Chris Dawson trial: Drama in the suburbs as babysitter’s ‘perfect home’ fantasy sours

The drama that preoccupied much of Chris Dawson’s murder trial on Thursday played out on a small and focused stage deep in the heart of 1970s Australian suburbia.

Chris Dawson on Thursday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Christian Gilles

The drama that preoccupied much of Chris Dawson’s murder trial on Thursday played out on a small and focused stage deep in the heart of 1970s Australian suburbia.

Almost the entire day’s evidence in the NSW Supreme Court took us to the home of Christopher and Lynette Dawson at 2 Gilwinga Drive, Bayview, on Sydney’s northern beaches. Through evidence we were taken up a steep brick driveway to a speckled brick and brown timber house with its wicker and canvas chairs on the veranda. Then inside the house, with its exposed brick features, knick-knacks on shelves, living and dining rooms, fireplace, bedrooms, walk-through wardrobes and stained timber kitchen benches and cupboards.

It is between 1978 and 1980, and school teacher Chris and nurse Lyn are living the dream with their two young daughters.

Enter schoolgirl Bev McNally, the Dawsons’ babysitter before JC, who has featured so heavily in this trial. McNally, who gave evidence via videolink, was also a student at Cromer High School, where Dawson was a PE teacher, and babysat for the Dawsons on and off from 1978 to her senior year in 1980. She painted an endearing picture of when she first met Lyn Dawson, who had brought her youngest daughter to Cromer to see her father; schoolgirl McNally became “besotted” with the baby.

Soon after, she began babysitting at Gilwinga Drive, usually on a Friday and Saturday nights, depending on the Dawsons’ social calendar.

She was living at Collaroy at the time, and Chris Dawson would either pick her up from her home and take her to Bayview or give her a lift straight from school. Sometimes she stayed the night.

McNally was in awe of Bayview. “Originally I thought it was the fantasy home, the perfect home. Everything was in its place,” she said.

She agreed there had been early discussions she might even go and live at Bayview, given she was having problems at home and her HSC was looming.

McNally agreed with defence counsel Pauline David’s suggestion that Chris Dawson had been supportive of her getting through her HSC and the offer of living at Bayview was made before other arrangements intervened.

McNally told the court Lyn was a hands-on, adoring mother. And Chris was a good father who loved his children. Then the more time she spent in the Bayview house and the more she observed, the more that perfect picture changed, she said.

“I believed when I first met them they had very good relationship, assured to me by Chris Dawson, but over time and seeing more things happen in the house, I became very disillusioned with what he had been telling me,” she said.

There was the towel-flicking incident in the kitchen. And later a physical altercation between Chris Dawson and his wife in the doorway of their bedroom, where she claims Lyn was shoved “like a rag doll”.

McNally was asked how many times she babysat after the alleged incident. “Not many. I was so upset by what I’d seen … that didn’t impress Mr Dawson, he tried to persuade me.”

It was suggested by barrister David that McNally made up her stories … that she had used different words that had increased in intensity, particularly the “rag doll” incident. “It hurt when I saw it,” McNally said. “(Forty) years on its imprinted in my brain. The words I use may change but that’s the way memory comes out. I know what I saw.”