Chris Dawson trial: Final spectre amid trial’s cast of ghosts

It seemed almost inevitable that one final spectre should appear during the murder trial of Chris Dawson in a case that has already had a sporadic cast of ghosts.

Chris Dawson leaves the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney on Monday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / James Gourley

It seemed almost inevitable that one final spectre should appear during the murder trial of Chris Dawson in a case that has already had a sporadic cast of ghosts.

The apparition in court 9D of the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney on Monday was once more the accused’s former wife, Lynette Dawson, who vanished on January 8, 1982.

With the crown case against Dawson officially closed, the defence had an open invitation to introduce new witnesses, and there was anticipation among a packed public gallery that one such witness might be the accused.

Instead, the defence wheeled in one last voice: Paul Stephen Cooper, 60, from the Gold Coast.

Dressed in a pale grey suit, cream shirt without tie and black runners with white trimming, Cooper walked to the witness stand on the balls of his feet, his style of perambulation giving him a half-swagger.

His darkish hair was swept straight back from his forehead, and he sported a Caballero-style sawn-off moustache that was grey in contrast to his head hair.

Cooper, who said he had never met Chris Dawson or any of the Dawson family, told the court that in the early months of 1982 he had popped into the Warners Bay Hotel on Lake Macquarie, southwest of Newcastle, for a drink with friends and relatives, and caught the eye of an ­attractive young woman sitting alone at a table nursing a tumbler of water.

Then just 20, Cooper sidled over to the table and started talking to the woman he believed was in her late 20s, possibly early 30s.

And what a story she had to tell. In no time, she started relaying how she had recently left her husband after discovering he had been unfaithful. She had children and had walked out on them too.

She told young Cooper she had no ID and had “left everything behind”. She had some cash because she’d sold a personal item and was waiting for her passport to come through so she could travel to Bali and beyond.

The mysterious woman, wearing a scarf, also said she was on the way to her sister’s place but was still building up the courage. She believed her sister might try to talk her into returning to her husband and family. She told Cooper she wasn’t going back.

Cooper: “I said what about the children? It’s not fair to them … we had conversation about that … I grew up without me parents … I said it’s not fair to them without their mother … I told her how hard it is and how hard it was for me … I tried to drill into her to get it across to her.”  Cooper said he bought her a glass of white wine and he sipped on Jim Beam and coke.

He said the woman asked him if he could book a motel room for her under his name, and he said he “thought the obvious, you know, it’s for me and her” but was quickly put in his place.

Then, with a couple of bourbons on board, she shocked him.

Cooper: “I did say to her by her leaving all her belongings, her purse and everything else at home, there was a good chance people might think her husband had done something to her, that he’d knocked her … when I looked back at her, she had a different­ ­demeanour.”

Had he stumbled across some sinister criminal plot in a tradies’ watering hole?

It wasn’t until Cooper saw a TV current affairs program decades later that he realised the woman was none other than Lyn Dawson.

Under cross-examination from Crown Prosecutor Craig Everson SC, it seemed the defence had found its version of Robert Silkman, the elusive figure who played for the Newtown Jets with the Dawson brothers and had socialised with some seedy characters at the Henson Park Hotel in Marrickville in the 1970s.

It was unusual and unexpected evidence on which the defence rested its case. A shadowy sighting. A scheme by Lyn Dawson to set up her husband for murder. A witness with an extensive criminal history whose life had been salvaged by God.

Just after midday, Everson began the crown’s final submission. After two months of disjointed testimony, stories out of sequence, jumbled timelines, fractured memories and hazy recollections, it set about knitting all of that evidence into a commonsense narrative.

Metaphorically, it was as if the switch to a ceiling packed with fluorescent lights had been flicked on. In that glare, Chris Dawson sat in his customary place to the left of the courtroom. He looked tired, he looked aged. He looked vulnerable and a little lost.

During a five-minute break in Everson’s oration, he sat alone, slowly fiddling with his surgical mask, and staring into his lap.