Teacher’s Pet podcast: Lyn Dawson’s love for girls illustrated in artist’s sketches

Far from being distressed over the apparent disappearance of his wife, Chris Dawson “was ecstatic” says ex-teen lover.

Artist Kristin Hardiman with some of her works. Picture: Hollie Adams

Sketches commissioned by Lyn Dawson of her two daughters just weeks before she went missing have been cited as compelling evidence she would not have walked out on them.

Kristin Hardiman, now renowned for her paintings of the mighty racehorse Winx, was a struggling portrait artist in 1981 when she set up a stall at a Christmas fair at Narrabeen High School on Sydney’s northern beaches.

There, with samples of her wares spread out on a trestle table, she was approached by Dawson, who hired her to sketch her daughters Shanelle and Sherryn, then aged four and two.

Hardiman travelled to Dawson’s family home at Gilwinga Drive in Bayview and spent a couple of hours photographing the happy young girls around the house and pool, so she would have pictures to base her drawings on.

Speaking publicly for the first time for The Australian ’s investigative podcast series The Teacher’s Pet, Hardiman this week told of her clear memory of the doting mother and her “beautifully dressed” daughters.

“She was so excited. They (the girls) had on matching pink broderie anglaise dresses,” she said.

“She didn’t want them before Christmas so we left it until early January. I went away and did the drawings. I phoned early January to arrange a time to go back.”

That was when the deal fell through. The man who answered the phone, and who identified himself as Dawson’s schoolteacher husband Chris, said the artwork was no longer wanted.

“I remember the words really clearly because it was odd. He said that she’d gone away and didn’t want them any more” she said.

“I asked him if he’d like to see them and he said, ‘No. Don’t want to see them’.”

Unbeknown to Hardiman, Dawson had vanished. Decades later, after Dawson’s disappearance made the news, Hardiman contacted NSW detective Damian Loone and made a statement.

“He was very interested because he said that it was physical evidence of the fact that Lynette loved her children and had no intention of leaving them,” she said.

She was able to find copies of her sketches, depicting the Dawson girls in the days just before they lost their mother.

Two coroners found, in 2001 and 2003, that Dawson was murdered by her husband, a former Newtown Jets rugby league star.

Mr Dawson was not charged and denies killing his wife.

According to Mr Dawson’s account to relatives and later to police, his wife intentionally left her family on Saturday, January 9, 1982, so she could have some time to think.

If Mr Dawson’s story is to be believed, his wife phoned only him in the weeks that followed before cutting off all contact.

One of Hardiman’s sketches of Shanelle and Sherryn Dawson.

Every significant date and event in the lives of her loved ones has passed without a word from her; among these the birthdays of her daughters, their first and last days of school, and the deaths of her parents Helena and Len Simms.

Dawson left behind her clothes, jewellery and the rest of her belongings, and never returned to a job she had loved at a childcare centre. She has not contacted a single friend or relative.

Meanwhile, Mr Dawson had his house and children to himself, and two days after his wife vanished he had moved his teenage lover, Joanne Curtis, in with him.

“He told me she was gone and she wasn’t coming back,” Ms Curtis would tell police years later, after their relationship had soured.

“One day she was there, a lot of stuff went on, and then she was gone. And I never heard from her.

“I don’t think he was distressed. He had what he wanted … his goal was to have me and have the children and have the house and have no Lyn. He was ecstatic.”

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