Chris Dawson trial: Web of chance entangles ordinary lives in intrigue

Some of Monday’s witnesses were ordinary ­people whose life story, for a delicate moment, intersected with another’s, and by fate became a small if potent tile in a murder trial.

Chris Dawson. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Christian Gilles

It’s a scientific fact that the largest orb webs produced in the spider world are those spun by Darwin’s bark spiders, with that first thread or bridge line reaching up to 25m.

This came briefly to mind during the opening day of week four of the murder trial of Chris Dawson in the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney.

Not the wonder of the insect universe but how a trial too can cast an enormous net that can extend back decades in time, catch a moment, one of infinite moments that constitute normal human lives, and reel them into the drama that is the justice system.

Some of Monday’s witnesses were proof of this – ordinary ­people whose life story, for a delicate moment, intersected with another’s, and by fate became a small if potent tile in a murder trial.

Take PS. He was called to the witness stand at 11.37am in Court 9D. Back in the early 1980s, the Manly Boys High student was an average teenager living on Sydney’s northern beaches. He loved his rugby league, the court heard.

He went ten pin bowling. He surfed the ever-reliable Long Reef, north of Dee Why beach. And he had a part-time job at Coles at Dee Why.

There he met babysitter JC, who also had a job there. She was pretty. He developed a crush. He flirted. He asked her out, to no avail.

Then on one shift, as he collected the shopping trolleys from the dimly lit supermarket car park, he alleges he had a confrontation with Dawson.

PS told the court Dawson warned him to stay away from JC “or else”. So he did. Life moved on. PS went on to build a life, to have his own family.

It wasn’t until he saw a television show on the disappearance of Lyn Dawson about eight years ago that that singular moment in the car park in his youth reasserted itself in his memory.

He gave a statement to police about the incident in 2014.

It was the same with witness Judith Solomon, a woman who had briefly worked with Lynette Dawson at a Bank of NSW branch in Sydney in the mid-1960s.

Their lives drifted apart soon after, until Ms Solomon happened to be shopping at Warringah Mall many years later and bumped into Lynette, nee Simms.

Ms Solomon told the court she didn’t at first recognise the woman in the dark sunglasses.

“I’m Lyn Simms, remember me?” she allegedly said.

Ms Solomons said Lyn took off her sunglasses and revealed “a huge, horrible black eye”.

She said Lyn had said she’d run into a doorway. Ms Solomon said soon after she visited Lyn at Bayview for a catch-up.

More than 40 years passed before she went to police and made a statement about this encounter.

Ms Solomon was challenged by the defence and it was suggested she may have misremembered this fleeting moment when her life, and that of Lyn, had intersected.

“No,” she said. “It was deep in my mind. I was horrified.”

The Darwin bark spider’s silk is the toughest ever measured by scientists.

And the Dawson trial witnesses will continue to step into the occasional web that is Court 9D for possibly another fortnight.