Lyn Dawson’s daughter Shanelle’s words cut to the heart of horror

Until Thursday, we had only seen Shanelle Dawson as a happy little child projected on courtroom screens during her father Chris’s murder trial earlier this year.

Shanelle Dawson arrives at the Federal Court in Sydney on Thursday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

Until Thursday, we had only seen Shanelle Dawson – daughter of convicted wife killer Chris Dawson – as a happy little child, a carefree innocent spirit in family photographs projected on courtroom screens during her father’s murder trial earlier this year.

She had hovered in and around this appalling story, flitted at the edges of this 40-year tale of lust and obsession, vanity and betrayal. She was just 4½ when her father murdered her mother Lyn in January 1982 on Sydney’s northern beaches.

Yet at 12.34pm on Thursday in Court 13A of the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney, she rose from the rear bar table of the court during Dawson’s sentencing hearing and made her way to the witness stand to read out to the world her victim impact statement.

“Good girl,” said Lyn Dawson’s childhood friend Carol Field, who was in the public gallery.

“Dear girl,” said Diana Alcorn, another long-time friend of Lyn.

Chris Dawson – his face a little hardened, perhaps, since he was handcuffed and swept into prison after judge Ian Harrison found him guilty in August of murder – sat in the wood and glass dock in a bottle green prison tracksuit, a dozen metres from his first child.

When he first appeared in court, his chair faced the public gallery to the left, the lawyers in the centre and Justice Harrison to the right. But quietly, almost imperceptibly, as proceedings began, he manoeuvred the swivel chair more towards His Honour, effectively turning his back on the full gallery.

Shanelle, 45, took a moment to compose herself, briefly putting a hand to her chest and breathing deep. For an instant, she and her ­father looked directly at each other. Then with almost incomprehensible courage, she began to read: “The night you removed our mother from our lives was the night you destroyed my sense of safety and belonging in this world for many decades to come.”

If Dawson’s trial had been the dissection of a crime – the murder of a young wife and mother at the hands of a husband who wanted unfettered access to the family’s teenage babysitter – this moment was this saga’s open, beating heart.

The public gallery rode every nuance of her statement. As she detailed four decades of trauma, at least one of the court staff shook their head in disbelief.

Shanelle detailed everything her father, in killing her mother, had taken from her – cuddles, home-cooked meals, love – and said he had no right to do that.

You are not God, she said. Those four words hit the room like a thunderclap.

As for Dawson, after that initial eye contact, he sat still with his head lowered. He was, as he had been throughout his trial, virtually unreadable, a blank canvas. One minute he appeared as a chastened child, the next as a man whose time was being wasted.

Shanelle’s 13-minute address shifted quickly from a public statement to an almost one-on-one discussion with her father. She constantly looked at him as she read, her face almost pleading.

She needed him to listen to what she had to say, and at times she was so intimate and direct that it was as if those in the courtroom had become accidentally privy to a very private dialogue.

Lyn’s brother Greg Simms, his wife, Merilyn, and retired detective Damian Loone – all seated in the gallery’s front row – studied Dawson in the dock as his pained and damaged daughter continued her recitation of sorrow and grief.

Nothing. Dawson remained frozen. Inanimate. “Look at him, the bastard,” someone whispered in the gallery. “The torture of not knowing what happened,” Shanelle said near the end, “or what you did with her body, please tell us where she is.”

Shanelle ended her statement at 12.47pm and briefly returned to her seat at the bar table before leaving the court soon after.

Her testimony had shaken Court 13A to its foundations.

Those 13 minutes – filled with anger and compassion, horror and hope – had neatly distilled everything that had been thus far inexplicable in this extraordinary case. The futility of the murder. The impact of decades of lies. The ongoing catastrophic implications of a single deadly decision.

Shanelle Dawson – the embodiment of innocence lost – showed everybody, especially her own father, her vulnerable heart.

As Justice Harrison had warned the moment he entered the court on Thursday, this was a solemn and serious legal proceeding, not a media event.

He was right of course. But nobody could have been prepared for Shanelle Dawson’s statement. It transcended solemnity and seriousness. It was about the fragility of life itself.