‘Lies and half-truths’: Top court rejects Chris Dawson’s murder appeal

A top court has rejected Chris Dawson’s bid to overturn his conviction for the cold-blooded murder of his wife Lynette, whose disappearance in 1982 became one of Sydney’s most enduring mysteries.

Dawson was convicted in 2022 of murdering Lynette Joy Simms, 33, who vanished from the couple’s Bayview home on the northern beaches in January 1982. Her body has never been found.

Chris Dawson’s appeal against his conviction for the 1982 murder of his wife Lynette Simms has been rejected by the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal.Credit: Nick Moir, ABC

Dawson, now 75, appealed against that conviction in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal. In a decision on Thursday, the court – Court of Appeal president Julie Ward and Justices Anthony Payne and Christine Adamson – dismissed his appeal unanimously.

Ward and Payne said the Crown’s circumstantial case against Dawson was compelling and there was no reasonable doubt about his guilt. Payne said he had no doubt, and there was no possibility Lynette voluntarily left her children “even for a few days” without telling her mother.

Adamson, with whom Ward and Payne agreed, said Dawson had “shown himself to be entirely without credibility, both by reference to direct lies and half-truths, of which there is a litany in the evidence and his versions”.

Dawson’s trial heard that in mid-January 1982 he told an artist who was commissioned by Lynette in late 1981 to produce sketches of the couple’s daughters, aged two and four at the time of their mother’s disappearance, that his wife had “gone away and doesn’t want them any more”.

“He could only say this with such certainty because he had killed her,” Adamson said. “It also indicated that he did not want to engage in any discussion about the deceased.”

The trial judge, NSW Supreme Court justice Ian Harrison, found Dawson, a former teacher and rugby league player, killed Lynette on January 8, 1982, or in the early hours of January 9, “for the selfish and cynical purpose of eliminating the inconvenient obstruction she presented” to a new life with JC, his former student and babysitter to the couple’s two young children. JC moved into the couple’s home within days of Lynette’s disappearance.

Adamson said Dawson’s “non-disclosure of his continuing relationship with JC” after Lynette’s disappearance “was also dishonest”.

Desire to ‘possess and control’ JC

Dawson was obsessed with JC, who was 17 at the time of Lynette’s disappearance, “and wanted to possess and control her at all costs”, Adamson said. “What [Dawson] told JC in order to induce her to live in the Bayview house – that the deceased was not coming back – was true.”

“Because he had killed the deceased, he knew that she was not coming back and that therefore there was no risk associated with installing JC in the main bedroom and inviting her to wear the deceased’s clothes and jewellery.”

Dawson’s previous move to leave his wife and children and go with JC to Queensland in the days before Christmas 1981 did not proceed as planned because JC became homesick and wanted to return to Sydney. The “ultimate blow was struck on Boxing Day when JC told [Dawson] that she wanted to end the relationship”, Adamson said.

Payne said Dawson “was prepared to take increasing risks to preserve his relationship with JC in the face of her increasing resistance”.

‘Done his worst’

Dawson’s legal team submitted that the Crown could not exclude beyond reasonable doubt that Lynette had voluntarily left their home in light of Dawson’s infidelity. However, Adamson said Dawson “had already, in a real sense, done his worst: by purporting to leave permanently with JC on 23 December 1981.

“By this act, [Dawson] had forced the deceased to face the future as a single mother who had been abandoned by her husband.”

Chris Dawson pictured in a court sketch from September 1, 2022, during submissions on his sentence in the NSW Supreme Court.Credit: Vincent de Gouw

Lynette had been given “considerable hope of reconciliation” when Dawson returned home after Christmas that year, and had “responded quickly and practically to arrange a marriage guidance counselling session”, which they attended on January 8.

The ‘call’ at Northbridge Baths

Dawson’s barrister, Senior Public Defender Belinda Rigg, SC, argued during the appeal hearing in May that it was a “reasonable hypothesis consistent with innocence” that Lynette was alive on January 9, 1982, and made a long-distance call to Dawson at Northbridge Baths, where he had a part-time job, to say she needed “time away … to sort things out”. Harrison found that Dawson had killed Lynette by this time.

Adamson said that “no credence can be given to the applicant’s version that the deceased rang him at the Northbridge Baths”, and she accepted the Crown’s submission that it was a contrivance by Dawson.

Northbridge Baths, pictured this year.Credit: James Brickwood

It could not be concluded that phone records “were ever actually created so as to be available even had they been sought on or soon after 9 January 1982”, Adamson said, because of limitations in technology at the time.

First eligible for release aged 93

Harrison sentenced Dawson to a maximum of 24 years in prison with a non-parole period of 18 years. A year was added to Dawson’s non-parole period last year, after he was convicted of unlawful sexual activity with a then pupil in 1980. He is first eligible for release in 2041, aged 93.

Dawson remarried twice after his marriage to Lynette formally ended in divorce in 1983. He married JC on January 15, 1984, at the Bayview home he had built with Lynette, and they moved to Queensland in December that year.

JC left Dawson in early 1990. She made her first statement to police about Lynette’s disappearance in May that year, triggering a renewed investigation.

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