Convicted wife killer Chris Dawson: How a man who seemingly had it all was reduced to ash
You might think that everything you needed to know about Chris Dawson had been exposed during his epic 10-week murder trial in Sydney last year, where he was found guilty of killing his wife, Lyn. But you’d be wrong.
In years to come, the name Christopher Michael Dawson will inevitably fall victim to the communal amnesia that comes with time.
It will slip into that distant firmament of convicted Australian murderers and villains. If he’s lucky, a relative, perhaps yet unborn, might probe the archives trying to understand what happened, how a man who seemingly had it all could be reduced to ash.
But not yet. In a case that has captured the imaginations of people around the world, the final and definitive public denouement for Dawson arrived on Wednesday in Sydney’s Downing Street Centre District Court 3.2.
At precisely 12.40pm on Wednesday, judge Sarah Huggett – in a judgment that took two hours and 21 minutes to deliver – found former high school physical education teacher Dawson guilty of carnal knowledge of one of his students back in 1980.
You might think that everything you needed to know about this man had been exposed during his 10-week murder trial in Sydney last year, where he was found guilty of killing his first wife, Lyn, in early 1982.
You’d be wrong. The carnal knowledge trial, a leisurely sprint compared to the murder marathon, also turned out to be a trial of Dawson’s character.
It held up to the light his moral fibre and emotional maturity, his measure as a married man and father to two, and his ethical depth as a teacher in charge of teenage girls.
This trial revealed he had failed spectacularly on all counts. His character was eviscerated by this trial and the guilty verdict.
And it was not lost on Dawson himself, appearing in court via an audiovisual link from Long Bay Jail in southeastern Sydney, where he’s serving 24 years for his former wife’s murder.
He appeared in little more than a cubicle space at 10.08am, dressed in prison greens and a collarless bomber jacket. For the duration of the carnal knowledge trial, the bulk of which he attended up on the court television monitors, he appeared daily with a look of glazed indifference. On Wednesday, he was a study of utmost alertness and he carried a sheen of annoyance. His mouth was set firm. He had a furrow between his eyebrows. He looked hard. He looked cold.
This was a very different Dawson, and so it proved throughout Judge Huggett’s lengthy verdict, delivered without emotional dips and troughs, and falling just shy of monotone.
Where Judge Huggett was measured and down the centre line, Dawson was on an emotional rollercoaster you could tell he was doing everything in his powers to contain. When the judge spoke about evidence that he had touched the schoolgirl AB on the knee at a sports carnival, Dawson shook his head. When she spoke of evidence given at trial about the first kiss between Dawson and AB, the complainant, he shook his head. The alleged first instance of sexual activities in his own parents’ home in Maroubra? Another shake. Cuddling his teenage pupil in the swimming pool of a public school after exercise classes? More shaking.
It‘s almost inexplicable a convicted murderer would allow these allegations to rattle him, but they did. His body language suggested he either knew all these allegations against him were untrue, or he was ashamed and embarrassed that the image he had cultivated during his heyday back in the 1970s and early ’80s – that of a demigod, a handsome, supreme athlete, a teetotalling object of worship to women and men alike – was being reduced to that of a repulsive and narcissistic predator.
Was it the realisation he’d gone from being the man who had everything to a man-child who had thrown his life away over not just uncontrollable lust but his complete disregard for any laws or restrictions over his behaviour?
He had often referred to himself as God, as Judge Huggett pointed out repeatedly.
And perhaps, in the end, that was all we ever needed to know about this man.
At 11.57am, Judge Huggett declared AB to be a thoughtful witness who did not appear to embellish any of her evidence.
Much of what she said had the ring of truth.
On hearing this, Dawson’s head fell slowly forward towards the monitor, then disappeared completely. All the court could see was the back of his collar and the edge of his shoulders. He knew it was over.
Guilty.
Dawson remained on the screen as Judge Huggett and the crown and defence barristers checked their respective diaries to decide on a date for sentencing.
Then as the court cleared, Dawson issued a quiet string of expletives before rising out of his chair and banging on the cubicle door to be released.
The second he left, another man wearing a woollen beanie quickly entered the room armed with a bottle of disinfectant and a cloth.
He sprayed the surface of the desk Dawson had just vacated, wiped it over, and left, as quick as a cockroach.
Whatever foul bacteria that had been left in that space had now been removed.
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