that by the end of the day Chris, the former fashion model and Newtown Jets rugby league star would be heading to jail in the back of a prison van.

Except that his legal counsel, Walsh, was not so relaxed. He sat alone to the side of the group, writing feverishly in a notebook.

The court opened its doors at 9.30am and many of the female spectators edged their way in, most festooned in pink scarves and pink blouses and pink ribbons – even pink anti-Covid surgical masks – in honour of Lyn Dawson.

Judge Ian Harrison took his seat in Court 13A on the stroke of 10am. “The crown case is wholly circumstantial,” he informed the court. For Dawson’s judge-alone trial, Justice Harrison ran a tight ship, and in the absence of the jury he was able, on occasion, to unleash not just his considerable verbal repertoire but a scintillating sense of humour.

Those flashes of levity gave the trial balance and occasional relief.

But on Tuesday he brought to court a different demeanour. He had a monologue of great gravity to deliver, along with a decision that might instantly change the life of a fellow human being. His tone was flat. There were no quips.

It was impossible to detect his decision by trying to read between the lines. One moment he rejected a tranche of evidence that would have been favourable to the crown. The next he gave no weight to allegations that Dawson had inflicted domestic violence on his wife.

Then he rejected claims that people had seen Lyn Dawson weeks, months and years after her alleged murder.

As the judge’s reasoning went on, the second-guessing in the court ebbed and flowed, inching towards guilty one moment and scuttling back to not guilty the next. But at about 3pm Justice Harrison’s reading pace slowed, and there was a tangible sense that a verdict was imminent.

There was a very real sense that all of those walls of defence with which Dawson had surrounded himself for more than four decades – the tales of Lyn not showing up at the Northbridge Baths on the day she allegedly walked away from her family, her phone call to her husband saying she was with friends on the NSW central coast and needed time to think, his narrative that she had abandoned him and their children, his suggestion she might have joined a religious cult – evaporated one by one in the minutes leading up to Justice Harrison bringing down his verdict.

This was when Peter put his arm around his brother. This was when the members of the public gallery fidgeted in their seats and started to murmur.

Then, after 40 years and almost eight months, the end came ­quickly. At precisely 3.11pm, Justice Ian Harrison addressed Christopher Michael Dawson and proclaimed: “I find you guilty.”

Some in the public gallery gasped, others wept.

Two prison officers strode ­towards Dawson. He was still at the rear bar table, having been ­motionless throughout the day. As the guards approached, Justice Harrison informed “Mr Dawson” that it would now be necessary to take him into custody.

Dawson rose, bemused, and was cuffed with his hands in front of him. He was then bundled unceremoniously to the right of the court, towards the empty glass-panelled dock.

As the guards marched him closer to the door behind the dock, Dawson listed sideways, his limp from hip operations impeding him, preventing him from keeping pace with his captors. It was a sad and pathetic image, the final glimpse of a man being led to his fate. Then he was gone.

After more than 4½ hours of Justice’s Harrison’s monologue, the court was still catching up to the moment. Did that just happen?

Peter Dawson, who remained sitting beside Chris’ empty chair, slammed his mobile phone down on table in front of him. Brother Paul also remained seated in the back row of the public gallery.

According to members of the public gallery in the nearby Banco Court, used as a “spillover” room to accommodate more than 100 spectators to this drama, the mood was very different.

When Justice Harrison handed down his verdict, televised into Banco, half the crowd burst into tears. The rest cheered.

Hours before, before the crowds gathered, before the Dawsons made their way across Queen’s Square, before Chris’s life changed forever, someone left a small card in that quiet corridor near the entrance to Court 13A.

One side featured a picture of St Mary MacKillop. And on the other side, a prayer. The card implored the good saint to instil in people a handful of virtues. The final virtue was that we may find a passion for justice.