‘I could have died’ in fight with Chris Dawson

Lyn Dawson said her husband Chris pushed her face into the mud and that the incident could have killed her, a court has been told.

Chris Dawson on Tuesday. Picture NCA Newswire / Gaye Gerard

Lyn Dawson said her husband Chris pushed her face into the mud and that the incident could have killed her, a court has been told.

Anna Grantham says she went to a market “boot sale” to sell items with Lyn, her co-worker at the Warriewood childcare centre on Sydney’s northern beaches.

When the market was over, Mr Dawson came in the car with the couple’s two young children. “He appeared to be very agitated and angry and aggressive towards Lyn,” Ms Grantham said.

The defence objected to Ms Grantham going any further on the issue, but judge Ian Harrison said he would hear it.

Ms Grantham said she ­believed the market was on a Sunday, and that she spoke to Lyn about it the next day when she was back at work. She told Lyn she was surprised at the way Mr Dawson was aggressive towards her.

Lyn’s face changed, and she spoke to Ms Grantham about once having a fight with her husband around the family pool. During the fight Mr Dawson had grabbed her by the back of the hair and pressed her face into the mud.

Ms Grantham gestured in court with her hand to the back of her head, and said Lyn had done that gesture.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, he could have easily killed you’,” Ms Grantham said.

“She said, ‘Yes, he could easily have killed me’.”

Lyn said she couldn’t breathe and was gasping for breath. On another occasion, Lyn told her of getting a taxi home at lunch during the school holidays.

Lyn didn’t usually do that, and when she returned to the childcare centre she was “really hurt and very, very sad”.

Ms Grantham said Lyn told her that when she got home Mr Dawson’s swimming trunks and bikini bottoms belonging to the couple’s babysitter were on the line. Lyn told her that her husband was pressing for the babysitter to move in.

Co-workers were telling her it was not a good idea. Lyn said: “I feel sorry for her.”

Lyn also said she trusted Mr Dawson and that he’d never do anything wrong. “She adored him,” Ms Grantham said.

Ms Grantham was one of a succession of Lyn’s co-workers to give evidence at Mr Dawson’s ­Supreme Court murder trial on Tuesday.

She denied defence suggestions she was mistaken about or embellishing what Lyn told her before vanishing in January 1982.

Defence counsel Pauline David suggested there had been multiple discussions about Lyn and her husband, and that Ms Grantham had concluded Mr Dawson was a terrible man.

Was the pool incident something she had created in her own mind, Ms David asked. Had Ms Grantham actually been told the story by a neighbour?

Ms Grantham insisted in cross-examination it was Lyn who told her.

Ms David referred Ms Grantham to an earlier police statement in which she had not stated the part about Lyn agreeing she could have died in the alleged pool incident.

“I don’t know why it’s not there,” Ms Grantham said.

Another colleague, Sue Strath, said Lyn told her prior to Christmas 1981 that her babysitter had moved into the family home.

Lyn wasn’t happy about it, Ms Strath said.

“She told me that she’d got home from work and the babysitter was in the pool naked, and Chris was somewhere in the house,” Ms Strath said.

Lyn said the teenager, known in court as JC, had nowhere else to live.

“I said, well, that’s not your problem,” Ms Strath said.

Lyn’s husband and children were everything to her, she said.

“She said nothing would happen, ‘my Chris’ would never do anything that was wrong. He was always on a pedestal for her,” Ms Strath said.