Teacher’s Pet: the chilling visit that haunts a magistrate

A magistrate has spoken publicly about murder suspect Chris Dawson’s “chilling” uninvited visit to his old home | LISTEN

Magistrate Jeff Linden says the then new owner of the house told him Chris Dawson inquired about their backyard digging. Picture: Natalie Grono

A serving magistrate has revealed a decades-old secret conversation in which he was told that murder suspect Chris Dawson went back to his old property when the new owners were renovating and asked: “Where are you digging?”

Jeff Linden has spoken publicly for the first time about hearing from the new owner of Mr Dawson’s “chilling” uninvited visit.

The NSW magistrate also disclosed his own regrets at not going to police earlier on the latest instalment of The Australian’s investigative podcast series The Teacher’s Pet, released today.

The podcast includes the view of Mr Dawson’s former schoolgirl lover, Joanne Curtis, that Lyn Dawson is buried on the property and her urgings that police “look in the soft soil”.

Mr Linden was working on Sydney’s northern beaches as a solicitor when the new owner of Mr Dawson’s house on Gilwinga Drive, Bayview, came to see him in 1987 about an unrelated legal ­matter.

Five years earlier, Mr Dawson’s wife, Lyn, had vanished from the home, leaving behind two young daughters, aged four and two at the time.

“I mentioned I knew Chris Dawson, who used to own that place,” Mr Linden said. “And he said, ‘What do you know about him?’ I … told him the story about Lynette and my personal view is that she didn’t walk out. I saw the blood drain out of his face, and I said: ‘Why do you ask that?’ ”

The conversation that followed has stayed with Mr Linden ever since. “He said: ‘We’re doing renovations there and he turned up completely out of the blue the other day … and he asked where we were digging.’

“That just sent shivers up my spine. That meeting in my mind was just chilling. Not only did he turn up, but the bloke made the point that he turned up uninvited and without making any contact with them at all.”

Mr Dawson had sold the Bayview home in 1984 and moved to Queensland. The house was then sold again, in 1987, to Neville and Sue Johnston. As soon as they moved in, the Johnstons put a concrete slab outside the bedrooms once used by the Dawsons’ daughters, because water had been running into the area from a hill. The run-off had been softening the soil outside the bedrooms. It was perhaps the only area of soft soil on the property.

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Based on timing, Mr Linden must have been speaking to Mr Johnston. “He said to me, ‘If she’s there, she’s under six inches of concrete’,” Mr Linden said.

“He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell my wife about this or she’ll never want to live there’.”

Mr Linden had played rugby union with Mr Dawson and his twin brother Paul before they switched to rugby league, and he got along well with Lyn.

He didn’t report his conversation to police at the time. Nor did he tell two fellow NSW magistrates, Jan Stevenson and Carl Milovanovich, who conducted coronial proceedings in 2001 and 2003 that led to findings that Lyn was murdered by her husband.

But he did notify police two or three years ago. “I have a bit of a conscience about that,” he said. “Probably that, to me, it was hearsay, and I would have expected the police would have interviewed the owners about it, and that was about the time I was appointed (as a magistrate) and things were pretty bloody hectic.

“A part of me didn’t really want to get involved; I was happy to answer questions anybody had for me, but I didn’t feel I had carriage of the whole thing anyway.”

Mr Dawson was not charged. The NSW DPP found there was not enough evidence to prosecute. He denies killing his wife.

Chris Dawson’s former home in Bayview.

Police have gathered evidence from a number of witnesses that Mr Dawson made repeated visits to his former property in the years after he sold it, at a time that he was not a suspect for foul play, as his wife was just regarded as having gone away to start a new life.

The Johnstons now live in a retirement home. Mr Johnston could not be interviewed, but his wife, Sue, has spoken on the podcast. A keen gardener, she vividly recalls the hard rock that made up most of the ground at the property. The terrain had always made her think Lyn Dawson could not have been buried there, but the area outside the bedroom windows was different, she concedes.

“All that area, we immediately had cemented, the water coming down from the hill, you just couldn’t drain it any other way,” she said. “Yes it would have been softer there. But wouldn’t the police have looked there?”

Ms Curtis is adamant Dawson was buried by her husband on the block, and is suspicious about the area next to the bedrooms where her children once slept.

Ms Curtis was 16 when she started a sexual relationship with Mr Dawson, then a sports teacher at her school, Cromer High.

Two days after Lyn Dawson went missing, Mr Dawson moved Ms Curtis into his Bayview home, and bed. “She’s on that block. I know that’s where she is,” Ms Curtis told her friend, Rebecca Hazel. “You know, they haven’t checked the loose soil.

“I kept telling him (police officer Damian Loone), you know, look in the soft soil.”

Police have not suspected Ms Curtis of any foul play. It was only in 1990 that NSW homicide detectives started making inquiries, after she went to police with information about the disappearance. That year, police went to the Bayview property with ground-penetrating radar equipment to search for anomalies.

However, perhaps thinking the concrete slab at the back was part of the original construction of the home or because it was too difficult, they did not look at the area outside the bedroom windows, focusing instead on the swimming pool area. “They didn’t want to look anywhere else,” Sue Johnston said.

In 2000, when NSW police were again investigating the cold case, Ms Curtis was there and directed police to the pool. There, they found the buried remnants of one of Dawson’s favourite garments, a pink cardigan that was apparently cut up with a knife.

The detective leading the case at the time, Mr Loone, has said Ms Curtis did not tell police about the soft soil area at the time.

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