Dawson’s daughter says ‘I saw Dad dig a grave’ while under hypnosis

Shanelle Dawson has revealed that under hypnosis she remembered her father digging a grave for her mother.

Shanelle Dawson appearing on 60 Minutes. Source: 60 Minutes/YouTube

The daughter of convicted wife killer Chris Dawson has sensationally revealed that under hypnosis she remembered her father digging a grave for her mother.

Shanelle Dawson – Lyn and Chris Dawson’s oldest daughter, who was four years old when her mother vanished in January 1982 – said in an interview last night that she recalled her father digging near the family swimming pool at Bayview, on Sydney’s northern beaches.

She told Channel 9’s 60 Minutes current affairs program: “I believe I saw my sister (Sherryn, aged two at the time) and I in the back of a car, of our station wagon, and my mother slumped in the front. I believe I saw him shining headlights on a spot near the pool and digging. I believe that he buried her in that spot for that night, and then the next day when he didn’t have us kids, moved her somewhere else.”

Ms Dawson told the program after undergoing hypnosis, she recalled shovels “being pulled out of the back of the car, and headlights, and digging”.

Lyn Dawson with her daughter at her Bayview home in 1978.

Chris Dawson, 74, was found guilty of murdering wife Lyn in August after a lengthy trial before Justice Ian Harrison in the NSW Supreme Court. Dawson will be sentenced on November 11.

For four decades, the popular rugby league football star and high school teacher maintained the story that his wife had abandoned him and their two daughters.

However, his trial found that he had murdered his wife and disposed of her body so he could maintain an “unfettered” relationship with the family babysitter, known as JC.

Dawson would go on to marry JC, one of his former pupils at Cromer High on Sydney’s northern beaches.

It was not until The Australian journalist Hedley Thomas’s global hit podcast The Teacher’s Pet in May 2018 that serious scrutiny returned to the perplexing cold case.

In December 2018, Dawson was arrested in Queensland and charged with Lyn’s murder. He would ultimately be granted a judge-alone trial before Justice Harrison.

Last night, Ms Dawson said in the interview that she despised her father’s lies.

“I could see that he was manipulative and gas lighting us all the time,” she said. “My father definitely embodies the survival of the fittest, f--k everyone else. Just do what you need to do to get what you want. And I feel a lot of anger and rage towards him for being that way, but I simultaneously feel compassion and sadness that he is that way.”

Ms Dawson said of the disturbing memories stemming from hypnosis that she believed those recollections to be true.

“It was like I regressed back to a four-and-a-half-year-old kind of thing, but I was still there and present in the room, listening to myself,” she said.

“And I guess people could question what’s in my subconscious. How much is that created? How much is that actual memory?”

Dawson’s legal counsel, Greg Walsh, said yesterday that 60 Minutes was obliged to disclose the “full facts” behind the hypnosis of Shanelle Dawson. To not do so would be “prejudicial” to his client, he said.

Mr Walsh said that on April 11, 2013, Shanelle Dawson was induced into a “hypnotic state” by clinical psychologist Dr Gary Banks in Sydney. The event was organised by police.

“The practical effect of hypnosis, so far as reliability of evidence of a hypnotised witness, is well known,” Mr Walsh added. “In such circumstances, the prosecution could not rely upon any purported evidence or memories of Shanelle Dawson.”

He described hypnosis as a “trance-like” mental state whereby a person experiences “heightened suggestibility and vivid fantasies”, and that hypnosis had been “demonstrated scientifically to result in false or distorted memories”.

Dawson will be sentenced by Justice Harrison on November 11.

He was recently relocated from Silverwater remand centre to the Macquarie Correctional Centre near Wellington, 360km northwest of Sydney, after death threats.

Last week, Mr Walsh filed a Notice of Intention to Appeal in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal on Dawson’s instructions. His team has six months to lodge the full appeal.

Ms Dawson said she still missed her mum: “I wish that she could hold my daughter and sing to her, or tell her stories, or go and do things with her. Yeah, just those things you take for granted like, people call up their mums when they need advice, or when they’re upset, or they’ve broken up with their partner … You know?

“Or to go home for a home-cooked meal or … I’ve missed out on all of that, and I have to at some point, I guess, accept that and move on from not having that. “