“We can’t say that happened,but we don’t know,” Chris Dawson’s barrister Pauline David told the NSW Supreme Court on Wednesday.
Chris Dawson and Lynette Dawson were married in 1970.Nick Moir,Supplied
Dawson,73,has pleaded not guilty to murdering his first wife,Lynette,who disappeared from Sydney’s northern beaches in January 1982. The Crown alleges he killed her on or about January 8,motivated by his desire to have an unfettered relationship with the family’s teenage babysitter,known as JC.
The defence says Lynette abandoned her home after being dropped off at a Mona Vale bus stop on January 9. Dawson claims she called him that afternoon at Northbridge Baths to say she needed time away,and he received “several” calls in the days and weeks to follow.
Continuing her closing address,David said there were an “enormous number of possibilities” as to what happened to Lynette Dawson after 1982,and the defence relied.
“We say,certainly,she was alive at the time when Chris Dawson put her on the bus. She was alive at the time when she called him,” she said.
Whether,at some later point,“there was misadventure” was unknown,David said.
“At some point in time,she has potentially created a new life,she has subsequently passed away,she has met with misadventure by some other way,or even the deeply unpleasant possibility of her taking her own life.”
Acknowledging Lynette’s body had never been found,Justice Ian Harrison said,“you can’t dispose of your own body after you’ve taken your own life”.
David said that was “depending on how you do it”,and also raised that Harold Holt had disappeared at sea. The former prime minister vanished at Cheviot Beach near Portsea,Victoria,in December 1967.
“Nobody knows where he went,” David said.
David said Lynette could have changed her identity and appearance,may be “in the outback” or have “sailed away on a boat somewhere”.
She said Lynette had been “in the process of some serious contemplation about her life”,as her husband had left Bayview to start a new life in Queensland with JC shortly before Christmas 1981,before the teenager became ill,and they returned to Sydney.
“We accept that it was the accused who put her in that terrible position and terrible mindset.”
She said Lynette was not abandoning her children to a “terrible life” but rather a loving father,good home and financial security,surrounded by family.
David acknowledged that a “curious aspect” of the case was the drawers of the home being “stuffed with clothes”,and if Dawson had the capacity to kill his wife and dispose of her body,it seemed “nonsensical” to leave her clothes intact and not pack a suitcase to make it look like she left.
“He is an open,we say,honest man that has left everything exactly as it is.”
The defence argues Dawson is at a significant forensic disadvantage and police investigations have been characterised by inexplicable delays with a “failure” to “follow significant leads of signs of life”.
David said banking and telephone records that might have supported that Lynette Dawson was alive in the early months of 1982 were now unavailable to investigators by reason of the passage of time.
She said there was “absolutely no evidence” as to how and where Dawson allegedly killed Lynette and disposed of her body.
“Notwithstanding,as a consequence of very fixed views about her being buried in the[Bayview] yard for decades,and many excavations and other searches,she’s not there,” David said.
“There is nothing,not a skerrick of scientific or forensic evidence to suggest that Chris Dawson killed his wife during a period of time when he’s alleged to have done it.”
Justice Harrison said,“if there were,it would not be a wholly circumstantial case”,noting the Crown had accepted it was.
David will continue her closing address on Thursday. Dawson’s judge-alone trial is in its ninth week.
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