Dawson lights up on last day of underage sex trial

Chris Dawson on Tuesday was as animated as he’s been during this case, 43 years in the making.

Chris Dawson on his second wedding day with AB, the woman who was once his pupil and now his accuser.

For weeks now in the carnal knowledge trial of Chris Dawson in the NSW District Court,

we’ve predominantly seen the accused in Court LG1 via audio-visual link, beamed in from a

cacky cubicle somewhere in the bowels of Long Bay Correctional Complex in south-eastern

Sydney.

To be precise, we’ve witnessed on screen mostly the top of the convicted wife killer’s skull,

seated as he is lowdown in the range of the camera. The court screens were clear enough

yesterday to betray that he’d recently had a haircut – clipped down to the skin on the sides

and back, with an abandoned slick of brownish grey on top.

Nothing different was expected on this, the last day of his carnal knowledge trial before

Judge Sarah Huggett – the crescent skull, the occasional flash of Dawson’s upper face, his

eyes seemingly in a state of permanent bemusement.

But the close of a trial can shift the status quo, and Dawson yesterday was as animated as

he’s been during this case, 43 years in the making.

As Crown prosecutor Emma Blizard began her closing arguments, Dawson appeared to wake

from a stupor.

It was an arresting opening from Blizard. She fired off a raft of direct quotes from witnesses:

AB was sitting on PE teacher Dawson’s lap; the door was ajar and she (AB) was sitting there

with her legs apart; he was pushing my chest … then backed me up against the wall.

Following that creative flourish, Blizard then went through the Crown case in perfectly

ordered chapters, and in some of those chapters were sub-chapters. And in the sub-

chapters numbered lists. AB’s troubled home life in 1980. Babysitting the Dawson children.

The driving lessons. The first kiss. The first sexual intercourse.

It was incrementally logical and assembled a damning picture of a married man with

children preying on a teenage student, all in the style of Russian nesting dolls.

For a moment Dawson lowered his forehead onto his clenched hands in front of him, and

we saw once more the full panorama of his scalp.

And it was while observing this that you wondered – what was he thinking now, hearing of

these alleged exploits, this infantile behaviour exposed to the world? This immaturity, this

infantile behaviour all driven by sexual desire for a teenager half his age? Was he

embarrassed? Humiliated?

Apparently not.

As Blizard meticulously detailed the timeline in this extraordinary case, Dawson shook his

head in disagreement on several occasions. On another, he seemed to be gently rocking to a

tune heard only in his head, quietly mouthing words to himself. He twice had a nibble at his

fingernails.

Dawson’s face also registered profound distaste as the Crown recalled the love notes he’d

written to AB and dropped into her schoolbag at Cromer High School.

Blizard corroborated the Crown’s meticulous timeline, also, with the evidence given from

witnesses during the trial and in police statements. It was a bravura performance.

By contrast, at 11.52am, defence barrister Claire Wasley asked that Dawson be judged fairly.

That the presumption of innocence was paramount. That she would be elaborating on the

forensic disadvantage experienced by the accused courtesy of the distance from the alleged

offence in 1980, and the long, long road to the trial itself in 2023.

Wasley started dipping back into evidence from AB over the years and how it couldn’t be

relied upon, and the barrister’s narrative temporarily lost impetus. Her reference to

seemingly innumerable transcripts and page and paragraph numbers was, for a while, as

exciting as an Ikea wardrobe assemblage manual.

But she moved forward powerfully, pointing out inconsistencies in evidence, in perceived

falsehoods and non-sensical assertions made by witnesses in this case.

In the end, Wasley also executed her job admirably. Without question she fired some not

insubstantial holes in the Crown’s precious timeline.

It certainly enervated Dawson. He sat bolt upright during Wasley’s entire presentation – no

head bowing, no skull flash, no jaw resting wearily on a palm. He was as attentive as a

diligent schoolboy.

Precisely one year ago yesterday, Dawson was fighting for his freedom in the Supreme

Court, just up the road from the District Court centre in Liverpool Street at the northern end

of Hyde Park, charged with murdering his wife Lyn in early 1982.

It was a day of high drama. A witness claimed he had seen Lyn at a bus stop in Sydney long

after she’d allegedly been murdered. So how could Chris have killed her?

We know how that trial ended.

Now, in another winter of discontent, Christopher Michael Dawson awaits his fate.

Again.

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