Teacher’s Pet podcast: Lyn Dawson and other ‘missing’ victims
How many Lyn Dawsons are there? That’s what Carl Milovanovich asked himself as the cases of missing women piled up.
How many Lyn Dawsons are there? That’s what Carl Milovanovich was asking himself as the cases of missing women piled up. As NSW deputy state coroner, Milovanovich was seeing a pattern. Suspicious disappearances of women — wives, mothers, sisters, daughters — were falling through the cracks.
“I think the majority of the long-term missing person cases that are still outstanding … involve young women who have disappeared and inevitably they are victims of homicide,” Milovanovich says in a candid interview for podcast series The Teacher’s Pet.
The case of Dawson, a much-loved nurse, childcare worker and mother of two, is among those that still trouble Milovanovich. Blind Freddie should have seen that it didn’t add up. But almost everyone — police, Lyn Dawson’s family, friends — took her husband, Chris Dawson, at his word when he said she went away in January 1982 for some time by herself and never returned.
When Milovanovich came to assess Lyn Dawson’s disappearance at an inquest in 2003, the police shortcomings were glaring. Key documents had vanished and witnesses had been interrogated late or not at all, until detective Damian Loone sank his teeth into the case. Loone was dogged in his investigation from the late 1990s onwards. He concluded, as many now agree, that Chris Dawson’s account of Lyn going missing was a farce; that he was a killer who had escaped justice.
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But would it be too late to make up the lost ground?
“There was a systemic problem in the police department in how they prioritised and triaged missing person cases,” the newly retired Milovanovich says. “What I had, really, was Damian’s investigation with all its defects and all of its missing documents. Totally unsatisfactory.
Unfortunately, this dearth of evidence is far from unusual. “It comes back to the bee I’ve got in my bonnet about missing persons,” Milovanovich says, explaining the frustration he felt when, as coroner, he handled cold cases such as Lyn Dawson’s, which often had never been properly investigated. “In the old days, it was just reported to the local police station. It was a cop’s entry, probably typed up on a manual typewriter and filed away. If it doesn’t get sent into the missing persons unit in a central agency and gets registered, well, how easy is it to lose a file? I’ve done numerous inquests of long-term missing persons cases where they can’t even find any evidence of the case being reported.”
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For the past three months, The Teacher’s Pet, the weekly podcast series by The Australian, has sought to reinvestigate every facet of Lyn Dawson’s disappearance. The unprecedented popularity of the podcast — climbing to more than 12 million downloads this week — has helped unearthed compelling new evidence and persuaded new witnesses to come forward. The exercise has shown that even in decades-old cold cases, there is always more evidence to find. Yesterday marked the release of the 14th and final episode, for the time being.
The hiatus will allow time for important leads that have been accumulating to be explored in depth before the series returns.
For now, Lyn Dawson’s disappearance is in the hands of the NSW Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Police earlier this year presented a fresh brief of evidence and are awaiting news on whether the office believes there is enough to take the case to trial. The NSW DPP has previously repeatedly declined to prosecute Chris Dawson over the probable murder of Lyn. He has always strenuously denied he killed his wife.
As they weigh up the latest brief, the ears, if not the eyes, of the world have been on them.
The degree of global interest has been unprecedented, with The Teacher’s Pet podcast investigation simultaneously hitting No 1 on podcast charts in Australia, the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.
What we’ve come to know, as the series progressed, is that those who suspected foul play kept it to themselves, or went unheeded when they did speak. Key people in the life of Lyn Dawson have said it was a time when what happened behind closed doors stayed private, with too few questions asked.
Some feel almost unbearably guilty that they didn’t do more when they had the chance, both before and after Lyn Dawson vanished. But they’re talking now.
When the podcast was launched in May, the case quickly expanded to encompass revelations of a “sex ring” of teachers on Sydney’s northern beaches preying on underage students.
One of the first to come forward was Robyn Wheeler, who was a student at Sydney’s Cromer High School, where Chris Dawson was teaching when Lyn went missing. Her tales of mothers confronting teachers to demand their daughters be left alone, of male teachers in their 30s climbing through their students’ bedroom windows at night, and of pupils being plied with alcohol and drugs, served as a lightning rod for others to speak up publicly.
Specialist child abuse and sex offender investigators have now teamed up with northern beaches detectives to form Strike Force Southwood to investigate. NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller, who has apologised to Lyn Dawson’s family for mistakes that occurred long before his appointment, says the investigation is making good progress. Fuller has confirmed police also are investigating other leads and witnesses unearthed during the podcast.
The story of Lyn Dawson is a case of truth being almost stranger than fiction. Her husband and suspected killer, Chris Dawson, had a disturbingly close bond with his twin brother, Paul, and both were celebrities on Sydney’s northern beaches as star footballers for the Newtown Jets.
Chris Dawson rubbed shoulders — literally, on football fields — with senior and influential police officers. He played the part of an upstanding member of the community — teacher, father, football coach. But scratch the surface, and another side to Dawson is revealed: his pursuit, alongside twin Paul, of teenage girls for sex; his long-running, obsessive affair with one of his students; his quick temper, and a wife who would show up for work, games of tennis with friends and dress fittings with disturbing bruises.
Chris Dawson’s version of what happened on the day Lyn disappeared — Saturday, January 9, 1982 — was that his wife had gone out shopping in the morning, and had arranged to meet him, their daughters Shanelle and Sherryn, and her mother, Helena Simms, later at Northbridge Baths, where Chris Dawson worked on weekends. However, he claimed he had received a phone call from Lyn at the baths saying she needed some time away and was on the central coast.
Her family never heard from her again. Two days later, Chris Dawson moved his schoolgirl lover, Joanne Curtis, into the family home at Bayview. He did not report Lyn missing for five weeks, and it was eight years before homicide detectives looked into Lyn’s disappearance, acting on information from Curtis, who by then had separated from Dawson.
The romance between Dawson and Curtis had started more than a year before Lyn went missing and had been all-consuming. But with Lyn gone, the relationship had withered and died. Curtis saw herself becoming Lyn, saying Dawson’s cruelty and possessiveness were suddenly directed towards her.
The first homicide investigation went next to nowhere and was shelved. But thanks to the lobbying of Lyn’s friend Sue Strath, northern beaches police assigned detective Loone to the case in 1998. For unexplained reasons, there was almost nothing in the police file when Loone picked it up. He began afresh, culminating in two inquests, in 2001 and 2003.
In both cases the coroners — Jan Stevenson in 2001 and Milovanovich in 2003 — found Lyn was killed by a known person, her husband Chris, and recommended he face a murder trial.
It’s rare for judicial figures to speak publicly about their cases in Australia, but Milovanovich feels so strongly about Lyn Dawson’s disappearance — and others like it — that he agreed to an interview at his Sydney home.
He found it impossible to believe Lyn had walked out on her family, contacting only her husband. He had fully expected after his inquest findings that the NSW DPP would prosecute Chris Dawson. It never happened, with the DPP citing insufficient evidence.
The experienced coroner disagrees. “If you put all this evidence before a jury, a jury of normal people, they would come back with a guilty verdict,” he says of the case.
Milovanovich says he spotted a trend of missing women who had been classified incorrectly; they were being treated as long-term missing persons when they were in fact homicide victims.
Hide a body well enough and no one goes looking. “There just was not the appropriate degree of attention given and not the appropriate degree of resources put into missing persons,” he says.
A deluge of missing person reports, and the high proportion of people being found quickly, affected the mindset of police.
“Ninety-five or 98 per cent of all missing persons came home within 48 hours, and that was a systemic attitude the police had — ‘you don’t worry about investigating until you’ve got a smoking gun or some evidence of foul play, they’ll turn up or they’ve gone off with a boyfriend or something like that’. And I suppose it was resources, too.”
The association between Chris Dawson and detectives on the northern beaches through his football is a red flag for potential corruption. But Milovanovich is inclined to think it was just the way they did things.
“They didn’t start investigating properly until there was a lot more evidence. They didn’t triage missing persons appropriately.”
Before his retirement, Milovanovich turned passion into action. He set up a committee under the control of the state coroner with the aim of ensuring all missing persons cases are referred to the coroner’s office within 12 months if the person is not found.
“So now if a person goes missing, missing persons (police) get involved straight away. They go straight to the house. Within 48 hours they get DNA, they get toothbrushes, they find out whether there’s a history of domestic violence, they get statements from all friends, they create a file.
“They check bank records straight away, not five or six or seven years later. They do all those sorts of things. And if the person hasn’t been found within 12 months, it’s reported to the coroner as a suspected death. So you get the ball rolling a lot quicker. People’s memories are fresher.”
Hopefully, if someone goes missing today, there will be a more thorough and appropriate investigation than that afforded to Lyn.
If you know more about this story contact thomash@theaustralian.com.au.
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