Seeking the truth about Lyn Dawson in the shadows

It was another day of mysteries – in shadow, and in daylight – in the murder trial of former schoolteacher and rugby league star Chris Dawson in Sydney’s ­Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Lyn Dawson. Picture: ABC

It was another day of mysteries – in shadow, and in daylight – in the murder trial of former schoolteacher and rugby league star Chris Dawson in Sydney’s ­Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Last week ended with evidence that Dawson’s wife, Lyn, who disappeared in January 1982, had been sporadically sighted by people since that date and in different locations, from a hospital on Sydney’s northern beaches to a fruit barn on the NSW Central Coast.

And now another appearance.

As the trial entered its sixth week, the court was played an ­official police videotaped interview with Ross Hutcheon, ­Dawson’s brother-in-law and husband to his older sister, Lynette, recorded in March 2019. (Hutcheon passed away just ­before the start of this trial.)

Hutcheon told police he had seen Lyn Dawson a few weeks or months after she disappeared, standing at a bus stop on busy ­Victoria Road at Gladesville in Sydney.

Hutcheon, almost 80 at the time of the interview, sat at a circular table between two detectives in a police interview room, his silver hair combed forward. He sported a similarly silver goatee.

He said at the time of the sighting he was working for Australian Eagle Insurance and was driving west towards Paramatta in a work car sometime between 10am and 3pm on a weekday, when he passed the hospital at Gladesville to his left. As he drove, he looked right, across the inbound lanes of traffic, and in sunshine saw a woman at a bus stop. He says he recognised her as Lyn Dawson.

“She looked just like Lyn,” Hutcheon said in his statement, “same colour hair, same hairstyle, no sunglasses, no obvious attempt to disguise herself or anything like that. I thought I’d stop and say hello … (but that it was) pointless because she had walked out on Chris.”

Then he changed his mind, ­negotiated his way back into the city-bound lanes, but reached the bus stop and found the woman gone.

“Another thing that convinced me at time (that) I was seeing Lyn Dawson was that it was opposite the hospital and she was a nurse and she’d been at work and she was now going somewhere, home, whatever.”

Then close to midday on Tuesday, Lynette Hutcheon appeared on the TV screens of Court 9D to give her evidence. She sat demurely in front of the camera, sporting a bloom of salt-and-pepper hair, hands clasped in her lap, thumbs briskly rubbing each other. Occasionally she lowered her head.

She was asked by crown prosecutor Craig Everson SC why she had not told her brother, Chris, about her husband’s sighting of his missing wife at Gladesville, and she said she thought it “wasn’t necessary and common sense would prevail … other people had seen her, I thought it was common … fairly well known …”

To the second mystery, in shadow.

Very late in the court day, at 3.11pm, another witness, Robert Silkman, appeared on the court’s four screens. Silkman, a former Newtown Jets rugby league teammate of Dawson’s, was allegedly approached by Dawson in the 1970s to help get rid of Lyn.

Silkman appeared in a dark­ened lounge room somewhere in Sydney, his face barely visible in the gloom. On a wall behind him was a framed print of a famous Andy Warhol portrait. It was ­either actress Liz Taylor or former American first lady Jackie Kennedy, but it was too hard to tell in the limited light.

Silkman had recently sustained a spinal injury in a fall down a set of stairs, and legal ­debate centred on whether he should give evidence at a local police station or courthouse, or be permitted to speak from his suburban heart of darkness due to his pain and discomfort.

When, and how, will Silkman give his evidence? That’s another mystery, in a trial full of them.