Double take from double vision as Dawson twin testifies

At 2.48pm on Wednesday in Court D of Sydney’s Supreme Court, a dark suited man suddenly appeared on the room’s four wall-mounted television screens.

A recent picture of twins Chris (left) and Paul Dawson.

At 2.48pm on Wednesday in Court D of Sydney’s Supreme Court, a dark suited man suddenly appeared on the room’s four wall-mounted television screens.

He was wearing a white shirt and maroon and white striped tie. His tightly cropped hair was receding at the crown and dusted grey at the sides.

He was witness Paul Anthony Dawson, 73, and at first glance it was a momentary shock to see him, because seated on the northern side of the courtroom, as he has been for the past 4½ weeks, was his twin brother Christopher Dawson, 73, also in a dark suit, white shirt, tie and same hair style.

As identical twins, their resemblance should come as no surprise, but to see one half of this equation beamed into court via videolink from a police station somewhere in NSW, and the other half looking up to seemingly observe his own reflection, was startling.

The only difference between the Dawson on the TV screen and the Dawson sitting near the courtroom wall clock, was that the latter was on trial for murdering his first wife.

This moment of optical illusion came late in proceedings, because almost the entire day was devoted to a single witness – Paul’s wife, Marilyn Dawson.

Here, the trial had arrived at the inner-sanctum of this story. Chris and Paul. Lyn and Marilyn. Paul and Marilyn married in 1969. Chris and Lyn married in 1970. By the late 1970s, the couples lived a few hundred metres from each other in Bayview Heights on Sydney’s northern beaches. Both had small children. Both brothers were teachers. Marilyn and Lyn both shared three letters in their first names. Mirror after mirror.

Marilyn preceded her husband on the TV screens, speaking from the same anonymous police station, and appeared impish, with a blonde bob and a warm face, her lips carrying just a light smudge of pink lipstick.

She had excellent recall in repeating whole sections of questions put to her, and her almost child-like vocal tone regularly featured what they call in musical terms an ascent at the end of her sentences.

Her evidence ranged across the marriages of the two couples, rugby league games for the Newtown Jets starring the Dawson boys, BBQs at each other’s houses, holidays together as far afield as Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast, living together while their two homes up on Gilwinga Drive at Bayview were being built (at the same time, by the same builder), pregnancies, small children, and their hardworking husbands taking on extra jobs – pro footballers, garbage truck runs, fitness instructors – to help pay for the swimming pools they both had installed in their respective backyards. More mirrors.

Then came a chat between Lyn and Marilyn, together in a car near the end of 1981. With the young Cromer High student and babysitter JC now on the scene, the seemingly perfect marriage between Chris and Lyn was starting to fray.

Marilyn told the court: “I said (to Lyn) you need to stay at home, you don’t want another person in your home unsupervised. And I think she said, ‘I’m at the end … I don’t know what to do.’

“She was sad and devastated and I just think she had a lot on her plate with two little children and she couldn’t believe what was going on.”

Her evidence illuminated that the lives of the Dawsons had been very much about symmetry. About balance.

Until January 1982, when Lyn Dawson disappeared.

In a single day in court on Wednesday, three of the figures in that long-ago symmetrical equation once again came together. The only one missing was Lynette Dawson.