Teacher’s Pet podcast: my mum Lyn Dawson vanished and we suffered in silence

Shanelle Dawson was four when her mum Lyn vanished, replaced by her father’s teen lover. But as she grew, so did her questions.

Shanelle Dawson, daughter of Chris and Lyn Dawson, is raising her daughter Kiahla at Hervey Bay. ‘We didn’t mention my mother,’ Shanelle says. Picture: John Wilson

Shanelle Dawson was just four when her mother Lyn vanished from her life, to be replaced two days later by her father’s teenage lover, Joanne Curtis.

Her mum was rarely spoken of again and, at five, she told her grandmother that Lyn had been a “pretend mother”. Their real mother was now Joanne.

But as Shanelle grew so did her questions. Now, after 36 years of silence, she hopes to honour the mother she lost by speaking ­openly about Lyn’s disappearance and suspected murder.

Police and two coroners have said Chris Dawson — Shanelle’s father — is Lyn’s killer. “We didn’t mention my mother. There was, I don’t really know why, but just this really uncomfortable ­silence,’’ Shanelle said.

“I think more recently Dad started talking about my mum a little bit and I would start asking more questions since I got older and realised, ‘Hang on, no, I’m not going to keep quiet’.”

Her interview, for The Australian ’s investigative podcast series The Teacher’s Pet, was unexpected — her father had always discouraged publicity.

But Shanelle is no longer the little girl who believed her mother walked out because she didn’t love her any more.

“I feel really excited because I’d kind of given up hope,’’ she said, giving her support to this reinvestigation of her mother’s case.

“It’s seemed like there were no other leads on anything that might lead to an answer as to what happened to my mum.

Lyn Dawson with Shanelle as a baby.

“So I’m hopeful that this might just keep the hope alive and maybe somebody who hasn’t seen the articles might hear this. I’m nervous but I definitely want to honour my mother and this is a great opportunity to do that.”

Until now she has spoken “only to psychologists” — and to the psychics she consulted in her own quest to find her mum.

“I had hoped and believed that she was alive for a long time,” she said.

“Although I had abandonment issues, I kind of always wondered where she was and how she could just let children go.

“I always went to see psychics trying to find the answers to where my mother was. Some of them said she was still alive, so I’d cling on to those hopes.

“But I’ve come into more of an acceptance that she’s not alive any more.”

Shanelle says she is still in touch with her father but is guarded in talking about their relationship. Unlike her younger sister Sherryn, Shanelle has supported the investigation into her mother’s disappearance during the making of The Teacher’s Pet.

Lyn vanished from Bayview on Sydney’s northern beaches in January 1982. The diaries of Lyn’s mother, Helena Simms, record that as a four-year-old who had started school just weeks after her mother’s deeply suspicious disappearance, Shanelle told her grandmother “Mummy had gone away” because she didn’t love them any more.

At five, Shanelle told Helena that Lyn had just been their pretend mum for a little while, because their real mum was now Joanne.

Helena believed Chris and Joanne, in their new lives, tried to erase the memory of Lyn from the minds of Shanelle and her sister Sherryn, who was two when their mum vanished.

Shanelle confirms that for many years it was like her mother had never existed.

“It was a taboo subject. No one in the family talked about it.

“If someone from the outer circles, like maybe one of our cousins or something, mentioned her it was just kind of this uncomfortable silence.”

Shanelle remains close to Sherryn, despite the sisters’ starkly different views. Sherryn has previously publicly defended her father.

“It’s a witch hunt on my dad,” Sherryn told the Gold Coast Bulletin last month.

“My dad’s getting hounded because there’s all these people that have got it in for him.”

Sherryn has also been scathing about Joanne, accusing Ms Curtis of trying to damage her father. “Stepmother was a bitch … she can live with that.”

Shanelle’s relationship with her stepmother was, she says, “incredibly painful”. Joanne has been accused of being cruel towards the young sisters, who walked on emotional eggshells during their childhood. While Joanne took over Lyn’s role and married Chris Dawson in 1984, early on she told the girls to stop calling her Mum. Joanne’s daughter Kristin was born in 1985. Chris and Joanne’s relationship ended in the early 1990s.

In her adult years Shanelle retreated to remote hippy communities. She stayed away from Australia when the two separate coroners, in 2001 and 2003, found her father murdered her mother. He denies killing his wife and has claimed Lyn is still alive, possibly supported by a religious cult.

Shanelle is now a mother herself, of a three-year-old girl she is raising on her own at Hervey Bay, 290km north of Brisbane.

She “can’t even imagine what she would be like if I left her life right now … it just breaks my heart to think about that.

“I’m sure as a little girl I yearned for this loving figure that had nurtured me since birth.

“I guess I do have a memory of the essence of her. I don’t recall any actual physical memories of her holding me or saying anything or singing or anything like that. But I have a memory of her essence.”

This memory is now bolstered by the discovery during the podcast series of long-forgotten video of Lyn from 1975, filmed for the ABC’s Chequerboard TV program. “She does have a beautiful grace about her. I know I’m biased but I thought she was just beautiful.”

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