How Chris Dawson groomed JC

New details about how the teacher pursued his student can now be revealed.

New details about how the teacher pursued his student can now be revealed.

Chris Dawson would buy chocolate for a teenage student before they had sex in his car, and slept with the girl while his wife Lyn was asleep or in the shower.

Throughout 1981, the convicted killer’s sexual encounters with the girl, known as JC, continued in his school office, the university where he was studying and his twin brother Paul’s home.

New details about Dawson’s pursuit of JC are revealed in NSW Supreme Court judge Ian Harrison’s published judgment, which culminated in the former high school physical education teacher being found guilty of Lyn’s murder.

Read how the Chris Dawson trial played out.

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A section of the judgment dealing with Dawson’s relationship with JC was not read aloud by Justice Harrison on the day he delivered his verdict.

Nor had some of the evidence emerged publicly during the trial, because the court was closed for part of the time JC was in the witness box.

It is not uncommon for a witness giving sensitive personal evidence to do so in closed court.

JC had a school bag which Dawson had bought her, and she “regularly found notes of love and affection from him” in the bag when she had biology, Justice Harrison wrote in a summary of her evidence.

By 1981, it had developed into a sexual relationship.

“Mr Dawson would pick her up and drive to Manly,” Justice Harrison wrote.

“He would stop at a convenience store to buy her chocolate and they would have sex in his car at Manly Point.

“They had sex at his home, at New England University, at his brother Paul’s house and at her sister’s home. They also had sex at his office at school and at 2 Gilwinga Drive when Lynette Dawson was asleep or in the shower in the evening.”

JC said that when she left her marriage in 1990, Dawson told her to destroy his love notes and cards.

“She kept the originals of the notes, but cannot now find them all,” Justice Harrison wrote. “She showed these notes to police officers, lawyers and friends.”

“Photocopies of some of these notes were tendered in these proceedings.”

Justice Harrison rejected JC’s evidence that Dawson had discussed wanting to get a hitman to kill Lyn.

It was “improbable” the married father-of-two would have shared that information when he was trying to convince JC to marry him.

However, the judge was satisfied her evidence “was otherwise truthful and reliable”.

He added: “I was struck by her evidence concerning the development of her relationship with Mr Dawson while she was still at Cromer High School.

“I was left with the impression that JC felt that she had been, and that she had in fact been, swept up in circumstances over which she had only limited control.

"She was confused and conflicted. On the one hand, Mr Dawson offered her friendship, stability and guidance as a well-respected and charismatic male figure of a kind that had been lacking in her life.

“On the other hand, JC appears to have found herself in an emotional bind with a man whose enthusiasm for their relationship was not matched by hers.

“I found that JC’s insistence during her evidence that she was at the time only a child to be an evocative description of her predicament with wider metaphorical implications.

“I refer to these matters in order to indicate that I do not consider that JC’s evidence has been corrupted by the influence of her separation and divorce.”

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