Episode 4 - Soft Soil

This is episode four of the teacher's pet. Listeners are advised that this episode 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. I was going to get a hitman to cure Lynette and he ran me and said Lynette's gone. She's a come back. I just want justice and I'd love her little girls to know she didn't leave them. To refresh your memory, would you like me to bring some of the material I've got? Yeah, I think some along, although there's one particular aspect that I'll be talking about that you may or may not have already known anyway. Why? About a meeting I had with these fellow students doing some renovations to the house. I've been trying to talk to magistrate Jeff Lyndon for some time because he once knew Chris Dawson. When he called me back, he had only about ten minutes before he was due to preside over a busy courtroom in regional New South Wales. Jeff played rugby for Eastern suburbs with Chris and Paul Dawson before the twins switched codes to rugby league and the Newtown Jets. And Jeff knew Lynne Dawson. He enjoyed her company and he recalled her easygoing and likable personality. Lynne vanished from her home at Bayview on Sydney's Northern beaches in January 1982. The conversation that Jeff is describing to me occurred five years later in 1987 before his appointment as a magistrate. It's important that we line up these dates carefully. In 1987, Jeff was working on the Northern beaches as a solicitor and the house that Chris and Lynne Dawson had built at Gilwinger Drive Bayview was then owned by another couple, Sue and Neville Johnston. They'd only just moved in. Jeff recalled that the new owner of the Dawson home came to see him about an unrelated legal matter. I mentioned that I knew Chris Dawson who used to own that place. And he said what do you know about him? And I went on and told him the story about Lynne and my personal feelings that she didn't walk out. And I saw the blood drain out of his face and I said why do you ask that? We're going to hear about it later in this episode. Has Joe said to you that she's absolutely sure she can be that Lynne is on the Bayview property? Yes, she's absolutely adamant. No doubts for her. She just says things like she's on that walk. I know that's where she is. Rebecca Hazel's conversations with her friend on the Northern beaches, Joanne Curtis venture into dark places. Places very few friends ever go. A place that's the possible location of the remains of a widely loved woman, Lynne Dawson, 36 years after her probable murder. The body is the key. If Lynne's remains are in the ground at Bayview, police will have a powerful new reason to bring a murder charge. Fresh leads coming to light in this podcast investigation consistently point to a possible burial place, the acreage property of her old home at Bayview. The property where Joanne Curtis, the family babysitter, who was Christorcent's troubled young lover as a schoolgirl at Kroemahai, last saw Lynne. I've talked about the backyard burial theory with former police, criminal defence lawyers and prosecutors, and with Rebecca. It's a location perhaps just 30 meters or so from where the police have already dug. But Lynne's friends and family have seen hopes and theories like these raised before. The police detective Damien Loon believed he was on the brink of a major breakthrough at times and what he was very sure was a case of murder. Every time his hopes were raised, disappointments soon followed. She looked up, she said she's up there, she fell right out there on that lock. On one of their drives around the northern beaches, Joanne and Rebecca stopped outside the Dawson family's old house. And then she's become even more specific in relation to this area outside the bedroom window. Yeah, that's right, I mean for a while she just kept saying she's on the block and then at some point she started telling me, you know, they haven't checked the loose soil. Let's break this down. In early January 1982, Lynne vanished. She has not been seen or heard from since. Her two daughters to whom Lynne was devoted but told Mummy had just decided to go away and never come back. Later in this episode of The Teacher's Pet, we will step back to the early 80s to investigate more of the deeply suspicious events just before Lynne's disappearance. Inexplicably, Lynne was treated as a missing person by New South Wales police for the first eight years. There was no actual investigation. The local northern beaches police, some of whom knew Chris Dawson and had played football with him, Fard Lynne's case away as a low priority. As a runaway wife, as a mother who abandoned her home, her life, job, friends, two little girls and didn't contact another soul again. That's how Lynne was written off. Chris sold the house at Bayview and moved to Queensland's Gold Coast at the end of 1984, three years after Lynne vanished. It took eight years from Lynne's disappearance, so we're now in 1990 for police to look at the case as probable foul play. Homicide detectives went to the house in that year, 1990, and talked to the then owners, Sue and Neville Johnston, who had bought in 1987 from the people who bought it from Chris. Chris had started teaching at Kibre Park High School in Queensland in early 1985. I'd finished year 12 there six weeks earlier. Now here are some more important facts. Detective strongly suspected homicide when they visited Bayview in 1990. But they didn't do any actual digging at Chris and Lynne's old property in 1990. The detectives who went to the house in 1990 were accompanied by a small team from Sydney University, and they came with ground penetrating radar equipment. The plan was to use the radar to look for possible disturbances in the earth around the swimming pool. They hoped to find a makeshift grave in which Lynne's body might be buried. I do distinctly remember using some modern technology back then or groundbreaking technology, and that was the ground in pulse radar. Of course there was a suggestion that she was deceased to what she'd been murdered. Stuart Wilkins is a former top-sidding homicide cop who investigated and helped solve some of Australia's most notorious murders. And the possibility that we thought was that she made very well have been underneath the pool that was built at the family home because that was being built at the time of her disappearance. He was a key detective on the task force that sneered Ivan Milatt, Australia's worst serial killer, who hunted and murdered backpackers with a psychopathic callousness. Stuart started working on the Lynne Dawson case with a more senior officer, Sergeant Paul Maeger, in 1990. For the first time, police had received some information from Joanne Curtis. By then, Lynne had been gone for eight years. I've come to see Stuart at his home at Palm Beach on the southern end of the Gold Coast. He rose to the rank of assistant commissioner of the New South Wales Police, and then he retired early. These days, Stuart and Jo are spending time at the nearby beach, and he coaches a local rugby league team. He's a rugby league tragic. So we went through the process of examining that area, going through a crime scene, investigations through that, and then we used that ground in Pulse Radar to have a look to see if we could see whether there was any skeletal remains in the ground or around the pool. So we did all that, and the time frame is a little blurry to me, but I know that we undertook an investigation first, and we spoke to a number of witnesses, and then we flew up here to the Gold Coast, and we spoke to one of the persons of interest Christopher Dawson. Could the case like this be solved after 35 years? Yeah, absolutely. And they are regularly. I would never say that this would never be resolved, or could never be completed successfully, because while there is that real hardship in the time process, there's still people out there without question. Who know what happened in that war? So whether it be one, two, three, four, five, six or ten, who knows, but there are still people out there who know what happened to Lindorzen. Is a murderer likely to tell or involve someone else, or keep the secret for 35 years, and not share it with anyone even as close as to? I don't know that that doesn't really happen, so you're greatest risk as a murderer of being found out or being arrested and charged, is the information that other people have, and the physical evidence that you live behind. So if you've been out there, keep your mouth shut, and have left no evidence, you're much better off. You're a better off, you are certainly a good chance of getting away with committee murder. You know, we don't have, there's no physical evidence in this case, so it's not going to be resolved by new technology in the physical investigation process. It will be resolved by somebody actually coming through and going, "I'm responsible for that person's death." finding the body would certainly play. place, absolute doubt on the story given to the known suspects. You heard Stuart describe the interest that the police had then in the swimming pool area. Stuart would go to Queensland in 1991 and formally interview Chris Dawson, and effectively put it to him that he had murdered his wife, Len. What I thought was interesting in the interview in his answers is very early stage and then throughout he's dropping the names of police officers in his. Is that an unusual thing to do or do you think that there's anything to be read into that? I think in hindsight he's probably trying to gain some credibility where there is shining intimidate and I can't remember specifically, but he did drop the names of quite a few police officers and I know that we went and spoke to those police officers and I distinctly remember because I work with at least some of these police that you know, he mentioned the name Brian Gardner. Gardner who I knew quite well and was involved in a rugby league club down on the northern beaches and then was a detective senior sergeant in a very well qualified and very well respected police officer. And he just truly is named in his either an associate or you know I've asked this detective senior sergeant if he can follow up from my wife. You'll see that you know the line of questioning is quite direct because we had the information to put to Chris Dawson but the answers were you know in my view they and forgetful. Chris Dawson's police connections whether real or exaggerated by him will become clear in a future episode when I investigate the lack of police action for several years after Lynn Dawson disappeared. I've recently found a note handwritten by Chris Dawson and dated August 1982. That's seven months after Lynn was last seen. And in this note Chris says he's actually being advised on procedure by a man who was a senior manly police detective at the time. This note had disappeared from the official files but it's been retrieved from another source and it also contains some extraordinary claims by Chris. You'll hear a lot more from Stuart and the details of that interview with Chris in an upcoming episode. But Stuart was mistaken about the timing of the pool's construction. The Dawson's first babysitter, Bev Stanoughforth, a Cromer-high student a year ahead of Joanne at the school remembers the pool well. The pool was already being built so there's no way she's under it. I agree. Joanne had suggested two detectives that the area around the pool be checked out thoroughly. But the 1990 search came to nothing and the following year the first homicide investigation just fizzled out. Stuart moved on to other cases. Another decade on and it's 2000. 18 years since Lynn vanished and an all new police investigation by the Northern Beaches Detective, Damien Loon, revisited Bayview. Once again police made a b-line for the area around the swimming pool and this time police dug up pavers and earth. Here's Damien commenting in the police video of the dig. Where we intend this morning to dig with the possibility of a body being buried in this area. In the dirt beneath the poolside pavers police found a woman's card again with what were described as about 16 cuts in the fabric. I've watched the official police video as a member of the search team potentially contaminates the cardigan near the pool. The cardigan is held with bare hands in a case study of how not to handle highly sensitive evidence. Damien Loon said the cardigan was found in five pieces, scattered at various depths and the diggings under the pavers. Lynn's good friend and next door neighbour at the time she vanished, Julie Andrew, told me it was one of Lynn's favourites, a pink knitted cardigan. How to get in the ground. How to get lost. She didn't lose it. It got in there after she was gone. Joanne went to the dig that unearthed the cardigan in 2000 and by then she was a 35 year old man with a teenage daughter. Joanne was there guarding the police, looking on as a small team armed with picks and shovels priced up the pavers and attacked the hard ground. It is clear from her earlier recorded interview with police in 1998 that Joanne had not told Damien she knew where Lynn's body might have been buried. In that interview in 1998, Joanne had not volunteered that she even knew if Lynn was dead. What do you think of Ben and his now? But nobody. Can I wash it? I don't know. It was fries. But in 2000, Joanne did suggest to Damien that the pool area might be a good place to look. It was an area in which there had been some landscaping activity by Chris. He had tried natural grass and then pavers. The pool is at the front and left of the house on the Bay of Eucourage block as you look up the steep driveway from the street. The pool was built several years before Lynn went missing. Thick bushland was on the right hand side of the house. Julie Andrew lived on the left and very dense bush covered most of the back of the Dawson's block. But around the back of the house, on the opposite side, not near the pool. Bedrooms looked out back then onto what Joanne has described as the soft soil. These are the bedrooms in which Lynn's daughters Chanel and Sharon slept as small children. The area outside those bedroom windows was called the soft soil because it was often wet and muddy. There was a natural spring and water flow down the slope to the flat ground outside the windows. And when it rained, more water ran off the slope. It pooled on the ground outside those windows. This ground was different to the natural rocky terrain across the rest of the block. The soft soil was originally put there as fill. It was the base for the footings of the house that Chris and Lynn had built in happier times. I've talked about it at length with one of the former owners, Sue Johnston, who has been incredibly helpful in this investigation. We've exchanged detailed emails about the work that she and her husband Neville did at the property. Sue really wants Lynn to be found and re-buried so she can rest in peace. When Sue and Neville moved into the house in 1987, Lynn had been missing for five years. And at that time, Lynn wasn't presumed dead. There had been no police investigation at that stage into foul play. Sue and Neville stayed five years at Bayview and they did a lot of landscaping and renovation before they sold in the early 90s. They live in a retirement home these days on the central coast of New South Wales. The Neville's memory is not what it used to be. But Sue makes up for it. She's happy to help and she shares her recollections in writing and on the phone. Sue told me she used to despair of a baby's rocky ground. It was really hard on her green thumbs. On the gardener and every shovel I put into that ground went clink-bang. It was all rock. It had come down from the escutland above. I cannot tell you this is too strongly. That ground was awful. It was terrible. I cannot believe anyone could get a peak in shovel and dig a six foot hole. That's why I feel Lynn was never ever buried there. Sue makes this point with conviction in our first conversation. But as things get pieced together over the weeks and months her confidence levels change. Sue and Neville poured a lot of money and time into the property and they also poured a lot of concrete. Sue actually excavated on the side of the house, the month after we moved in and put a garage there. But there's no way she would have been buried there. That was solid clay. With the biggest bowl you've ever seen in your life we had to get a crane in to remove it. It was huge. Sue was worried about uncovering a body only once. We knocked down some flower boxes. It was an 80s house and I had big flower boxes in the bathrooms. I held my breath and I had that problem. Why did you hold your breath? It's a flower boxes. Well I thought she might have been under them because she wasn't. They were just hollow structures. But I did believe the story that she was missing and was very likely not no longer with us. Have we known about it? I wouldn't have bought. It told Sue that Joanne Curtis had said the police should have looked outside the children's bedroom windows at the back. Well the ground outside the window, we were all at the area where we had cemented because the water coming down from the hill just couldn't drain at any other way. So it would have been softer there. But didn't the police have looked there? It was then that I discovered one of the first things Sue and Neville did when they bought the house was poor concrete over that soft soil. But it would have been difficult for the police to look there anyway of course because Sue and Neville had already put the concrete down over the soft soil in 1987 and they also had a retaining wall built to completely fix the drainage problems. We've seen that it's thoroughly took the whole thing. We took it. about it and as I said we put the poem and made it to be at peace and if she was there, if it was any help that was fine. We both thought at the time the poem was definitely gone. But neither of us felt she was on the property and I just because of that terrain. I mean it was beautiful, I loved all the rocks but when it came to creating your own garden so I could never just put the spade in and plant one thing. I always knew there would be rocks underneath and I'd have to get the crowbar. Sue told me she was very sure that when the detectives and the university team visited in 1990, they were only interested in the swimming pool area because the pool area was what Joanne had suggested to the police during the first investigation of possible foul play. I didn't want to look anywhere else and the information was that he had been building a pool at the time his life went missing and that's where the body was. She had mentioned the front of the house near the pool and that's why they concentrated on it. It wasn't anything we said, it was because she had said that. Sue's comment about a pool being built at the time Lynn disappeared in 1982 is not right. In fact the pool was already in. Lots of people make this mistake but the areas around the pool were unpaved so improvements were being made at the time Lynn vanished. I wanted to be doubly sure that the soft soil outside the bedroom windows, the ground over which Sue and Neville had put down the concrete slab, wasn't checked out by police in 1990. They didn't have looked for example underneath that new slab you built. No, there was no need to because that was not the information they were working on. The police never ever searched the place where we were there, apart from sending those people in. You need to. When the unit room came in there was no disturbance at all. It was as you saw it laid up, something went down the penetrated ground and it turned up signals. It was funny really because computers were quite permigoded then so we were a bit interested you know but they didn't find anything. I'm going to say again we do not believe she's there. She's not on that property. No, I think it's very possible she's in the area. Just before I got it, the ground outside the bedroom windows had a fact. Would it have been as rocky and hard as everywhere else? It would have been softer because the water was coming down. We would cause a wear of the fact that we had to do something about the hill behind. So that's why we got the equipment in. Now here's Rebecca Hazel again. She's describing what her good friend Joanne Curtis confided to her and how Joanne repeatedly said that she regress it. The detective Damien learned did not tell the police team to dig outside the children's bedroom windows in 2000. So I kept telling him, you know, I'm looking the soft soil. And when I spoke to Damien about that it was really angry because he said she was at the dig and she'd shown him where the dog was buried and she'd pointed out this sheet up. I didn't ever said anything about the soft soil. So that was the place that hadn't been searched. And it just seemed odd if she was at the dig. Why wouldn't she have linked in the soft soil? We're going to hear more about the soft soil in later episodes. But there's another strange thing. Rebecca said she went back to Joanne to tell her what the detective Damien Lun had said. Rebecca has kept notes of these conversations about the soft soil. Rebecca had told Joanne that Damien was exasperated and unimpressed. "Redden the face, you know, I think she was at the 2000 big wide-end, she tell me." And that's when Joanne said to Rebecca that the soft soil suggestion was not actually her idea. It came from a person claiming to be a clear-voyant. "Well, I went back that's when she said, 'No, no, no, it's what a psychic has been telling me.' And the psychic didn't tell her until after the 2000 deep." Why didn't she mention the psychic to you when she was telling you about the soft soil in the first place? She is just a physicist. The circumstances are bizarre. For a start, it takes a big leap of faith to believe a so-called psychic could know anything about where Lin might be buried. It seems unlikely that a psychic influenced Joanne when it came to the police dig in 2000 around the swimming pool. But the police must have been thanking their lucky stars back then, because they targeted a tiny area of a sprawling 1 acre block, 4000 square meters. And in this tiny area around the swimming pool, they actually found something. Lin's pink cardigan, but the cardigan had multiple cuts. And on closer examination, police believed that these would have been made by a knife. When I visited the house at Bayview with Rebecca one afternoon, we talked in her car at the bottom of the driveway about the soft soil and these weird connections. We considered walking up to talk to the new owners of the house. They bought it a year ago for about $2.5 million. Could you live there? Knowing its history? Yeah, I could. Because if she's there, and if it happened under the circumstances, it did, I could. I could take care of her. They could make it nice, you know? If that's where her resting place is. If her family thinks that where she is, there's a place where they could come and speak to her. What about you? I don't think so. I think it's a beautiful thing that you've just said, but Eric and I'd be pretty uneasy. I think I dig the place up. So we have a situation where Joanne is adamant that that's the place to dig beneath the window sill, the children's bedrooms. And the investigating officer Damien Loon, who's done more than anybody to investigate this case. He didn't dig there because he's adamant that he didn't know that that's where she said you should dig. I know Damien's not on the case anymore, but there's an anomaly here. The key witness says, "This is where there was loose soil." I was adamant that's where you should be digging. They didn't dig there. It's not too late. They need to dig there now. For the place to do it properly, I imagine that's a really expensive expedition. I don't know if they'd be able to get the money for that. I tried to imagine how it would feel if a stranger turned up at my family home to tell me there could be a murder victim in the backyard. My hesitation is that if Linn remains are on that property, if they are, for example, where Joanne suggests, and we just bowl up and start talking about it, or try to talk about it to the neighbours, they would be understandably spooked and the owners could be completely freaked out. You heard Magistrate Jeff Linden at the start of this episode. He described a meeting on the northern beaches in 1987 with the man who was then the new owner of Linnan Chris's house at Bayview. Jeff believes that he must have been Neville Johnston. The person I spoke to was the owner. The owner? Yeah. The conversation they had has stayed with Jeff all these years. As an experienced Magistrate, Jeff is a highly credible source and he isn't relating this conversation lightly. It's been on his mind for a long time. That just sent the shivers up my spine. That meeting in my mind was just chilling. Not only did he turn up, but the bloke made the point that he turned up uninvited and without making any contact with them and all just turned up. But he said to me, if she's there, she's under six inches of concrete. And he said, remember, in addition to what I'm talking to, he said, whatever you do, don't tell my wife about this or she'll ever want to live there. Jeff was granted permission from the chief Magistrate's office before he spoke to me. I was already aware that for several years prior to 1990, in the period in which Chris Dawson was not a police suspect in any foul play whatsoever, because Lynn Dawson was still being treated as a runaway wife. Chris had made a habit of revisiting Gilwinger Drive Bayview. When he would travel from Queensland to Sydney's northern beaches to catch up with family and friends, he had an unusual attraction to the property he had sold at the end of 1984. As a non-owner, Chris walked over the land. He jogged and drove past it repeatedly. He wanted to know about the landscaping improvements that were being made. For nostalgic reasons, many people do drive past their old homes. But I believe that Chris's special interest in the land around his old home went beyond a casual trip down memory lane. And those four words which Magistrate Jeff Linden has related, where are you digging? Convey so much. Why would a former owner ask the brand new owner such a direct question? Jeff is certain of the phrasing. He vividly remembers the conversation with Neville Johnston. But it is a hearsay comment because Jeff didn't actually hear his old rugby teammate out of those words. I still believe these are remarkable disclosures and a possible clue to Christosan's concern about whatever lies beneath the ground up there. I think the police have missed something quite fundamental. I think that they've misunderstood that after Christ's left, the new owners, the Johnston's, put in a retaining wall and some concrete out the back because they were concerned about the water that was running down the hill. And of course the water had softened the ground and the ground was soft anyway because it was filled to accommodate the construction of the slab in the first place. So they put it in new space and the police must have thought this was part of the original footings so that or maybe that thought was too much trouble. I didn't go under it. And it was probably the only soft ground on the side because it was incredibly rocky according to Mrs. Johnston. You couldn't put your pick in the ground without hitting bolder. And you think that it would have been at that time that you alerted the police, yeah? No, no, in fact, I didn't. Jeff regrets that he didn't raise this with police a long time ago. A bit of a conscience about that, but I did notify them properly two to three years ago. And Jeff didn't pass this hearsay information to his two fellow magistrates. Jan Stevenson and Karl Milovanovich who ran the coronal proceedings in 2001 and 2003, respectively. Those proceedings culminated in findings by the two coroners that Chris had murdered Lynn. But the director of public prosecutions has consistently refused to prosecute, to put this matter before a jury. What do you think you didn't put it in straight away? Probably that. To me, it was hearsay and I would have expected the police would have interviewed the owners about it. And look, that was about the time I was appointed and things were pretty very hip-hop. But a part of me didn't really want to get involved. I was happy to ask, hence any questions that anyone had for me, but I didn't feel I had the courage of the whole thing anyway. Rebecca said Joanne's remorse over whatever happened to Lynn is still raw and immense after 36 years. When we really talk about it, she would often put her head in her hands and so it wouldn't have happened except for me. It's a terrible burden. She carries, of course, it's not her responsibility at all. No, it's not her responsibility. I think though that even as a 16-year-old, you can separate what's right and wrong. I think that's true, but in the scenario that I think she's alluding to is that if he killed her, she feels responsible. She had no way of knowing he might have been going to hurt her. There was no conspiracy or I think she hoped at certain points during her final year of school that he would leave her and they could be together, but I don't think she thought he was going to hurt her. Was Jo jealous of Lynn when she was in Chris? Yeah, I think she was. I do. Do you think she ever felt suspected by police or the family of being involved? I do. I do. I asked, that was one of the first things I asked, Damien. Did you ever think she had anything to do with Lynnette's disappearance? And he said, no, not for a minute because she came to us and she told us what she knew. He said if she had something to do with her, you would not put yourself in that position. We've talked about how Lynn must have felt when she understood the betrayal. Teachers, students, her friends, her brother-in-law Paul Dawson, his wife Marilyn. They all knew Chris was in love with Joanne, not with Lynn. It was not a brief fling or a one-night stand. It had been going on for a year. These people around me, this little community I have who was supposed to really love and do everything for me are actually all betraying me, including this young woman who I've moved into my house as an act of kindness who I'm pretty sure is having an affair with my husband. There's a part of me that I think I could imagine just walking out the door. My planned interviews with Joanne were weeks away. In the meantime, it was important to know as much as possible about events at the time of Lynn's disappearance. Did Jo argue with Lynn or she liked her? I've asked her that exact question and what she said to me was she started to cry and she said, "On it Dawson showed me more kindness than anyone else ever has in my entire life." So I guess that's yes, an inquire profound way. She must feel a lot of guilt. She feels terrible. Yeah, so I should cry. She's having a relationship with a 16-year-old girl and he's had the arrogance or the confidence or the lack of respect for his wife to actually move her into their own home and to sleep with her in their house while their children are sleeping nearby. I mean, there's something quite abnormal about that. It's so far outside the bounds of normal human behaviors and it's so incand. I mean, it's not each other for so long and that had two beautiful children together. Why can't he just say I just can't be here anymore? Lynn was 21 when she and Chris were married. They had been together since high school. As a boy, Greg Sims looked up to his sisters one and only, Chris Dawson. And do you recall Lynn having any other boyfriends before Chris as a serious one? No, no, he was it from high school to when she disappeared. Now let's go back to October 1981. Three months before Lynn vanished. Lynn finally accepted the truth while Chris was having an enforced stay in the surgical ward at the nearby Mona Vale Hospital. Here's Lynn's sister, Pat Jenkins. Chris was going into hospital to have an operation on his nose and he didn't want Lynn to visit him. Your mum visited Chris in hospital? Yes, that's right. And what did she report back from what she saw? She said to me that the door was a jar, wasn't closed, it was a jar. So mum went in and she saw Joanne sort of draped across the bed and Chris was lying back and Joanne was sort of dabbing at his nose with a tissue or something. Lynn's mum, Helena, witnessed the very obvious and tender affection between them and she knew that her daughter had been expressly asked by Chris to stay away from the hospital. Mum was horrified. I don't know what she said. That would be a very embarrassing situation for her. So your mother would have spoken to Lynn about what she saw? Yes, she did. You said your mother would have been horrified because you think she immediately suspected that there was a very close relationship. She would have had to seeing that. And when mum told Dad, Dad, you said, "Tell Lynn to get rid of her. Tell her to go." Dad, you said, "Tell Lynn to get rid of that girl." Here's how Helena noted the build-up of tensions. Helena's been dead for many years, but this is a jotting from her diary. November 5, Len and I went to see Chris in hospital. Lin rang on phone, chatted for over an hour, things upset in that household. Upsetting my sleep worrying, Lynn said Joanne should go. It all started to make sense to Helena. Lynn's sadness, Chris's cold behaviour. He was an introvert. He didn't like socialising, but he had become even more distant. The atmosphere in the house, when Helena would visit her granddaughters during Joanne's sleepovers, was as taught as piano wire. Mum had to travel a long way to get to bay view. She would, mum would stay there. And this is when Joanne was still there. So Mum said she'd get up to go and get a drink of water. And there was movement in the house. Joanne's had a walk through in the darkness, and that sort of thing, which to me was very suspicious. Chris and Joanne were having sex in the house at night while Lynn slept, and Lynn wouldn't wake up when her husband was out of the bed. Lynn enjoyed only a glass of wine socially. She was not a drinker, but Chris would mix Lynn and evening cocktail when Joanne stayed over. It always resulted in Lynn going to sleep early, and then sleeping very soundly. Here's Joanne from her interview with Damien Loon, the police detective. I don't know, I mean, I guess whatever opportunity was presented to the police. After the hospital incident, with Joanne paying affection at attention to Chris, Helena telephoned Lynn at the house in bay view. Here's how Joanne remembered the event. One day I was sitting there wiping his nose and hit her mother walked in. And I went off to work in my part-time, Coles job. And when I got back to the house, Paul had picked me up from work and taken back to the house and when I got there, she said, "You've been taking liberties with my husband." It had taken Lena a year and she still could not bring herself to spell it out. That phrase, "taking liberties with my husband" sounds like understatement. And it's an odd way to say it too. Chris was the same age as Lynn. Joanne was half their age. Chris wasn't being exploited. He was the one taking liberties with a troubled teenager. That's what she said and that was the last time I spoke to her because I left the house and went down the road to his brother's house and stayed there until we went to Queensland on the day before Christmas. Joanne waited until after 10pm and Lynn had gone to bed. Then she packed up all her clothes and schoolbooks and walked down the driveway. Have you ever shown any signs to you at some stage that he wanted his wife to disappear or that he wanted her to lay the house and continue relationship with you? Well, the fact that he asked me to marry him to me is an indication that that's what he wanted. Joanne's disclosures to Damien Loan in 1998 during his patient and methodical questioning were important. She had made similar disclosures eight years earlier in 1990 when she first spoke to detectives who then launched the original homicide investigation. You heard Stuart Wilkins, a detective in that first investigation, describing an aspect of it earlier in this episode. But it was a really narrow probe. They talked to people, but then the investigation just fizzled out and inexplicably almost all the police files from that investigation were somehow lost. This was a murder investigation. But the paperwork, including the records of interviews and statements taken from key witnesses, had disappeared without a trace. Only one document was found. It was the police interview with Chris Dawson, including a tape, and it will be examined closely in a future episode. In the second murder investigation eight years later, with Detective Damien Loan in the Northern Beach's police station, opposite Joanne, the interviews were electronically recorded. Joanne's next disclosure was chilling. But I do remember one time going out with him to a pub somewhere. I just remember sitting in the car and I was just a kid at school. We went out to this pub and he said, "You sit in the car." And he went up these stairs. I don't know where it was. And he came back and I said, "You know what was that about?" He said, "I was going to get a hitman to kill Lee." But then I changed my mind because innocent people would be hurt. And that's all that was said. And we drove home or whatever we were doing. But I remember that incident. Damien Loan pressed for more details. But Joanne could not provide a location. I don't know. I didn't drive so I didn't take any notice of streets. But I just remember it was upstairs. I can just picture myself sitting in the car going, "What are we doing here?" And then he came back and saying, "This is what I did. And I'm not doing it now." So he was telling me that this was his plan and now it was abandoning it. At the time, as Joanne explained it, her boyfriend and Chroma High Sports teacher twice her age actually went up in her estimation. Because he worried about innocent people and he didn't want them hurt. Joanne was deeply in love. She didn't mark Chris down back then for having allegedly sought out a hitman in the first place. For having taken Joanne, according to her, to some strange place where he met a dangerous man with the intention of having a mother of two girls murdered. Joanne couldn't be sure of the timing either. Was it before the hospital incident or afterwards? She said she was guessing. I thought, "Oh, that's the end of that." But Maggie, I didn't take it seriously because I didn't mention it to anyone. But then I trusted him completely. It's important to stress that Chris Dawson has always emphatically rejected these claims and many others by Joanne. He believes that she is a manipulative liar. He denies murdering his wife. We rolled in Rebecca's car to the end of Gilwinger Drive. The secardas were out and buzzing loudly again. At the end of the road, Chris's twin brother, Paul and his wife, Marilyn, had also built their impressive house and they lived in it with their young daughters. Back in 1982 when Linda appeared. So when Jo was asked to leave that night when that said, "You've been taking liberties with my husband." And you know, I said, "Get out." I said, "You remember walking down this road carrying all of the long insa school bag and a few bags with her clothes." She doesn't even know how, she can't remember. Paul met her halfway and helped her carry her things back to his place. The betrayal of Lynn was deepening. Her brother-in-law, Paul, his wife, Marilyn. They welcomed Joanne into their house. They had known for many months that Joanne was sleeping with Chris. Paul and Chris took another schoolgirl and Joanne away with them for four days to teachers college in Armadale, where the brothers were required to sit for further exams. They slept together in a dormitory. It's a scenario difficult to comprehend. Two high school teachers finalizing their own higher education to be qualified as senior teachers and taking two schoolgirl students as lovers along with them. Paul Dawson has always denied wrongdoing too, but both Joanne and the other girl corroborate each other. After Lynn's challenge to her, Joanne could have gone elsewhere. She had friends and a sister with a shared flat at Neutral Bay. But Joanne stayed put in bay view, a few hundred meters from Lynn. When Chris got out of hospital a couple of days later, in early November, his girlfriend was still close. Just not in the spare bedroom. You're living in this extremely isolated location. And the three people, the three adults in your world, who are helping you, who are closest to you, are conspiring against Lynn. It's quite breathtaking. That's the influence I suppose between Chris was able to bring to bear on Paul and the support Paul would give to his brother. Unconditional. Absolutely unconditional. The Trinity Dells advocate could have been out of desperate concern for Joanne's welfare. She needed someone to live. Lynn had thrown her out. They wanted to give her shelter. No down against. Lynn's wishes, but they felt that this kid needed backup. Is that possible? Yeah, it's possible. That would explain the first few nights. I think beyond a crisis, if you're sheltering your sister in law's husband, your brother, he's lover. I just. The longer that strings out, the more cruel and unsustainable an act of kindness becomes. But Chris now had a potentially significant problem. Lynn knew he had been lying the whole time. Chris started looking for somewhere he and Joanne could live together. He found a flat in North Manley and he handed over a $500 bond. They were making plans to live together. Without Lynn, Joanne told Damien Loan, the police detective, that she heard one side of an important conversation when Chris telephoned another brother, Peter Dawson, for legal advice. Chris wanted to know what would happen to his nest egg. His property asset, if Lynn were to divorce him. I was present for a phone conversation where Chris rang his brother, Peter, it's a list of them. Because he wanted a split together and he wanted to keep the property. So he spoke to his brother and asked whether if he left, the ringer drug, would he fall for his rights to the property? And the brother said, "You know, you're better off staying there." Joanne was sure that Chris feared he would lose the house if he moved out with Joanne. He abandoned the idea of a flat at Manley and they started making other plans. Joanne's situation, living in another Dawson home, near Lynn while trying to hide her presence from Lynn, was putting strain on Paul Dawson and his wife, Marilyn. They didn't really want Lynn to know Joanne was even living there. They didn't want one of the girls seeing Joanne and they're innocently mentioning it to Auntie Lynn or to their four-year-old cousin, Chanel, who must have wondered where the friendly living babysitter had gone. Joanne would get up early and leave Paul and Marilyn's house some days to hide in the nearby bush in the mornings just before the girls were woken up. Joanne would stay in the bush until the girls were out of the house. Then she'd get ready for school. For the exams that were part of her higher school certificate or HSC in her final weeks at Chroma High. In the evenings, Joanne would sometimes return to her peaceful hiding place in the bush until the little ones went to bed. It was tough on her and it became intolerable for Paul and Marilyn. Just up the road, Lynn and Chris were living under the same roof. But the marriage appeared finished. Here are more jottings from the diary of Lynn's mum, Helena. Pre-Christmas family gathering at Klavalli. Chris said again, "I only want to look after my two-lifters." little girls. I said, "What about Lynn?" He said, "She's in the kitchen where she belongs." Lynn's sister Pat remembers talking to her mother about it. "There's lots of aunts and uncles. Mum and Chris were having a conversation. And Chris said to Mum, "All I want to do is to look after my two little girls." Mum said, "What about you big girl?" And he said, "Oh, she's in the kitchen where she belongs." So, I mean, obviously things were pretty bad then. I've come to Sydney to meet Roslyn McLaughlin, who played tennis with Lynn in a friendly group of Northern Beachers' mums. They tried to catch up once a week for games of doubles, and then a chat over a cup of tea. You've described an event in December 1981. And this has played on your mind for many years. Well, as part of the group, that was the last time any of us saw Lynn. And it was just before Christmas. And when we met again, we did discuss the fact that she disappeared. And that was really out of character. And on that occasion, she didn't appear to be as happy as she could have been. She had some bruising on her, and particularly, she had tennis gear on. So, on top of her thigh, she had a really large grapefruit size bruise. And some, I don't know if it was on both arms, one arm, I can't remember now, but certainly bruising on her upper arm. You recall that Lynn said something to you as well, and to the other mums? She really wanted me to come back with her to her place at the time. And I just, because it was pre-Christmas and, yeah, kids and things to do, I said, no, I couldn't do it. I just thought I can't take on any more today. I did sense a desperation in her request. And in hindsight, I would have definitely gone. But when we regrouped in January, evidently, she'd asked other people to go back. Christmas Day fell on a Friday in 1981. The women usually played tennis on Thursdays. And Roslyn is sure they would not have got together on Christmas Eve. She's confident that the last time she saw Lynn, pleading for someone to accompany her home, was December 17, 1981. What was it about her request that you go back that made you think that there was desperation around it? If she was just really begging me to go back to her place? I've wondered whether Lynn was simply hoping to have a friendly shoulder to cry on. Alternatively, she might have been genuinely fearful about being alone in the house with Chris. Lynn couldn't drive, and it wasn't easy for her to get away. She relied on lifts from Chris and Paul and Marilyn. Chris was on leave. School holidays had started. And Lynn wanted him to see someone about his temper. He was always angry with her. And when you all got back together the next time, is it fair to say that when Lynn had disappeared and you were talking about the bruises and her desperation and so on, that you all started to speculate that there had been foul play? We did suspect that maybe Chris her husband had done something to her. We talked about that. As I said, there's a lot of bush. You've got water down, not far away. There's lots of opportunity for someone to just vanish off the face of the earth quite easily in that area. We just presumed that her body would be found or she would reappear. Do you think it would have been possible in early 982 for one of Lynn's friends to go around to the other friends and say, look, this doesn't make sense that Lynn would leave. We did notice this bruising and she was begging for us to go back just before she disappeared. Do you think we should go to the police and just air our concerns? Or do you think that would have been a really unusual thing to do at the time? We certainly discuss everything that you just mentioned, the bruising, the fact she was really wanting us to come back to her place, that her disappearance was really out of character and if she was just going to go away, she would have taken kids or two children. I. we had a discussion and we probably talked about it a few times but I. going to the police, I guess partly because I was certainly on the proofery. I wasn't someone that spent a lot of time in their house. I have no idea why no one went to the police and I can't answer for the others. Lynn had been putting aside money from her salary working part time at the childcare centre to buy a cubby house for the girls. In her unhappy home, at least she could look forward to her daughter's excitement about Christmas and presents. But she received another surprise on December 21. Chris presented Lynn with a monovale real estate agent standard sales inspection agreement. Chris had decided that Bayview would be sold. His asking price was $180,000. As a joint owner with Chris, Lynn's signature would be needed. But the document isn't signed. Lynn wanted to stay in the smart house that she and Chris had built. Her flair for interior design and decoration was evident. But the home had been looking tired. Yeah, well Lynn was very house proud. I particularly noticed she had these big hanging baskets with ferns hanging down, which looked absolutely beautiful in previous times. They're all dead. The ferns were dead. And I just had that feeling that the love wasn't in the house at that time. But I had no reason to suspect that she was being bashed. No, you know, no reason at all. Lynn's life was turned upside down two days before Christmas. Here's Helena's diary entry. She's shot through. Left Lynn and the two girls on their own. While Lynn was at work, Chris and Joanne spent December 23 packing clothes and valuables to start their new lives together in Queensland. Lynn had been waiting. He was supposed to pick her up from work and she'd done a big shop and she waited for an hour and he didn't come. So she rang his twin brother Paul who lived just up the street and Paul said he didn't know where he was. So Lynn got a taxi home. I mean, she got home. She found this note on the bed and all his clothes had gone. His pillow had even gone. And from the note, she wasn't sure if he was even coming back whether it was going permanently. And Lynn told me that she said to the girls, "Dad's had to go away suddenly on a holiday." And Lynn said that she gave the girls both a kiss and said it was from him. For years, Joanne kept a photograph of herself standing beside the car on the day they left. Lynn was oblivious to the decision. She had waited until after 6pm with the Christmas shopping for Chris to collect her and drive her home. But he and Joanne were already driving the family car north up the Pacific Highway. They drove through the night. As they needed Queensland, Joanne was having second thoughts. When Lynn finally got home, she found a hand-written note from Chris. It said that he had left her. Don't paint tube like a picture of me to the girls. That would Chris's words on the note. By the time Chris and Joanne had made it to the Willembar on the New South Wales border with Queensland, their plan to start new lives together in the Sunshine State had fallen apart. Joanne had become anxious. Her skin was breaking out in hives. "And I was very sick because I didn't want to leave my family. And you know, he said, "We'll just make a clean break." And I don't know what he said to his wife or whatever. I don't know what the situation is there. And I just know that we went away. And then we came back Christmas Day." Chris and Joanne drove through the night back to Sydney, reaching Maryland and Paul's house in the early hours of the morning of Christmas Day. They stayed hidden from Paul and Maryland's daughters, as the children excitedly tore the wrapping from their presence. Later that morning, Paul took his family to see his parents for Christmas lunch, and Chris and Joanne slept in the Dawson house in Gowinger Drive. Lynn and her girls went to the same Christmas lunch. But Lynn was completely unaware that just down the road, her husband was sleeping, having returned with Joanne. In the afternoon, Joanne went to Forest High, where Paul taught. Paul had left the Makeda at the school's gymnasium, and they stayed the night there, sleeping on the gym mats. Joanne told Chris on the morning of Boxing Day that she wanted to go home to her mother's place. "And the next day I was dropped off at my mother's because I didn't want, I wanted to end the relationship finally after so many attempts. And he did that and then the situation which I had to leave initially was still there. And so I decided to know what I was to do, so I did go back with him." In the next episode of The Teacher's Path, Lynn and Chris go to marriage counseling. And in her last word, words to her mother. Lin says, "Everything's going to be okay. My husband has made me a lovely drink." The Teacher's Pet is a podcast series investigated and written by me, Headley Thomas, with original music and audio production by Slade Gibson Audio and additional audio editing by Zachary Wommel. This podcast series is brought to you by the Australian and proudly hosted by Wushka. Visit theteacherspet.com.au for additional documentary material as well as credits for the full team behind this multi-part production. Anyone with information about Lindorston's disappearance can send it in confidentially or contact me through the website, theteacherspet.com.au. Hi, I'm Headley 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 was travelling around Australia and making new friends at places like Uluru in this vast 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.