What happened to Lyn Dawson?
A missing woman, a cheating husband and a teenage lover. After nearly four decades, no body has ever been discovered, so will her family ever find out…
She was killed on the Friday night. I’m sure he drugged her. I reckon he rolled her up in a carpet and took her out back, into a prepared grave.’ Neighbour Julie Andrew has no doubt what happened to missing person Lyn Dawson.
She’s convinced Lyn’s husband, Chris, murdered his wife of 21 years and hid the body so cunningly, it hasn’t been found in the 36 years since Lyn was last seen.
She’s not the only one who believes Chris is guilty. Two coroners, in 2001, then 2003, have concluded in separate inquests that Lyn was killed
by a known person. Chris.
Yet, Chris has never even been arrested, let alone prosecuted for murder. So what did happen to the pretty 33-year-old? Was she murdered by the husband she adored? Or, like he claims, did she run off with a religious cult, never to be seen again?
Nearly four decades after the disappearance, journalist Hedley Thomas is bringing new attention – and evidence – to the cold case in his podcast, The Teacher’s Pet.
When the couple got together, Lyn and Chris were the picture-perfect high-school sweethearts who went on to get married in 1970, aged just 21.
Chris was a professional rugby player and became a PE teacher at Cromer High School in Sydney, Australia.
Lyn was a nurse, who’d always dreamed of becoming a mum. The couple tried for six years, and it was only after deciding to adopt that she realised she was pregnant, first with Shanelle, then Sherryn.
Cracks in their relationship started to show when Chris began an affair with teenage student Joanne Curtis. He introduced Joanne to the family as a babysitter, and moved her into their home. It’s believed he’d make Lyn, a light drinker, a strong cocktail to send her to sleep before having sex with his teen lover.
Then Lyn began to appear with bruises. ‘Chris could be rough,’ Julie remembers. ‘Every now and then, she’d have grab marks on her.’
Lyn’s sister, Pat, and brother, Greg, also recall seeing her with grapefruitsize injuries.
Things came to a head at the end of 1981, when Lyn confronted Joanne. ‘ You’ve been taking liberties with my husband,’ she allegedly said. Joanne then moved out. Chris, though, was unwilling to give up his lover and, on Christmas Eve 1981, the pair ran away to Queensland. Lyn came home to find his things gone and a note on the bed, saying, Don’t paint too black a picture of me to the girls.
It seems Joanne changed her mind and they came back.
When Chris arrived home, he was apparently abashed and ready to start again with Lyn.
On Friday 8 January, 1982, the couple went to a counselling session and were seen holding hands by Lyn’s colleagues.
That night, when Lyn’s mum, Helena, called, Lyn – unusually ‘sozzled’, according to Helena’s diary – told her, ‘Everything’s going to be OK. My husband has made me a lovely drink.’ That was the last time anyone – other than Chris – heard from her.
Despite confirming plans to meet her mum the next day, Lyn never showed up. Instead, Chris arrived with Shanelle, then four, and Sherryn, two, saying he’d dropped Lyn off at the bus stop that morning, saying she’d meet them later.
In the following days, Chris told an increasingly worried Helena that Lyn had called him and said she’d phone her mother. But despite staying home by the telephone, there was no word. After five weeks, Chris eventually told the police, and she was officially declared missing.
He didn’t hang around when it came to Joanne, though. On 10 January 1982, Chris moved her in and she started wearing Lyn’s clothes – something her friends found disturbing.
After gaining advice from his lawyer brother, Peter, Chris was granted a divorce from Lyn in June 1983, leaving him free to sell the family home, move to Queensland and marry Joanne in January 1984. During the ceremony, he sickeningly slid Lyn’s wedding ring onto his new bride’s finger.
For Julie, this was all too convenient. ‘He wanted Joanne, and to have Joanne, he had to get rid of Lyn.’
And yet, the police didn’t act. It was only in 1990 that it became a murder investigation, and years later for new evidence to emerge.
Joanne – who separated from Chris in 1990 – told police that, before Lyn went missing, Chris had said, ‘I was going to get a hitman to kill Lyn but I changed my mind.’
It also emerged that when Chris returned to his home town to see family, he would often drive by the old family home and question the owners about which areas of the garden they were landscaping.
Eventually, in 2000, an excavation of the property uncovered a cardigan, believed to be Lyn’s. It had 16 cuts in it.
This evidence led the coroners to conclude that Lyn had been killed by her husband Chris, at some point between the evening of Friday 8 January and the morning of 9 January.
Yet, because of insufficient evidence, the New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to press charges.
Chris to this day denies any involvement in Lyn’s disappearance. Shanelle agreed to speak to Hedley Thomas for the podcast, but refused to answer any questions about her father’s alleged guilt. Sherryn believes the continuing investigation of her father is a ‘witch-hunt’.
With both of Lyn’s parents now dead, it’s hoped that one day the rest of her friends and family will find out what really did happen to their loved one.
‘He could be rough. Every now and then, she’d have grab marks on her’