The Teacher’s Pet podcast: The footballer, his schoolgirl lover and the missing wife

The footballer, his schoolgirl lover and the missing wife | LISTEN

Lyn Dawson with one of her two daughters.

On fine days, Chris Dawson walks hesitantly from his home to a wide stretch of Queensland beach near Noosa.

He enjoys basking in the morning rays as a zephyr ripples the waves a few hundred metres from his home. He should be carefree. At peace. But tranquillity never comes. It has been this way for many years. He is constantly looking over his shoulder.

Dawson’s accusers, who have helped The Weekend Australian to uncover evidence for a new podcast investigative series The Teacher’s Pet, vow they will never stop demanding justice.

They are sure the star rugby league player for the Newtown Jets in the 1970s is one of the ­nation’s most likely murder suspects never to be charged.

The former high school sports teacher is alleged to have killed his first wife, Lynette Joy Dawson, between 9pm on Friday, January 8, 1982, and 8am the following day.

He has always emphatically rejected these accusations.

Two coroners have ruled that he did it. Police have wanted him charged for 20 years. But the ­Director of Public Prosecutions in NSW has always baulked, repeatedly refusing to run a trial for murder.

Lyn’s remains have never been found. Dawson, who had strong motives for being rid of his wife in 1982, has argued she is still alive.

For Lyn’s family and many friends who saw her exceptional devotion and love for her two young girls, Shanelle and Sherryn, the idea she has lived but avoided her daughters for 36 years with not a single contact is ridiculous.

The Teacher's Pet: The people involved in the case

Julie Andrew, Lyn’s good friend and next-door neighbour from Bayview on Sydney’s northern beaches at the time she vanished, said: “He was in love with Joanne. He wanted Joanne.”

At the time Lyn vanished, Dawson was in an intense sexual relationship with a teenager, Joanne Curtis. It had started more than a year earlier when she was a Year 11 student at Cromer High School and he was the sports teacher. She would become the Dawsons’ babysitter.

“That’s the Lolita thing, you know,” Andrew says. “And to get Joanne, he had to get rid of his wife. He would have come to a point through, that last week, where he realised the only way out for him to achieve what he wanted was to kill Lyn. I’m positive.”

The podcast series, which launched yesterday, will continue over at least eight episodes, which can be ­downloaded from www.theteacherspet.com.au, iTunes and other platforms.

Lyn’s family and friends are hopeful that the series will flush out the evidence that might finally solve the case.

Key witnesses who did not go to police at the first ­opportunity have now come forward and divulged important facts, some speaking for the first time about what they know.

Nobody has heard from or seen Lyn since January 1982. There has not been a single trace of life since she vanished.

“She was a truly sweet, caring, loving woman who would never leave her children,’’ says Andrew. “She was an earth mother. Those little girls were everything.

“Nothing would come between her and those kids. They were the light of her lives. So if she was going to leave, those kids would have left with her.

“You don’t accuse somebody of murdering somebody else. It’s not something you can say lightly. It’s heartfelt. And it’s not anger or ­aggression, it’s sorrow. I’m sorrowful. I’ve lost a dear friend. And I’ve carried it for years. And I miss her every day.

“I just want justice. I just want justice for her and her family and I would love her little girls to know she didn’t leave them. She never walked away from them. She was taken away from them. By the person who was supposed to protect her.”

The Teacher’s Pet

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At Bayview back in early 1982, the bush was very close to the house. Andrew recalls how dense it was. There have been police digs for her body but they’ve been confined to one area, the swimming pool. Witnesses who have not come forward before have given The Weekend Australian information that supports a view that Lyn’s body is in the ground at Bayview, and not far from her house — but not where police have dug.

“The best way to dispose of a body when you live in the bush is to put it in the bush — and that’s what I think he did on the Friday night,’’ Andrew says.

“And then when Joanne turned straight up like a few days later, she’s there, I thought, ‘You’ve got rid of her, you’ve got rid of her, you’ve done that’.

“Somebody’s going to eventually find her. I thought the only way that she’s going to get justice is if her body turns up. And if I ever believed in a god, I would be praying for that. Find her body.”

Shortly before her disappearance, Lyn had confided to her sister, Pat Jenkins, that Dawson had a “dark side nobody knows”.

She says he covered his tracks and repeatedly lied to Lyn’s family and friends, telling them the deeply devoted wife and mother had voluntarily left her husband and children for just “a few days”.

Dawson said at the time that Lyn had telephoned a couple of times to say she would be coming back, and just needed a few days to think things over.

As he presented to her family as a worried husband, he continued an already intense relationship with Curtis, who moved into the Dawson home, into Lyn’s bed, two days after she vanished.

Curtis believed Dawson’s ­assurances in January 1982 that Lyn had gone and was “not coming back”. He suggested his wife had gone off with a cult.

With Lyn, Dawson’s first of three wives, out of the picture, he had much to gain. He kept the large house he and his wife had built and he remained there with Curtis until selling up and moving to the Gold Coast three years later.

For the first eight years after Lyn went missing, nobody investigated foul play. Her daughters would call Curtis “Mum” as memories of their own mother faded.

Lyn’s sister Pat and her brothers, Greg and Phil Simms, despise Dawson, who had a fearsome reputation for rising quickly to anger. Along with Lyn’s friends, her siblings feel badly let down by the justice system.

“I just see evil. I really see evil,’’ Pat Jenkins said, “because of what he has done to so many people through his own selfishness and what he wanted. I can never forgive, never ever.’’

When he played rugby league, Dawson was known as “Cranky Chris” while his twin brother was “Passive Paul”. Their temperaments could not have been more different. Those who knew them well — from football, relationships and family ties — describe a strangely close bond between the brothers.

Chris Dawson and his brothers have insisted he is the innocent victim of an outrageous smear campaign — a conspiracy of ­wicked and incredibly hurtful lies.

If the serious and highly defamatory accusations levelled against him were only the ­emotion-charged products of Lyn’s family and friends, the argument might be more persuasive, but numerous police detectives, two coroners and a host of witnesses are confident everything points to him having killed Lyn after drugging a drink he had made for her.

NSW detectives — one in particular, Damian Loone — want to take Dawson away in handcuffs from his affluent life in Queensland and watch him defend a charge of murder in a jury trial in Sydney.

One coroner, Jan Stevenson, who studied a detailed police brief of evidence, formally recommended in 2001 that Dawson be prosecuted for murder. But nothing happened — the DPP refused to run it. A second coroner, Carl Milovanovich, received a more comprehensive police brief of evidence, tested key witnesses thoroughly over five days of public hearings in 2003, and then delivered the same powerful and rare finding — that Chris Dawson murdered his first wife.

Chris Dawson, now living in Queensland, denies he killed his wife, Lyn, and has never been charged. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen.

A second brother, Peter Dawson, a solicitor, argued strongly against the findings to no avail.

The DPP again refused to run it. It is why all these years later, Chris Dawson remains a free man.

Milestones abound at this stage of his life. In eight weeks he will be 70. Last month, he went to Fiji with family to celebrate a significant anniversary in his third marriage.

On visits to the Gold Coast, he spends time with his best friend and the closest person in his life, twin brother Paul. Sometimes they go together to watch the local rugby league team, the Titans, training and playing.

Chris Dawson told The Weekend Australian he did not want to give his side of the story for the podcast series. He said he had lost his faith in journalism because of damaging things written about him in the past.

He was once a pin-up, a part-time model for jeans and corn chips, a fitness fanatic and a clean-living non-drinker. His road runs with Paul around Sydney’s northern beaches in the 70s and 80s covered thousands of kilometres. Schoolgirls were at times infatuated with the brothers. Lyn was devoted to him. “I think she had this wonderful image — fairytale marriage, beautiful children and home — and it was all falling around her, and she didn’t want us to know,’’ said her sister Pat.

Andrew is among dozens of people to speak to The Weekend Australian over the past six months of this investigation. Like many people who knew Lyn and Chris Dawson well, who witnessed his behaviour with a schoolgirl and understood his determination to be rid of his wife, Andrew is passionate about justice being served: “She trusted him. He could talk his way out of anything.’’

Everything about Lyn’s dis­appearance was uncharacteristic.

When a devoted mother and wife vanishes, detectives make a beeline for the husband. If he is in an extramarital affair, the stakes suddenly get a lot higher. Yet in this case, nothing happened — Lyn was treated as just a missing person, a woman who had gone off and abandoned everyone in her life, all her worldly possessions, without a word. It didn’t make sense then. It makes even less sense now.

Do you know more about Lyn Dawson’s disappearance? Contact Hedley Thomas at [e-mail]