Chris Dawson’s daughter reveals where she believes her mother was buried

Shanelle Dawson was just four years old when Lynette was murdered, but she believes she knows where her mother's body was buried.

Chris Dawson's daughter has revealed where she believes her mother's body was buried, after her father murdered her in 1982.

Convicted murderer Chris Dawson's estranged daughter believes her father buried her mother Lynette Dawson under the family's pool, for the first time revealing hidden details of the "toxic" environment she grew up in. 

Shanelle Dawson was just four-years-old when her mother, Lyn, disappeared from their Bayview home on Sydney's northern beaches in 1982. Shanelle'a father, Chris, was convicted for her murder in August, following a lengthy podcast investigation by The Australian's Hedley Thomas, The Teacher's Pet.

Now 45 years old, Shanelle told 60 Minutes she was "in shock" when her father was found guilty in a judge-alone trial in front of Justice Ian Harrison. 

"I just couldn't fathom it really," she revealed on Sunday night. "It just felt so surreal." 

Shanelle Dawson, pictured with her eight-year-old daughter, Kialah. Picture: 60 Minutes

In 2013 when the investigation had hit a dead end, Detective Damian Loone, the officer in charge of the case, put Shanelle under hypnosis.

During the session, memories were uncovered of Shanelle sitting in the family station wagon with her mother slumped in the front seat and of Chris burying her mother underneath the family pool, she said.

“It was like I could feel myself as a four-and-a-half-year-old child again,” Shanelle said. “I could feel the feelings that she felt at the time. It was really pretty profound."

“I believe I saw my sister and I in the back of a car, of our station wagon, and my mother slumped in the front. I believe I saw him shining headlights on a spot near the pool and digging. I believe that he buried her in that spot for that night, and then the next day when he didn’t have us kids, moved her somewhere else.”

Chris Dawson seen arriving at the Supreme Court in Sydney. Picture NCA Newswire/ Gaye Gerard.

Shanelle said she was aware that some people would question how much of the recollection was real, but said she believed they were true memories.

When Lyn disappeared, she left behind Shanelle and her youngest daughter, Sherryn, who was two at the time. During his only police interview in 1991, Dawson told officers that he had dropped Lyn at Mona Vale bus stop on the morning of January 9, 1982, however she failed to meet up with them at the Northbridge Baths.

For 40 years, Shanelle said she was told by her father that her mother had run away. However, Justice Harrison found that Dawson murdered his wife so he could be with his 17-year-old babysitter, who can only be known as JC. Dawson would go on to marry JC, one of his former pupils at Cromer High on Sydney’s northern beaches.

Shanelle said that while living in America for nine years, she came to realise that he had fostered an “abusive”  environment for her while growing up.

“I could see that he was manipulative and gas lighting us all the time,” she said. “My father definitely embodies the survival of the fittest, f***--k everyone else. Just do what you need to do to get what you want. And I feel a lot of anger and rage towards him for being that way, but I simultaneously feel compassion and sadness that he is that way.”

Lyn's death created a divide through the family, and Shanelle said she had been cut off by Chris’s side and her sister, who has supported their father.

The last contact Shanelle had with her father was a text message in 2018, three months before his arrest.

“I won’t live a life based on lies, nor will I keep subjecting myself to emotional manipulation and control,” she wrote in the message. “You have dishonoured our mother so terribly, and also my sister and I, through all of this. No more. One day I will forgive you for removing her so selfishly from our lives.” 

She insisted he take responsibility for what he had done, but he instead blamed her.

Lynette Dawson and her husband Chris Dawson on their wedding day 26 March 1970.

Shanelle told 60 Minutes that her father replied: “You are clearly very lonely and depressed in the life you have chosen.

“You know very little about what was going on in my life, or your sister’s. It is your adult life, now 41, with a child and without a partner. That has clearly caused this terrible depression.

“We all, unfortunately, have to live with the choices we make. I OWN my poor choices, and you never need to remind me of them.”

JC was moved into the family’s home by Dawson and acted as Shanelle’s replacement mother, just days after her mother's disappearance. But Shanelle said she didn't blame JC, and instead felt sorry for her.

“I feel very sad for her. I feel sad that I don’t know why she made the choices she did,” Shanelle said.

“I know for myself having babysat and nannies in multiple, multiple homes ... And thankfully none of those dads ever hit on me. 

“But I know as a 17-year-old, I still would’ve had the capacity, even with my background, to say, ‘no, that’s not okay. You’re a married man’.”

With NCA Newswire