Courtroom cruise ship all at sea as evidentiary squalls rock boat

Trials can throw up moments of unfiltered drama, and on Thursday at the murder trial of former school teacher Christopher Dawson, such moments arrived with regularity.

Chris Dawson. Picture

It’s the nature of long trials that as the weeks grind on, a familiarity grows between players in the drama – from regulars in the public gallery to families with a direct stake in the crime allegedly committed to even the eminent horsehair-topped legal counsel.

Nods are exchanged, morning greetings proffered, the same seats in the court room wordlessly reserved throughout proceedings.

It resembles over time a sort of legal-themed cruise ship where you grow accustomed to the same faces, furniture, hour for lunch and unspoken camaraderie of all being aboard the same vessel for a moment in history.

On a cruise, sameness gives comfort.

Trials, however, can throw up moments of unfiltered drama, and on Thursday at the murder trial of former school teacher Christopher Dawson, in the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney, such moments arrived with regularity in Court 9D.

Paul Dawson, identical twin brother to Chris, returned to give evidence via video-link on the court’s four TV screens and was steered by crown prosecutor Craig Everson SC back to the early 1980s.

The court heard Paul, like his brother - now both 73 - had his own family babysitter to help manage his and wife Marilyn’s three young children up on Gilwinga Drive at Bayview Heights on Sydney’s northern beaches.

Paul Dawson, leaning in close to the camera in a police station interview room somewhere in NSW, filled the screens with his bespectacled visage, and carried throughout a look of mild irritation. He squinted at some questions, and performed an almost imperceptible chewing motion when considering answers.

On Thursday he was asked whether he’d ever spent a lot of time in the car with his babysitter. He denied he’d said that.

Did he agree he picked her up in the car park at school (Forest High) on any occasion? He said he didn’t recall that. Had he ever sat in the front seat of his car with brother Chris Dawson, with Chris’ babysitter JC and Paul’s babysitter in the back seat? He said he didn’t remember, no.

Had he ever been in a swimming pool at a school in the Sydney suburb of Lindfield at the same time as his brother Chris, JC and his babysitter?

Not to my knowledge he said.

Paul Dawson was questioned about his perceptions of his brother’s wife, Lyn, and he said she was not “overly affectionate” and “felt her children didn’t need her as much” as the children she cared for at the local child day care centre where she worked as a nurse.

This assessment sent a murmur through the back half of the court, and provoked a shocked reaction from some of Lyn’s relatives observing proceedings.

Then another ripple.

Paul Dawson exited left from the video-link and up popped his former babysitter, beamed in from her home in the US. Hours earlier she’d been a nameless figure. Now she was looking down, virtually, on the court.

The babysitter, blonde and tanned, vividly recalled her younger self on Sydney’s northern beaches. Yes, she told the court, she had driven around in a car with Paul and Chris Dawson in the front, and she and her friend JC in the back. Yes, she had been to Lindfield school.

The crown asked: What did Chris Dawson say if anything about Lyn Dawson in those drives in the car to and from the Lindfield school?

Babysitter: Things like … that she was a bitch.

Crown: A what, sorry?

Babysitter: A bitch.

Another courtroom tremor.

Defence barrister Pauline David said this assertion was a total fabrication.

Behind the babysitter on the video-link screen, on the walls of some room far across the ocean were dreamy blue and green paintings of sand, sea, and clutches of palm trees.

This cruise ship is still a long way out from port.