‘Sighting’ of Chris Dawson’s wife Lyn shut down case

Homicide detectives dropped the Lyn Dawson investigation 30 years ago as a result of a prior purported sighting by a family friend.

Former Detective Paul Mayger, who investigated Lynnette Dawson's disappearance in the early 1990s, is seen leaving the Supreme Court in Sydney. Picture: NCA Newswire/ Gaye Gerard

Homicide detectives dropped the Lyn Dawson investigation 30 years ago as a result of a prior purported sighting by a family friend.

Retired detective Paul Mayger was one of the officers tasked in 1990 with investigating Lyn’s disappearance from Sydney’s northern beaches eight years earlier.

Mr Mayger and colleague Stuart Wilkins interviewed Lyn’s husband, Chris, in Queensland in January 1991.

At the trial of Chris Dawson for Lyn’s murder in the NSW Supreme Court on Tuesday, prosecutor Craig Everson asked Mr Mayger why the investigation was suspended the following year.

Mr Mayger said there was a system in place at the time of senior officers doing monthly reviews of ongoing investigations.

As part of his job he was also regularly in contact with people from the Director of Public Prosecutions and the coroner, and they often discussed ongoing inquiries.

Mr Mayger said he raised the issue of eyewitness testimony that Lyn had been seen a week after her disappearance.

“And I was advised that unless we could refute that evidence, then the investigation probably shouldn’t proceed,” he said.

Mr Mayger told the trial the reported sighting that stopped the investigation was by Sue Butlin, who died in 1998. Her husband, Ray Butlin, has previously given evidence at the trial.

Mr Butlin said Sue thought she saw Lyn while working at a fruit barn off the Pacific Highway at Kulnura on the NSW Central Coast.

Mr Butlin was team manager of Gosford Rugby League Club’s first grade team when twins Chris and Paul Dawson were the coaches in the late 1970s, and the men became close.

The woman Sue thought was Lyn got in a car and drove off without turning around.

Numerous witnesses have told the trial Lyn didn’t drive.

“She knew Lyn Dawson well, supposedly,” Mr Mayger said.

He said he’d never spoken to or interviewed Ms Butlin, adding it “may have been something that we intended to do”.

The homicide squad was on call, and fresh matters took priority while older cases were pushed back, he said.

The trial was also told police records from the homicide investigation went into storage and couldn’t be found.

Mr Mayger had been a homicide investigator based at Chatswood in Sydney’s northern suburbs.

“When we relocated from the Chatswood office to a centralised system over in Strawberry Hills, all our records, all our briefs, everything was boxed up and taken into storage,” he said.

“I had later visited that warehouse to try and find something else. And what we found was quite a disaster.

“There were boxes of records, stacked four and five high. Cardboard boxes from all of the crime squads, and they had been there on this concrete floor for some many months.

“The weight at the top had started to collapse the bottom boxes, and the damp had come up through the concrete. It was just a mess, really. Trying to find stuff was almost impossible.

“So what went from our office at Chatswood into that storage facility was more than what I was able to locate.”

Retired detective Damian Loone has previously given evidence that when he was assigned the Lyn Dawson investigation in 1998 he was given only a one-page document. Mr Loone eventually got from archives a videotape and audiotapes of the interview Mr Mayger conducted with Chris Dawson in 1991.