Under cross-examination from Dawson’s barrister Pauline David,Grantham said she had not recommended Lynette go to the police,as she was “very secretive about her personal life”,and they “never brought the subject up again”.
She denied David’s suggestion that the pool account was said to her by somebody else or created in her own mind.
Asked by Crown prosecutor Emma Blizard whether they ever spoke about the babysitter,Grantham said Lynette told her “Chris was pressing her if she[JC] could move in with them” during her HSC.
“She wanted to help the girl through her study as well ... but we were saying,I think you should really look into that,” Grantham said. She said Lynette said,“Chris will never do anything wrong”.
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Grantham said Lynette had looked “very sad” after one day taking a taxi home at lunchtime and finding Dawson’s swimming trunks and JC’s bikini bottoms on the line.
Colleague Sue Strath said Lynette referred to Dawson as “My Chris”. “He was always on a pedestal for her.”
She said that before Christmas 1981,Lynette had told her she once came home to find JC naked in the pool and her husband somewhere in the house.
Strath said on Thursday,January 7,1982,Lynette told her it “wasn’t a very happy Christmas” as Dawson had left,but was “back now”.
“She said everything looks like it’s going to be fine because we’re going to see a marriage psychologist,” Strath said. “She was very hopeful for the future.”
On January 8,Strath said Lynette arrived at work with Dawson “holding hands” and had said the counselling was “really positive”.
Strath never saw or heard from Lynette after that date. In 1985,she wrote to the Ombudsman,asking questions about the police investigation into the disappearance.
Outside court on Tuesday,Strath said she would have been one of the last people to see Lynette alive. She said she was a “lovely person”,loved her husband and was “never going to leave her girls”.
Another worker,Annette Leary,testified that a couple of months after Lynette vanished,she and Grantham were at a shopping centre and “saw Chris with the schoolgirl[JC] and the two little girls”.
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“We stopped and said hello to them,and he said he had a letter from Lyn,and she was in Queensland,and he didn’t know when she was coming back,” she said.
In response to a suggestion from David that she was mistaken and “at no stage did he ever say that he had a letter from Mrs Dawson”,Leary said:“I don’t believe I am.”
“He had a call from her,and he had a letter.”
The 86-year-old,who first made a statement to police 18 years later,dismissed the possibility that she may have been confused about what was said.
“It was a very trying time at that time,having her[Lynette] disappear and worrying about her,what had happened to her. It was something that would stick in your mind. It stuck in my mind.”
The judge-alone trial before Justice Ian Harrison continues.
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