The Teacher’s Pet: Coroner certain jury would find Chris Dawson guilty

Coroner Carl Milovanovich says the evidence against Chris Dawson is ‘overwhelming’.

Former coroner Carl Milovanovich: ‘The day of (Lyn’s) disappearance is just absolutely bizarre’. Picture: Hollie Adams

The former NSW deputy state coroner says if all the evidence against Chris Dawson was put to a jury, it would return with a verdict that he was guilty of killing his wife, Lyn, 36 years ago.

In his first interview ever about the cold case, Carl Milovanovich, who held an inquest in 2003 into Lyn’s disappearance from Sydney’s northern beaches, described as “overwhelming” the circumstantial evidence against Mr Dawson.

“If you put all this evidence before a jury, a jury of normal ­people, they would come back with a guilty verdict,” he told The ­Australian.

New evidence and witnesses uncovered in the investigative podcast series The Teacher’s Pet would have to be tested but could only strengthen the prosecution’s case, he said.

The recently retired Mr Milo­vano­vich said his initial reaction on reading the brief of evidence for the inquest was: “Why haven’t the police charged this fellow with murder?”

His inquest spanned five days of public hearings in a Sydney courtroom, and resulted in him recommending Mr Dawson face a murder trial.

“He knew she wasn’t coming back. That’s so evident,” he said.

“That’s circumstantially so strong and probably one of the reasons why I felt so strongly about the case to refer it to the DPP.”

The 2003 inquest followed a separate 2001 inquest in which coroner Jan Stevenson also determined a “known person”, Mr Dawson, had killed Lyn.

Police have wanted to charge Mr Dawson since the inquests but the Office of the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions has repeatedly said there was insufficient evidence.

Mr Dawson denies killing his wife.

Mr Milovanovich said he believed Lyn was dead when Mr Dawson took the couple’s daughters, Shanelle and Sherryn, then four and two, to Northbridge Baths on January 9, 1982.

While there, he claimed to have received a phone call from Lyn to say she wouldn’t be at the pool as planned, purportedly because she needed a few days by herself on the central coast.

She was a doting mother who had been in constant contact with her own mother in the preceding days. Her daughters, parents, friends and siblings have never seen or heard from her, and there have been no sightings.

Mr Milovanovich said Mr Dawson’s “Achilles heel” was that he almost immediately drove to South West Rocks to collect his teenage lover, Joanne Curtis, and had moved her into his home and marital bed at Bayview just two days after Lyn went missing.

There was no sign he had any fear his wife would turn up to find the teenager had taken her place.

“The day of her disappearance is just absolutely bizarre — the circumstances, the phone call to the pool,” Mr Milovanovich said.

“There’s no corroboration, she doesn’t ring her mother and then he drives up there within days and brings her (Ms Curtis) back.

“All the circumstances when you put them together are just so remarkable that I could not ­accept that Lyn Dawson would just disappear off the face of the Earth without there being some human intervention.

“It just defies all logic that a mother would leave a four-year-old, a two-year-old, a family, a job and friends and just disappear.

“The lies that I think are clearly being told by people in relation to purported phone calls, to purported sightings — they were all thrown out there to muddy the water.”

He added that he was “very disappointed that the police investigation was so poor initially … it wasn’t prioritised”.

The DPP is examining whether there was now enough evidence to prosecute Mr Dawson following a renewed investi­gation by homicide detectives.

Mr Milovanovich said prosecutors should also assess evidence from new witnesses from The Teacher’s Pet.

These include the former Dawson family babysitter Bev McNally, who came forward during the podcast to say she witnessed Mr Dawson’s rough physical treatment of Lyn.

For the first time, prosecutors now also have Mr Dawson’s lies and omissions in his August 1982 statement to police in which he failed to mention his affair and blamed his marriage difficulties on Lyn’s spending.

“If that evidence was before me when I was doing the inquest, it would only strengthen the view that I already had that there was sufficient evidence for the matter to go before a jury,” Mr Milovanovich said.

“It would go to the question of his character and his credibility.

“Any additional evidence that’s relevant and compelling should be considered (by the DPP). They should be looking at all the evidence.”

In his 2003 findings, he stated he was “confident” a jury would be able to convict Mr Dawson. He now says he thought then that prosecutors “would run with it”.

In the absence of a detailed explanation for why there has been no prosecution, it was “always a possibility” the DPP had mis­understood the evidence.