Teacher’s Pet podcast: all going well then ‘babysitter came along’

When Sydney mother Lyn Dawson went missing, her friend Robyn Warren thought Lyn’s husband Chris would be in a ‘dither’.

Lynette Dawson with husband Chris and daughter Shanelle.

When Sydney mother Lyn Dawson went missing, her friend Robyn Warren thought Lyn’s husband Chris would be in a “dither”.

So Ms Warren whipped up a meal for Mr Dawson, only to be taken aback when he arrived to collect it with his teenage lover, Joanne Curtis.

Speaking publicly for the first time for The Australian ’s investigative podcast series The Teacher’s Pet, Ms Warren said Lyn loved her husband and everything seemed to be going well until Ms Curtis began babysitting for them.

“She would never speak ill of Chris. She loved him so much, he was her world. Before the babysitter came along,” she said.

Ms Curtis was 16 and in Year 11 at Cromer High when she started a sexual relationship with Mr Dawson, a physical education teacher at the school.

They had been in an intense affair for 14 months when Lyn went missing from her home at Bayview on Sydney’s northern beaches in January 1982.

Two days after Lyn vanished, Mr Dawson moved Ms Curtis into his family home with his daughters, four and two at the time.

In the days after Lyn disappeared, the only time Ms Warren saw Mr Dawson — a strapping former football star who played rugby for Easts and league for the Newtown Jets — was for the handover of spaghetti bolognese.

She “of course” found it unusual that he didn’t call her repeatedly to find out if she had heard from Lyn, who doted on her daughters.

“He only rang that one time to say had I heard from Lyn. I said no. And he said ‘oh she was supposed to be meeting me at the baths’,” she said.

“I thought he was in a dither and I made him a meal and I remember just spaghetti bolognese, just something easy because I thought he was, you know, panicking. And then the car pulled up outside and I took the meal out and there’s Joanne sitting on the front seat.

“Honestly, I didn’t know what to do. I thought well what do I do now? So I just put the spaghetti bolognese in the container just at the feet of the car and I said, ‘Oh there you go, see you’.”

Not bothering to get out of the car, Mr Dawson accepted the meal and drove off with Ms Curtis.

Ms Warren was one of Lyn’s closest friends and she was alarmed at her disappearance. But she did not suspect Lyn had been murdered by her husband, who was a friend of her own husband, Neville, a science teacher.

“We never thought that because we never saw that side of him. It was earlier before Joanne, so it was happy days that we had with them,” she said. “From the Chris we knew, and Neville would back me up on this, I can’t believe that. But then life changes.”

Mr Dawson has said his wife unexpectedly left to spend time by herself and never returned.

Before going missing Lyn had been constantly in touch with her parents, Helena and Len Simms, and her siblings.

At the urging of her family, Mr Dawson reported his wife missing to police almost six weeks after she vanished.

In the podcast’s latest episode, released tomorrow, other friends say they didn’t hear much from Mr Dawson after Lyn vanished.

Two separate coroners found, in 2001 and 2003, that Mr Dawson murdered his wife. He has not been charged and denies killing his wife.

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