The Teacher’s Pet: justice came in unmarked cop cars

In dark suits on a Gold Coast summer’s morning, detectives arrived to effect an arrest almost 37 years in the making.

A sketch of 70-year old Chris Dawson as he appeared in Southport Courthouse after being arrested over the murder of his wife Lyn. Sketch: Richard Gosling

Two unmarked police cars came for Chris Dawson yesterday.

They pulled into Barnard Street, Biggera Waters, just before 8am; homicide detectives from NSW in one vehicle, their Queensland colleagues in the other.

Conspicuous in dark suits on a Gold Coast summer’s morning, the detectives were there to effect an arrest almost 37 years in the making. Across the road from Mr Dawson’s low-set home, a man on his ride-on mower strained to see what was happening.

He saw his 70-year-old neighbour, Mr Dawson, dressed casually in T-shirt and shorts, being led out, a detective on either side and several more behind.

An extraordinary development in a cold-case murder investi­gation that has become the talk of the nation and beyond, thanks to a groundbreaking podcast, was in motion.

Moments later, the phone rang at Greg Simms’ home in Elee­bana, south of Newcastle.

Mr Simms had recently sec­ured a promise from police that they would call if anything happened in connection to the dis­appearance of his sister, Lyn, from Sydney’s northern beaches in January 1982.

He said he couldn’t handle turning on the TV to see someone in handcuffs without prior warning. Yet the request was made more in hope, than expectation. He had felt the case was close to a breakthrough in the past, but nothing had eventuated.

A former policeman, Mr Simms was once the one making arrests, yet he could barely believe what he was being told by the officer on the other end of the line: Mr Dawson, the former Newtown Jets rugby league star and one-time respected high school sports teacher, would be charged with Lyn’s murder.

“Quite emotional,” Mr Simms told The Australian shortly after the arrest, barely getting the words out.

“We’ve had a cry, we've cuddled, we’re just completely over the moon that something has finally happened.” With his wife Merilyn, he prepared for the media to descend.

Since The Australian ’s investigative podcast The Teacher’s Pet began in May, the Simms family has weathered the global interest with dignity and a single-minded purpose — to find Lyn and bring her killer to justice. They have kept every news story published.

They are going to need some more scrapbooks.

Pat Jenkins left her home in Seaforth, in Sydney’s north, yesterday morning to get some bread and milk. When she returned, she was told by her son, visiting from Western Australia, that something was up — the phone had been ringing off the hook.

Before she could check her messages, a Seven Network reporter was at her door with a camera. That was how she found out, after all these years, that someone would face trial for the murder of her sister, Lyn. “I was just stunned,” she said.

“I’m all goosebumpy, a bit shivery. After all this time. I’m stuck for words. We’ve had such hope before, every time something new came up. I think it’s the podcast that has done it, I really do.”

Allyson Jennings could hardly breathe.

Ms Jennings is the daughter of Lyn’s cousin Wendy Jennings and is part of the latest generation of Lyn’s family to take up the fight for justice, running the Looking for Lynette Dawson Facebook page.

“I never thought this day would ever come. I really didn’t,” she said.

The arrest is an end and a start all in one. “It’s the beginning of a very long legal process,” she said.

Lyn’s sister, Ms Jenkins, is immeasurably grateful for the recent efforts of police, under the watch of commissioner Mick Fuller and the homicide squad’s commander, Detective Superintendent Scott Cook. But she also wishes one NSW detective who played a crucial role, Damian Loone, was part of the arrest team.

Mr Loone had dived headfirst into the case in the late 1990s when it was gathering cobwebs. Lyn’s disappearance had, in the early days, been neglected by police in a shocking dereliction of duty for reasons that are still not yet clear.

When Lyn is described by her family and friends, it’s often in terms of her devotion to her daughters Shanelle, who was four when her mother went missing, and Sherryn, who was two.

Lyn had plenty of plans for the future. Her eldest, Shanelle, was about to start her first year at school. Lyn, the organiser of the family, had also been planning her mother Helena Simms’s surprise 66th birthday.

The celebration was going to go ahead at the home Lyn and her husband had built in Bayview, but it was called off when she went missing. One of her relatives would for decades carry a folded piece of paper bearing directions, in Lyn’s handwriting, to her ­address for the party.

Yet northern beaches police treated her as a runaway, accepting the story of her husband that she had wilfully walked out on her family. Mr Dawson insinuated she may have run off to a cult.

Whatever happened, he said, he had nothing to do with it.

Mr Loone’s dogged investi­gations led to two coronial inquests, in 2001 and 2003. He kept investigating, going back to the DPP again, but prosecutors were immovable.

In 2015, the case was taken over by the NSW Homicide Squad and a new detective, Daniel Poole, who sorted through the evidence with fresh eyes and re-engaged witnesses. In April this year, Superintendent Cook sent a letter to the DPP seeking the green light to charge Mr Dawson.

The first episode of The Teacher’s Pet aired in May.

Police found Mr Dawson in a granny flat at the back of the property. In recent times he has been living out his retirement there, rather than at his main home near Coolum on the Sunshine Coast.

When the knock on the door came, Mr Dawson was calm. The timing may have been a surprise, but he’d known for a long time that this day may come eventually.