“It is entirely understandable that her family and those that love her would like an answer,” she said. “The answer ... does not lie in the prosecution of Christopher Dawson,and that suggestion that he has murdered his wife,is the wrong answer.”
Neighbour Julie Andrew testified that she had regularly caught up with Lynette Dawson,and saw her “wailing” with Dawson “towering over her and screaming at her” in their yard in December 1981.
Andrew said she overheard words such as,“What are you doing to us,Chris?” and later called into the house. It was the last time she saw Lynette Dawson,who told her JC was moving in.
“I said,‘Lyn,you can’t have her move in here,he’s f---ing the babysitter’,” Andrew said.
She said the mother-of-two had previously told her about coming home from work early with a migraine to find the accused and JC in bed.
Under cross-examination,Andrew denied that she had embellished evidence and made up scenarios such as seeing JC walking around in g-string bikini bottoms “to try and suggest impropriety”,would say anything to cast Dawson in a “dark and menacing light” and was incapable of giving evidence due to her association withThe Australian’s podcastThe Teacher’s Pet.
She said Lynette Dawson was a patient mother who would “never have left her children”.
Asked by Justice Ian Harrison whether she accepted the existence of the possibility Dawson “might have had nothing to do” with the disappearance,Andrew replied:“I don’t accept that he didn’t”. She added:“I do believe Chris Dawson murdered his wife. I’d be lying ... if I said otherwise.”
The defence says Dawson drove his wife to a bus stop at Mona Vale to go shopping on January 9,1982,and they had agreed that she would later meet him,their daughters,her mother Helena Simms and friend Phillip Day at the Northbridge Baths where Dawson was working.
At 3pm,a staff member notified Dawson of a call and handed him the phone,during which Lynette Dawson allegedly said,to the effect,“she would not be coming to the pool,and she would not be returning home that day”. David said Simms and Day observed Dawson was “shaken”.
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David said there were subsequent phone calls and bank transactions,and it was disputed that Lynette Dawson “was deceased at the time”.
She said the police investigation had been characterised by inexplicable delays,a loss of records,and a “failure” to “follow significant leads of signs of life”,with some reported sightings “not followed up”.
“Vital evidence consistent with Lynette Dawson being alive after the 8th and 9th of January 1982 is not available to this court.”
David said there was “wilful disregard” by some police to follow those leads,and that “this was deliberate because it did not accord with a view that they had formed against the accused”.
“It is a sad fact ... that at times,people do make difficult choices in difficult circumstances,and people like Lynette Dawson do from time to time disappear,” David said. “It is the defence case that she had reasons.”
She said there was “not a scintilla of truth” to the suggestion Dawson thought about using a hitman.
The judge-alone trial continues.
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