When asked by Crown prosecutor Craig Everson,SC,about her sister’s plans for Christmas,Jenkins’ voice trembled,and she said she was a “bit upset”.
Lynette had planned to give the girls a cubby house,and “didn’t want to disappoint them”,but expressed concerns about how she would manage financially,she said.
Asked whether they ever discussed Dawson’s health,Jenkins said Lynette described him as having “black eyes flashing”.
“She said ... he was always so angry with her all the time,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins said she last spoke to her sister on January 1,1982,when “Chris had gone on a yachting party” without his wife and children.
“She said they’d had such a sad Christmas,could he drive them down to the park,and they could sit and watch the boats? And he said ‘no’.”
Jenkins found out about her sister’s disappearance in a letter from their mother,Helena Simms.
In the tendered letter,dated January 21,1982,Simms wrote she had been walking around the house like a “zombie” and “hoping things would resolve”,but that “Lyn took herself off” on January 9.
“I was with Chris at Northbridge pool when he had the first call ... he was obviously very much affected and emotional,” she wrote.
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“She was very affected with Chris leaving ... right on Xmas but Chris assures they were ‘coming good’ ... yet she’d about turned on the Sat morning.
“Whether she has cracked under strain or is being vindictive or what the answer is I don’t know.”
Dawson’s barrister Pauline David asked Jenkins whether her sister “may have arrived at the point where she needed a break” from the household.
“When someone just drops out of your life,a much-loved person ... you don’t know what to believe,” she said. “There’s always that little bit of hope that you’re going to find her. That was a very distressing time for all of us so that was a remote possibility.
“To think otherwise would mean you wouldn’t see her again,so we had to have that hope.”
Lynette’s brother,Greg Simms,said in late 1981 his sister had been on the veranda of their parents’ Clovelly home and Dawson had commented about his “two darling little girls”.
Asked about his wife,Dawson replied,“She can get in the bloody kitchen where she belongs”,Simms said.
He said after Lynette’s disappearance,Dawson dropped off her belongings in “big green plastic bags”,including a dressing gown with a sales inspection report in the pocket regarding the Bayview home,which had his signature.
Simms said his sister had previously told him she “refused to sign it”.
Asked by David whether he had made up the suggestion Dawson “was trying to do something behind Lyn’s back”,Simms replied,“That’s incorrect.”
The court heard he sent a list of his sister’s dentists to the missing persons unit.
Pausing to gather his emotions,he said this was if “she was ever found” and “wasn’t alive”.
The Crown alleges on or about January 8,Dawson,alone or with others,murdered his wife and disposed of her body. The defence says he may have “failed” as a husband,but did not kill Lynette.
The judge-alone trial before Justice Ian Harrison continues.
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