Teacher’s Pet: Chris Dawson hangs appeal hat on footy mate’s dead wife’s dubious sighting

Chris and Paul Dawson with their friend Ray Butlin in 2013.

Of all the purported evidence cited by murderer Chris Dawson in his appeal, a so-called sighting by his football mate’s wife, Sue Butlin, of his first wife Lyn at a fruit barn ranks most highly on the “clutching at straws” index.

Sue Butlin has been dead for a quarter-century. It is highly likely police took no statement from her in the 1990s before she died.

It is not clear police ever spoke to her at all.

There is not one piece of paper directly attributable to Sue Butlin to advance claims that Lyn was alive after January 8, 1982. If Lyn were alive days or weeks after that date, the crown’s case that she was killed by her husband on or about January 8 collapses.

But the sighting evidence is very weak.

On Monday, in the Court of Criminal Appeal, hearsay evidence revolving around the late Sue Butlin was rolled into the bundle of grounds for Dawson’s taxpayer-funded legal bid to win freedom.

Public defender Belinda Rigg argued that the Butlin “evidence” was some of the most “extraordinary”. A key contention of Ms Rigg is that Dawson was hugely disadvantaged by failures of police to properly investigate evidence and leads that could have cleared him of murder. That’s where Sue Butlin comes in.

“She was a witness who had given a positive account of having seen Ms Dawson,” Ms Rigg told the Court of Appeal’s president, judge Julie Ward, sitting with judges Anthony Payne and Christine Adamson.

Sue Butlin has hovered over the Dawson case for four decades. She was name-checked in police files for the first time in 1991 when the then detective sergeant Paul Mayger from Sydney’s Homicide Squad went to the Gold Coast to interview Dawson, who told him: “I mean, this friend of mine and Lyn’s said she’d seen Lyn on the central coast – I presumed she was on the central coast for at least, for a little while after that, anyway.”

Hundreds of pages of documents from Mayger’s 1990-91 investigation of Dawson were subsequently lost or destroyed.

Dawson’s murder trial in 2022 heard from Mayger that when he spoke to prosecutors in 1991 about Dawson’s claim about his mate’s wife’s sighting, he was told it made it hard to run a case for murder. Extraordinarily, the Mayger investigation was stopped there and then in 1991.

And Sue Butlin still didn’t come forward.

When Mayger was asked during the trial about there being no evidence or statement from Sue Butlin, he agreed he had not interviewed her. He said: “It may have been it was something we had intended to do, but you have to remember … being in the homicide squad and being on call … the workload often meant that matters such as this that weren’t fresh, weren’t alive so to speak, got pushed to the back.”

It was a big and distressing moment in the trial. It dawned on those following the evidence closely that the case got dropped in 1991 because of specious hearsay claims, unsupported by evidence or statements.

Decades of freedom ensued for a cold-blooded killer.

But there’s something else. When Ray Butlin gave evidence under oath in a 2003 inquest into Lyn’s presumed death, he said his wife would tell tall stories.

He told the then deputy state coroner, Carl Milovanovich, that if his wife “had seen somebody that may have been of like appearance to Lyn – and she knew Lyn extremely well – then she may have wanted herself to see Lyn, it would put her in a situation where she would be at the centre of attention”.

Sue “didn’t have a lot”, he added, and “Chris and Paul to Sue were more or less stars. She looked up to them quite a bit.”

As I wrote in 2023: “Delicately, respectfully, Ray was suggesting to the courtroom in 2003 that Sue could exaggerate things. They got ‘distorted’ by her.”

Sue Butlin met the Dawson twins when they played for Gosford after they’d finished playing first grade for the Newtown Jets. Ray Butlin was a manager at Gosford Rugby League Club and had interviewed them for player-coach roles there in the late 1970s.

While investigating Dawson for The Teacher’s Pet podcast ­series, I found a 2013 Facebook photo of the twins with Ray Butlin. Still good mates all these years later.