DAWSON D-DAY
SEARCH FOR ANSWERS OVER MISSING WIFE
JANET FIFE-YEOMANS
NO ONE outside the secrecy of a marriage ever really knows what goes on inside the relationship. Often not even the two people involved know the truth.
Chris and Lynette Dawson were one of those enviable couples who appeared to have everything.
They were attractive, had close families, good circles of friends and two beautiful and healthy daughters, Shanelle and Sherryn. The family lived in a house Dawson had built among the bushes and views of Bayview on Sydney’s relaxed Northern Beaches.
There had been problems in their marriage, not the least of which was one of Dawson’s students at Cromer High School, 16-year-old Joanne Curtis moving in with them. As well as babysitting the girls, Curtis was having an affair with Dawson, including sex in his car.
Like Curtis, Lynette had been just 16 when she started seeing Dawson. The difference was that he was about the same age.
It was against that background that on Friday, January 8, 1982, Chris and Lynette Dawson went together to marriage counselling. They were seen hand-in-hand afterwards at the childcare centre in Warriewood where Lynette, a former registered nurse, was working.
Later that evening, Lynette called her mum Helena Simms and said the counselling had gone well and she was sure that it was all going to work out between her and Dawson. Mother and daughter would never talk again. Dawson has maintained he dropped his wife off at a bus stop in Mona Vale at 7am the next day, Saturday — she never learnt to drive despite their Bayview home being relatively isolated. He said he expected to see her that afternoon at Northbridge Baths where he was a lifeguard, but she never turned up. At the age of 33, Lynette Dawson had vanished — but she has never been forgotten. Almost four decades later, her disappearance captured international notoriety through The Australian newspaper’s award-winning podcast The Teacher’s Pet, which has been downloaded 19 million times since it began in May this year. On Thursday, 37 years after his wife disappeared, Dawson, 70, by now thrice-married, was charged with her murder. Police have focused on that last night in January 1982 as the time of her alleged death. Dawson is charged with murdering her between 9pm on January 8 and 7am on January 9. When he appeared before Sydney’s Central Local Court on Thursday afternoon, the eyes of the world, or at least those 19 million podcast fans, were on him. In shorts, thongs and a dark short-sleeve T-shirt with a collar and a deep tan, he could not have looked more Australian, wearing the same clothes he had on when he was driven from the Gold Coast’s Southport Police Station at 5.15 that morning to Coolangatta Airport for a Qantas flight to Sydney. With him all the way was NSW Homicide Squad detective Daniel Poole, the senior constable who had put together the voluminous brief of evidence that was handed to the Office of The Director of Public Prosecutions in April, before The Teacher’s Pet podcast began. Poole worked with Strike Force Sriven, which was set up in 2015 to reinvestigate Lynette Dawson’s disappearance.
Ordering his extradition to NSW, Southport Local Court magistrate Dennis Kinsella said the police case would hinge on allegations of domestic violence, Dawson’s affair and the deterioration of his relationship with Lynette.
“His desire was to leave the relationship and there were outstanding property issues,” Mr Kinsella said.
Dawson remains behind bars and will apply for bail next Friday, December 14.
Outside court, his lawyer Greg Walsh said his client would be pleading not guilty and “strenuously asserts his innocence”. BOTH
the police and defence are quietly cursing The Teacher’s Pet podcast.
Outside court, Walsh said he hadn’t listened to it. He was recruited to the case late on Wednesday when one of Dawson’s two brothers, lawyer Peter, 72, asked him to represent Chris.
Walsh said he was concerned about the publicity that came from the “ideological” view that his client was guilty.
He said he had great faith in the jury system but there was the possibility they may elect for a trial by judge alone because of the media storm surrounding the case.
From the prosecution side, there was concern that many statements they had already taken may be compromised by what those witnesses said on the podcast, and the defence can seize upon differences.
The one key witness who never spoke to the podcast is Joanne Curtis.
Now 54 and long divorced from her teacher lover, Curtis is back in Dee Why on Sydney’s Northern Beaches with the daughter she had with Dawson, Kristin.
Curtis has every reason to protect her privacy. As well as the podcast, a book has been written about the case which now can’t be released until after any trial. On top of that, Hollywood has been sniffing around the cold case drama that appears to have everything.
As well as making five statements to police, Curtis has twice told her story to the two inquests into Lynette’s disappearance, detailing her relationship with Dawson, sometimes tearfully.
She was driven into the sport teacher’s arms after coming from a broken home and a violent stepfather, which left her nowhere to live.
At the time in the early 1980s, Cromer High School was said to be a hotbed of sex between teachers and students, and a separate police investigation is ongoing into those claims.
That January weekend in 1982 when Lynette went missing, Curtis was at South West Rocks on the NSW mid-north coast camping with her sisters and friends.
On Sunday, January 10, 1982, with his wife missing, Dawson drove up to South West Rocks to see his teenage lover. Dawson and Curtis drove back to Sydney, where she moved in as his partner.
In January 1984, Curtis became the second Mrs Dawson, wearing Lynette’s rings, which Chris had reset for her. Dawson sold the Bayview home and, in December that year, the couple moved to Queensland.
In 1990, Curtis left Dawson in what was said to be a bitter split. He married again and has been living at Mt Coolum on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
When he was arrested early Wednesday morning it was at the granny flat connected to his daughter Sherryn’s Gold Coast home.
Sherryn and Shanelle are both also casualties of their mother’s disappearance.
Shanelle slowly came to the belief that her mother would never walk out on her family. Sherryn believes in their dad’s innocence, labelling the investigation a “witch hunt”.
The final truth will probably be decided in the spotlight of a Sydney courtroom possibly next year.