The Teacher’s Pet: Charge Chris Dawson now, friend urges

A former friend of Chris Dawson has called for him to be charged with his wife’s murder.

Christopher & Lynette Dawson on their wedding day.

A former friend of murder suspect Chris Dawson has called for him to be charged, telling of her shock that he gave his missing wife’s rings to his teenage lover.

“How much more do they need?” Lesley Cox asked The ­Australian, in her first public comments on the case.

“I hate him for what he’s got away with. I can’t believe that he hasn’t been prosecuted.

“Charge him. I just can’t understand it. The anguish that everybody’s going through for this amount of time, it just seems unbelievable to me.”

The comments come as the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions faces a growing public campaign to prosecute Mr Dawson, 36 years after his wife, Lyn, vanished from Bayview on Sydney’s northern beaches.

Two coroners found, in 2001 and 2003, that Mr Dawson murdered Lyn but the DPP has always maintained there was not enough evidence to charge him. He denies killing his wife.

The suspected murder is being examined in The Australian’s investigative podcast series, The Teacher’s Pet, with a seventh episode released last week.

Mrs Cox said she and her husband John visited Mr Dawson at Bayview in 1983, the year after Lyn went missing. Her husband had played rugby for Easts with Mr Dawson, and the visit was a catch-up for former teammates.

She remembers a “horrible feeling” about the gathering, in which she was introduced for the first time to Mr Dawson’s teenage lover, Joanne Curtis.

“I remember him coming down the front stairs, introducing us to Joanne,” she said. “At that time myself and another wife both saw the rings she was wearing and we both felt they were very much like Lyn’s rings.”

Told by The Australian that Mr Dawson did give Lyn’s rings to Joanne, she was stunned. “We looked at him as a friend, as a good person, as an upstanding citizen and yet he’s had this mask on all these years,” she said. “It’s just terribly unnerving that he’s done this. And he obviously has.”

Mr Dawson had been in an ­intense affair with Joanne for 14 months when his wife disappeared.

Joanne was 16 and in Year 11 at Cromer High, where Mr Dawson was a physical education teacher, when their relationship started.

Along with his twin brother Paul, Mr Dawson had dazzled the northern beaches. Fit and handsome, he was “adored” by everyone — but especially by Lyn.

“I think that’s what makes me hate him so much. It really is quite horrible.

“(The twins) were that close they acted almost as one in some instances that we could recall. It was not normal. I mean, I’m married to a twin.”

Lyn was devoted to her two daughters, aged four and two when she disappeared. Her clothes and jewellery, along with the rest of her belongings, were left behind when she vanished.

Broadcaster Ben Fordham last week wrote to DPP Lloyd Babb urging him to reopen the case and to examine fresh evidence unearthed in the podcast series — and called on his 2GB listeners to do the same. The DPP has declined to comment.

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