Episode 1 - Bayview

I'm Katie Page, CEO of Harvey Norman. For over six years, Harvey Norman has been the principal sponsor of the Australian's investigative podcasts such as The Teacher's Pet and The Teacher's Trial, The Night Driver and Shandy's Story. Harvey Norman are proud sponsors of the Australian's podcast investigations and their award-winning journalism. Barnaby Joyce is behaving strangely. You won't say if you'll jump ship from the nationals to one nation. That's today on The Front. Search The Front to listen now. Listeners are advised that this podcast contains course language and adult themes. This podcast series is brought to you by The Australian. Lynette Dawson was reported missing by her husband, former Newtown Jets rugby league star Chris Dawson. He said, "I was going to get a hitman to kill Lynne," and he rang me and said, "Lynne's gone. She's a comeback." I just want justice, and I'd love her little girls to know she didn't leave them. There is a hilltop of rugged beauty above Sydney's sunny northern beaches, a place of dense bush and rocky outcrops, and long driveways snaking across acreage properties to comfortable family homes. It is noisy here at Bayview in summer. Male cicadas crawl out of the soil, then violently deform their bodies to pull off a complex vibration and an ear-splitting buzzing. Nature's summer soundtrack can be deafening, maddening. The secretive cicadas are desperate to find a female for a frenzy of mating. It will ultimately be fatal. The best way to dispose of a body when you live in the bush is to put it in the bush, and that's what I think he did on the Friday night. My name is Hedley Thomas, and for the past six months I've been investigating the sudden disappearance and probable murder of Lynne Dawson. This is The Teacher's Pet, a podcast series about a star footballer. She's a schoolgirl lover and a wife who vanishes. For many people who knew Lynne, a devoted wife and mother of two, this is a cold case that evokes great anger, sadness, guilt and blame. A case of the most callous betrayal, of strangely close ties between twin brothers, and of sexual relationships between Northern Beaches high school teachers, men in their thirties, and girl students in their mid-teens. And it is a case of incompetence, or worse, by police in the early years and missed opportunities by Lynne's family and friends when the trail was fresh. I don't think I believed she was murdered straight away. I think I thought he's got rid of her somewhere. What's he done with her? Where's he put her? Julie Andrew lived at Bayview with her husband and young family. She became good friends with Lynne Dawson in the three years they were neighbours. And then when Joanne turned straight up, like a few days later she's there, I thought, you've got rid of her. You've got rid of her, you've done that, but no, you wouldn't have done that, would you? You know, it was that, and then I became absolutely sure. Julie is worn and open. She's passionate about Lynne and what happened to her. And sometimes Julie sounds really wound up as she describes harrowing events. It's the first time she's talked publicly about the case. And I'm waiting for someone to come and knock on my door and ask me my opinion. But no one looked for her. No one looked for her. No police really started looking for her. You don't accuse somebody of murdering somebody else. It's something you can say lightly. It's heartfelt. And it's not anger or aggression, it's sorrow. I'm sorrowful. I've lost a tea friend and I've carried it for years and I miss her every day. I just want justice. I just want justice for her and her family. And I'd love her little girls to know she didn't leave them. She never walked away from them. She was taken away from them by the person who was supposed to protect her. Lynne and her husband Chris built the family's dream home at Bayview and they lived in it with their daughters. Chris was a high school physical education teacher and a former staff footballer. Lynne was a nurse who worked part time at a childminding centre. She was dedicated to her family. And then in early January 1982 Lynne simply vanished, never to be seen again. Chanel was age four and Sharon just two when they last cuddled their mum 36 years ago. While somebody's going to eventually find her, I thought the only way that she's going to get justice is if her body turns up. And if I ever believed in a God, I would be praying for that, find her body. There has been no trace of Lynne Dawson since she disappeared. There is no credible information to suggest she is alive, but as her body has never been found and nobody has been charged with a crime, the case remains unsolved. I believe Lynne is up here, in the ground with the cicadas near her old home. Her family and friends want her remains recovered so she may be properly buried and allowed to rest in peace. They want those responsible for her death prosecuted for murder. There was also this picture which I thought you might be interested in. That's the house that my then husband and I built. There are several ways to get to the house at Bayview. Winding roads from the surf beach at Moana Vale bring me up to Gill Winger Drive in ten minutes when the traffic is light. That's our acre. That house there that you can see is Men's House. So their acre, their boundary line is just to the back of my pool. Julie has waited a long time to talk about her friends last weeks. But I didn't think she was in danger. I felt that the only danger she was in was that she was going to be edged out of her life. She was just going to edge her out of her life and she was going to lose her life with her husband and her family and her children. In 2001 and again in 2003, two decades after she was last seen alive, coroners in separate inquests declared Lynne Dawson died in January 1982. More importantly, the coroners found that Lynne was murdered by a known person, her husband, Chris, and that her body had been deliberately concealed. Two experienced magistrates recommended that the director of public prosecutions consider putting Chris Dawson on trial for murder. But Chris has never been charged and he denies killing his wife. Chris argues he is the victim of a self-serving campaign of lies and manipulation by a former high school student. Her name is Joanne Curtis. As a besotted 16-year-old, Joanne was in a secret relationship with her Year 11 sports teacher, Mr Dawson, at Cromer High School. Joanne came to know Lynne and the little girls well. Chris introduced his young lover to the family home as the babysitter. His relationship with Joanne was intense. And two days after Lynne disappeared, Joanne moved into the house at Gilwinga Drive, Bayview, into Lynne's bed. Lynne's two girls would start calling Joanne mum as memories of their own mother faded, and as their father and his former student made plans to be wed. Where we intend this morning to dig with the possibility of a body being buried in this area. Chris also blames a New South Wales cop called Damien Loon. You heard his voice then during an unsuccessful dig for Lynne's body at the Bayview property. I met Damien 17 years ago in a Northern Beaches police station when this case first burst into the public arena and I decided to look into it closely. I know from many interviews that Lynne was very close to her sister, Pat, her brothers, Greg and Phil, and her parents, Helena and Lynne Sims. The Sims children grew up in a modest house a couple of hundred metres from the waves at Clovelly in Sydney's eastern suburbs. I always thought she was the brightest of the four of us. Yeah, and I think she was very clever, she was very quick. No, she was just a lovely, lovely person. We loved her, didn't we? Normal family. Yeah. Normal family. The big sisters doing little brothers up in make-up. She was a water baby. The Clovelly public school, she was the marching captain and sports captain of her group. The two girls and I used to swim down at the beach. It was a great life, an enjoyable life. Pat describes an idyllic childhood. The Sims youngsters were blonde, sun-bronst, happy and fit from long ocean swims and longer walks around the coastline. I've got a picture on my iPad of Lynne, she was only about, I may be six or something, we walk around from Clovelly around Thompson's Bay, which is now Gordon's Bay, right round to South Coogee and we'd swim in the middle of winter and then in the summer we'd swim at the Sydney Lady Swimming Club. When we were very little we'd go around to a place called the Bogey Hole which was behind Clovelly and there was always a watchful mother sitting above near the flats, just watching that everything was okay and there was a pool there and high tide, the water would cascade over the pool and that was quite magical when we were very small. It's just things we did every week, it was just every day, like having bonfires on bonfire night and collecting all the sticks and letting off crackers and I mean she could be very cheeky and she would always stand up for what she thought as well. When I went to high school we had to wear hat and gloves and a uniform, a dress, had to be a certain level, all this sort of thing. Lynne went to the same high school and her hat got blown off and run over by a double decker bus within days of her starting school so the rest of her school career she had the tire marks of the double decker bus going across the top of her hat and that was just Lynne you know, just something a little bit different you know and she couldn't help that, there wasn't a fault, didn't do it deliberately but it happened. Do you remember when she met Chris? I think she met him at a dance at Sydney High because she was a prefect at Sydney High and he was going to Sydney Boys High, I think he might have been a prefect as well. Yeah, I mean she was very, yeah she was very keen on him and I mean they seemed like a lovely couple but you know, thinking back, I mean obviously now we realise we didn't know him at all because as Lynne said there was a dark side to him that nobody knew. But your mother adored him didn't she? Yeah well they had the image you know, Lynne and Chris they always looked lovely together, the children always looked beautiful, yeah Mum thought he was a very fine young man, he didn't drink and didn't smoke, maybe she thought he was a very clean living person I don't know but her ideas about him changed. Pat and Lynne shared a bedroom for many years and they stayed close after they had left the house near the beach to marry and start their own families. Julie Andrew was looking at old photographs from the house at Bayview that she left 25 years ago. My friendship with Lynne was just this beautiful gift because she was so, ah she was beautiful, she was just so lovely and sweet, she was a truly sweet, caring, loving woman. Julie and Lynne would see each other two to three times a week for cups of tea and chats about their children, relationships, friends and work. I mean I can picture myself sitting in her kitchen, I could tell you where the lamps were, I could tell you what the cups we were drinking out of, I could tell you in her bedroom she had this beautiful big basket full of costume jewellery, I've never seen so much in costume, I've never seen so much in my life, beautiful costume jewellery and the little girls that all go in there and start bringing them all, walk out with all these fast bracelets and things and the love that she had for those little girls, I mean I love my children, we all love our children but she had some special bond with those little girls, they were her light and I think it's because she was so unhappy in the rest of her life with her marriage, her girls were paramount. Lynne talked constantly about her girls to friends, their first words, their first wobbly steps, funny questions, tantrums, meals and dress ups, she related all of these normal toddler breakthroughs with wide-eyed joy. Absolutely totally devoted and totally besotted, it was the one thing in her life that she really wanted above everything else was to be a mum, those girls were her absolute world. There is a strong consensus among these seven women who talked with me about Lynne's devotion to her children. There's no way in the world she would have gone away without those two little girls, she just idolised them, there are everything to her. And at the time when she just disappeared she was just getting Chanel ready for school, she was so excited about getting everything ready. She would never ever have left her children, her children and the older one was just about to start school so she had the school uniforms ready and she was looking forward to them starting school. Lynne would not voluntarily leave her children because she was told she couldn't have children. She was really close to her kids and focused on them a great deal, she had two girls, I wouldn't have thought she'd ever leave them or not be with them. Because I knew how deeply she cared for her two children, she waited a long time to have them and they were her life, they were it. As a nurse Lynne was highly trained to care for children. She saw her own girls as baby miracles, her maternal instincts were powerful, Lynne had been trying to conceive for six years and she had undergone surgery in a bid to help make it happen. She and Chris had all but given up hope of having their own, they were applying to adopt when Lynne discovered she was pregnant with Chanel, here's Julie again. She was an earth mother, so if she was going to leave those kids would have left with her, nothing would come between her and those kids. I've often wondered, hypothetically, how would someone like Lynne start a completely new life in 1982 without leaving a trace? How would she stay in the shadows all these years, not wanting her girls or anyone else to know where she was living, that she was even alive, and why? Could a mother, one as devoted as Lynne clearly was, inflict such pain on her flesh and blood for the rest of their lives? She was committed to her family and there was no history of running away, nowhere obvious to go, and she had no independent savings. There were no signs of mental illness or depression, stress and sadness in her life, yes, her marriage was under great strain. She was sharing it with a beautiful and athletic school girl, half Lynne's age. But Lynne Dawson was not a quitter. The idea that she would voluntarily abandon her children and leave behind her valuables, her rings, clothing and nursing badges that would help her get a job elsewhere makes no sense to everyone who knew her. I've discovered new evidence in this podcast investigation. It has helped me see clues that were missed by New South Wales police when they finally started suspecting a murder and began asking hard questions for years after Lynne vanished. Key witnesses who did not go to police at the first opportunity have divulged important facts. If these lead to the recovery of Lynne's body from the ground at Bayview, where I think she lies, it is likely that murder charges would be levelled against the suspect police have circled for a quarter of a century. Lynne's husband, Chris Dawson, who taught Joanne at Cromer High. Chris has always strongly denied murdering his wife. He has never been arrested, let alone prosecuted. When he moved from Bayview to Queensland, he taught some of my friends at my old high school on the Gold Coast in the mid-1980s and he claims that Lynne is alive. "Tremendous trial, I think, was only sheer courage to put Chris Dawson over the line. And magnificent after by Easton Sabbers, two men down and yet they've forced their way right through a sustained period of pressure. Dawson, Chris Dawson number six, actually tears himself across the line. Now there he is, he just charges over, a great effort by him. Now Dawson, that's Chris Dawson, the two Dawson boys are there, here's Paul Dawson and over the top he goes." Chris and his twin brother Paul were pin-up first grade footballers who played rugby for the prominent Sydney club, Easts. This is a bizarre and intriguing story for many reasons and one of those is the close relationship between the Dawson brothers. They were more than best friends and confidants. They were inextricably linked together in almost everything they did. As small children they had their own secret language or code for communicating with each other and they needed speech therapy to undo it. From a young age they were determined to play sport in the same team and attend school in the same classes. They needed to share everything. They went to teachers college and became high school PE teachers together. They built their family homes a few hundred metres apart. In this place Gilwinga Drive at Bayview so they could live close together. In the northern beaches high schools at which they toured, they adopted the same strategy of singling out pretty teenage girls from PE class. They invited these girls to come back to their homes in Gilwinga Drive after class and earn pocket money as babysitters to the Dawson children. And that's when everything started to spiral out of control. It was a twin relationship that seemed to be even more connected. It was they mirrored everything. Everything they did in their lives was mirrored right down to all their part-time jobs and the way they did everything, the way they looked, the way they interacted was, you know, they always lived just a few houses apart. They sort of drove the same cars, they both had the same cars. It was, they were too entwined. It was almost like they'd never been able to function separately. They functioned as one person connected. They're really quite strange. I've not come across anyone in my life that presented to them to me that the way they did. It was like two people who were actually one person. Even into their, I mean, the way their wives were quite submissive and they both were very secretive. They did, they weren't wordy. There was not a lot of conversation. They didn't seem to relax around people. There was always this sort of how to shell or this veneer. To me anyway, how they might work with their family was probably very different. But I was on the outside looking in and that's how I perceived it. I never felt connected to either of the men at all. When Chris and Paul switched codes from rugby union to rugby league, they drew paychecks as professional first grade footballs for the Newtown Jets. Newtown making advantage of this blindside, that's the sort of fourth time we've seen them take the ball up the blind and they've gained ground each time. They signed with Newtown for a reason vitally important to the twins. The club agreed to take them both, whereas other clubs had wanted Paul but not Chris. The coach of the Newtown Jets back then was Paul Broughton, he's now in his 80s and revered on the Gold Coast as a godfather of rugby league and the homegrown club, the Titans. Paul, I want to have a chat to you about Newtown days if we go back to the 70s. The reason is I'm interested in investigating a story surrounding the Dawson twins, Chris and Paul Dawson. It's a really strange you should say that, so I went into one of them the other day and he asked how I was and hadn't seen me for a long while and he said I had to ask one question that intrigued me for 40 years and I said what was that, he said why did you drop me after game one? And did you remember why? I had a misguided belief that their first concern would be for their brother, for either brother for himself rather than the team as a whole, but they felt that they should be in the team together, that was very strong. How did you rate them as for Paul as Paul? I thought they were good players, because they're very close, they're very strong for each other, they're loyal to each other, they just never played really well together. Yes, it was an unusual time, that time because you've got to remember that Paul Hayward Saga was on that too. When Broughton mentions the Paul Hayward Saga, he is talking about the Dawson brothers teammate and the gangsters behind him. The Newtown Club stood out at the time for its connections to serious crime figures, somewhat deadly dangerous. Hayward was caught in Bangkok in 1978 while attempting to import a suitcase of heroin to Australia. The heroin was organised by his friend and brother-in-law, Arthur Nettie Smith, a notorious contract killer, rapist, drugs importer and armed robber. He died as long dead from a drug overdose, he became a heroin addict during his prison sentence in Thailand. Smith is an old man with Parkinson's disease and he is serving life sentences in Sydney for the couple of murders police pinned on him. Veteran detectives are adamant that Arthur Nettie Smith shot, stabbed and strangled many more victims of slayings, which will never be resolved, but it's hard to run a prosecution for murder when you can't point to human remains. Julie trusted her instincts. She seemed to have an intuitive sense about the former football celebrity. I tried not to go there when he was there. Why? Didn't like him. Didn't feel comfortable around him. Was there a different atmosphere when he was there? Totally. What was it? She was careful. Not to ruffle any feathers or she was very softly spoken, very quietly spoken woman. So there's this really calm, quiet, serene woman. And then around him she just had this edge of out of caution. She wasn't frightened of him, although I do think that he physically abused her at times towards the end. He could be rough. I know that. Because every now and then she'd have grab marks on her. But I never asked her how she got them. I mean, which I should have. I should have said, how'd you get that, you know? And the woman I am today, I would ask that. Julie last saw Lynn shortly before she vanished. She remembers Lynn's torment in the weeks and days before. On a day etched in Julie's mind, Lynn's cries carried across the property at Bayview. She told me she can see and hear the row as if it happened yesterday. I'd been, it was midweek, I know, because I only had Erin with me and the other big kids were at school. I was, my clothes line, I'm in a big property. My clothes line was up the back boundary of my property. I was out hanging up washing and I could hear Lynn crying. Even though it was quite a long way away, I had a line of sight straight up the side. It was one part where our locks weren't bushy. And their children's trampoline, their children's trampoline was out there. And I stopped and thought, Oh, what's happening? What's happening? What's the matter with it? Knowing that she'd been going through a whole lot of angst. I can remember walking, closing the distance a little bit. I mean, I can remember hearing this argument between her and him. She had Sharon in her arms and she was backed up against their trampoline and he was literally towering over her and she's got the baby protecting this child and she's crying and he's bullying her and he was yelling at her, I couldn't work out what he was saying. And then after, and I was just dumbstruck, he went inside the house and she cried and she said, Oh my gosh, what's daddy doing to us? And I thought, Oh, there's obviously, this is accelerating, you know? So I was really nervous. I waited until the afternoon and then I rang her and said, I heard you today, you're upset. Do you want me to come up and have a cup of tea? And she said yes. So I walked up and I remember sitting at her round pine family room table and the kids, the little girls were playing and I said, what's going on? And he said, Joanne's coming to live with us. And I said, you can't have that. This is your home, this is your home, no, Lynn. I'd never really gone past that line, you know? I'd only just been the supportive friend, not the instructive friend. And I said, you can't let this happen. You just can't let her move in and she said, I don't know what else I can do. And I said, I'm sorry, Lynn. He's fucking the babysitter. So she has to be shocked and she just, oh, look, I don't think so. She said, I don't think so. I said, Lynn, he is, you know he is. Because you've told me that you're speaking to your family members and everyone's got concerns. Julie held a clear-eyed view about what she believed were Chris's motivations. He was in love with Joanne. He wanted Joanne. I think that was the low-leader thing, you know? He just wanted, and yet to get Joanne, he had to get rid of his wife. I'd say that he would have come to a point through that last week where he realised the only way out for him to achieve what he wanted was to kill Lynn. And Julie, you talk about him as if you're absolutely certain that he has done this. I'm positive, yeah, I'm positive. In our legal system, you know, there's a fundamental human right, being a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. And in this case, so many of Lynn's former colleagues, friends, family members speak of Chris Dawson as a murderer. And you do, too. And that's a word I don't take lightly, and I've never used it for another human being in my life. We all, obviously, there would be some prejudice, there'd be some mis-recollections, but all in all, we're solid, intelligent people who could think clearly and logically and laterally and knew the guy and knew what he wanted. He wanted Joanne. To get Joanne, he had to get rid of Lynn. And then Lynn's gone, where's she gone? She just wandered off, wandered off with some God-botherers and never to be seen again. Didn't take anything, didn't have any money. He said she took $500, she didn't have five, she didn't have two dollars to rub together. She worked part-time and he gave her this little tiny bit of money again, control. She had nothing. She didn't take anything, she didn't take a pair of underpants, she didn't take any of her beautiful fiddles that she loved, and she didn't take her two children. And she would not have let go of those little hands, I can tell you. And I was really worried, and I've tried to ring quite a few times, tried to ring. There was no one there. And then, you know, some of the time my kids were all up in the pool and I kept looking at them. And then I'm seeing Joanne there, who I knew quite well. And I thought there's no Lynn, but there's Joanne because she was topless, she was just in her bikini bottoms, you know, kids in and out of the pool, and it was obvious just from what I could hear that the relationship was now out in the open. I thought, "Where's Lynn? Where's she gone?" So I kept trying to ring, never did get on to her, talked to one of the other neighbours on the other side of the road that I went over and said, "Have you heard from Lynn?" She said, "No." She said, "I went up there last week, a long-steep driveway, she said, 'I walked up there and caught Chris and Joanne in a compromising position.'" I said, "I'm really worried about Lynn because something's happened to her." So he'd obviously achieved his goal, Lynn was gone and Joanne was there, nobody cared. Nobody cared. The people who could have done something didn't care, or didn't know. We were impotent. We didn't have the ability. It's not like the connectivity of today with social media. I just had a broken heart, and I've lived with it ever since. As has everyone who knew her, she was just a darling person. Just about everything surrounding Lynn's disappearance in 1982 looks deeply suspicious, but it must have looked really suspicious at the time too. When a mother and wife banishes today, detectives question the husband very closely. They find the woman's friends and loved ones, and they investigate the state of the marriage. If there are red flags, for example, if the husband is in an intense sexual relationship with a schoolgirl lover when the wife suddenly goes missing and the affair then escalates, yet the husband is paradoxically saying he hopes his wife comes home, then the police should at least be sceptical. But when Lynn disappeared, and all of those things were actually happening, the police sat on their hands. No one ever approached me, no one from her family, no one from, he never came down and said, or rang and said, "Have you heard from Lynn?" Which I would have thought he would have done to try to cover up his, you know, his actions, and never from the police. They didn't even search the Bayview property for a decade, we're going to investigate why. I was just surprised that no one asked me. You know, if a woman disappeared, wouldn't you canvass the people in the neighbourhood? Why do you think you didn't just go down to the police and ask them? Well, why would I think as a, you know, as women were back then? I mean, women are very different now. And the knowledge that I've gained as a mature woman, an older woman, I'm a different person to the one I was back then. Back then I believed your police and your judiciary, if your doctor told you something, you did what you were told. They know, they can be trusted. So if police aren't going to do anything, then they must know something more than I know. I never expected to see her again. I just knew she'd been killed. But I was too, I don't know, naive, inexperienced, didn't back myself at all to think that I would have any knowledge or what would I have to offer, you know? So I just sort of got on with my life. Julie, if you're right and that her remains were buried on one of those blocks, either hers or your father-in-law's or perhaps even yours. It wouldn't have been mine, as was all landscaped. Why do you think that she would have been subsequently removed? Because she was killed on the Friday night after I'm sure he drugged her, I reckon he rolled her up in a carpet and he took her out his back, up the back, into a prepared grave. So where's he going to take her? He's not going to take her anywhere, when he's got plenty of areas around and he could have prepared something months in advance. No one would ever have known. My kids used to disappear into the bush, like, "Kooey!" You'd never see them. They, it was solid bush. And there's all these, you know, they weren't allowed to, but they would, with the dogs. You know, and I'd go stomping up there and you could not see through. It was dense. But I think that he probably left her for a bit and then went and moved her. And she's, I don't know where she is. But that was the problem, because they never found her remains. You think about her often? Oh, all the time. I've asked Julie a few times about her own regrets in this case, because it seems she wishes she had done much more back in the beginning, when she was waiting to hear from police. And usually, in my dreams, I'm saying, "I'm sorry." I think for her not being around, you know, for her not having a life. Were you unsurprised that Chris never asked you whether you'd heard from Lynn? He didn't want to come anywhere near me. He knew that I knew. He knew that I'd asked some questions. I would have said, "What have you done with him?" And depending on his body language, I would have known the answer. He didn't want to come anywhere near me, nowhere near me. Chris and his side of the family insist that, far from being a killer, he is the very public victim of a shocking travesty of justice. Chris has enjoyed his freedom these past 36 years, and he has been married twice since Lynn went missing. He argues that Lynn is still alive. He wrote to his daughter Chanel to let her know a woman in a crowd in an episode of Britain's Antiques Roadshow that was first televised eight years ago appeared to be Lynn. He sent Chanel a screenshot photograph of the mystery woman, and he asked her to share the note with her uncle Greg, Lynn's younger brother, and her auntie Pat, Lynn's sister. Chris's email says, "The show was filmed in Padstow near Cornwall, and the likeness to your mum is uncanny and has given us a strong sense of hope that at last her whereabouts may be known. It was a segment of footage where a woman was trying to get a valuation on a silver pig, and Lynn was in the background. As you have found after a decade of world travel, how easy it would be to travel anywhere and remain uncontactable. I have not lost belief that she may one day be found. I always prayed that her life choices, like yours, could then be acknowledged and her safety and well-being confirmed." The evidence, old and new, keeps leading me back up those winding roads to Bayview where Chris and Lynn lived, where Lynn vanished. It's where I am confident she is buried. I've heard something which has narrowed the possible location, but let's be devil's advocate. Is it possible that Lynn is still alive? If so, she has not recognised any of her daughter's birthdays for 36 years, or the births of their own children, or anyone else's special occasions. The death and funeral of her father, Lynn, and then her mother, Helena, came and went without a word from Lynn. If Lynn is alive, she has got by without a bank account in her name. She has not filed a tax return in her name, or travelled overseas, or visited a doctor, or worked, or received welfare, or been positively identified by anyone. I believe that Lynn is dead, and that she died in January 1982. There's an electronic group of any of you who have taken a seat in the Constable Damien Loonesville, all the way over there, N.E., and Joanne Marbeau Curtis, C.U.R.T.I.S. at the Northern Beaches Police Station on Monday, 27th July 1998. The time is 3.50 p.m. Ms Curtis, as I've spoken to you earlier, we're on conducting an investigation into the disappearance of Lynette Joy Dawson. My investigations at this stage have revealed that you knew that person who was missing. I'm just going back to what we were talking about a little while ago. You say you first met Christopher in about 1979-1980? Yes. And that's when you were a student at Kronow High School? Yes. Can you just outline the circumstances in relation to that meeting? Well, he was a teacher at the school. He came to the school in 1979 and took the class that I was in in sports coaching class in year 11-1980. How old were you then? 16. Can you tell me what sort of relationship was formed after that? We're going to trace the destructive high school relationship between Chris Dawson and his young student. We'll hear how Joanne's friends, family and teachers saw it but felt powerless to act on the next episode of The Teacher's Pet. The Teacher's Pet is a podcast series investigated and written by me, Hedley Thomas, with audio and music production by Slade Gibson. This podcast series is brought to you by The Australian. Visit theteacherspet.com.au for additional documentary material as well as credits for the full team behind this multi-part production. Hi, I'm Hedley Thomas and I want to introduce you to The Australian's latest investigative podcast, The Lighthouse, from my good friend and colleague, David Murray. David's done a fantastic job. He's been working closely with people in the iconic community of Byron Bay to try to find out what happened to a young Belgian backpacker, Theo Hayers. Theo is travelling around Australia and making new friends at places like Uluru in this fast country's red centre. But then in May 2019, he disappeared from beautiful Byron Bay. David's podcast, The Lighthouse, has already generated a lot of interest in Theo's intriguing story and how he vanished. And I know there's a lot more information to come as the series unfolds. Byron Bay is home to the Hollywood star Chris Hemsworth. It's a haven for writers, poets, musicians and actors. And the good people of this laid-back surfing community are pulling out all stops to help find Theo. Please listen to David Murray's podcast. It's called The Lighthouse. Search for The Lighthouse in your podcast app. This podcast is made possible by subscribers to The Australian and our principal sponsor Harvey Norman. For more than six years, Harvey Norman has been a key partner in my investigative podcast such as The Night Driver, Shandy's Story, The Teacher's Pet and The Teacher's Trial. For more information on this podcast, go to theaustralian.com.au Barnaby Joyce is behaving strangely. He won't say if he'll jump ship from the nationals to one nation. That's today on the front. Search the front to listen now. you