The Teacher’s Accuser: Shanelle Dawson, daughter of murderer Chris Dawson, contemplates visiting him in prison

The eldest daughter of murdered mum Lyn has written her own book and tells The Australian of her complex feelings towards her imprisoned father.

Shanelle Dawson, who has written a memoir entitled My Mother’s Eyes, and is interviewed in a new episode of podcast The Teacher’s Accuser, holding a pcture of her mother Lynette. Picture: John Wilson

It has been 10 months since Chris Dawson’s daughter, Shanelle, looked her father in the eye across a courtroom and told him: “You are not God.”

Shanelle Dawson delivered a powerful victim impact statement, in which she described the heartbreak of a life without any memory of her mother, Lyn, and the sorrow of having to tell her own daughter, Kialah, that her grandfather had murdered her grandmother.

Dawson – a former rugby league star and model who had got away with murder for four decades until he was convicted in the wake of The Australian’s podcast The Teacher’s Pet – is now serving 24 years for the murder, and a three-year sentence for the unlawful carnal knowledge of a 16-year-old pupil.

Now Shanelle Dawson wonders whether she should visit her father in prison – and whether he would see her, if she did.

“I have been working on forgiveness more for myself than for his sake, so I don‘t carry the toxic grief,” Shanelle Dawson told The Weekend Australian in an interview for our podcast, The Teacher’s Accuser, out now.

“My daughter did say to me one day, can she go and visit her grandfather in jail?

“And I went: ‘Oh, I hadn‘t actually even occurred to me that we might do that. And then I thought about visiting him just sort of for myself,” she said.

“I certainly do feel like I might want or need to at some point before he dies, but I‘m also really well aware of the fact he might not even want to see me.

“If he‘s feeling betrayed by my actions and my participation in things and standing up to him in court, he very likely probably doesn’t want to see me because on some level he might even blame me for the fact that he’s incarcerated.”

It’s a heavy burden to carry, but Shanelle Dawson has devoted herself to finding peace in a life where she’s been forced to deal with the consequences of her father’s choices.

She has written a memoir, My Mother’s Eyes, dedicated “to all Mothers and every Motherless child, everywhere.”

In the book, Shanelle Dawson has deliberately chosen to capitalise the words ‘Mum’ and ‘Mother’, but to leave ‘dad’ and ‘father’ in lower case.

Her father has never wavered from his lie that Lyn simply disappeared from the family home in 1982, leaving behind Shanelle and her younger sister, aged just four and two.

In the murder trial, Justice Ian Harrison found Chris Dawson killed Lyn in order to pursue a sexual relationship with his former student, whom he went on to marry.

After having her own baby, the former student realised Lyn would never have left her daughters willingly, and began speaking up to police, education authorities and friends about Dawson’s controlling, abusive behaviour.

While working at a women’s refuge on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, the second wife met lawyer Rebecca Hazel, who began working on a book about the case.

That book, The Schoolgirl, Her Teacher and His Wife, is also out now.

The Australian’s national chief correspondent Hedley Thomas, who created the podcast which has had more than 80 million downloads worldwide, is about to release his own book about the case, entitled The Teacher’s Pet.

Shanelle Dawson says she believes others know how Dawson killed Lyn, and where he disposed of her body.

“I‘m not sure if we’ll ever get the truth from my dad, but I do believe there are other people who know the truth,” she said.

“So I‘m hopeful that one of them might want to lighten their conscience at some point.”

Lyn Simms, as her birth family would like her to be known, would have been 75 on Monday September 25.

To mark her birthday, Shanelle and her own daughter Kialah “played some songs which we dedicated to Mum.”

It was a moment of joy, at odds with the deep anxiety Shanelle felt last year while preparing to face her father in court.

“I kept having panic attacks at the thought of seeing my dad. I knew it would be really, really, really confronting. But I also felt like it was the greatest opportunity for healing.

“In an ideal world, he would have broken down and cried and said: ‘Sorry’.

“But I had no expectations of that. I think it took me quite a long time afterwards to just digest it all and feel the heartbreak and the look in my father‘s eyes when he stared me down.”

“It was my chance to be able to give it back to him and hopefully not carry it on my shoulders any more.”

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Episode 7 of our podcast The Teacher’s Accuser is available now, wherever you get your podcasts.