Police had reopened their investigation into the case three years before his podcast was broadcast,but Dawson’s legal team used it at every opportunity to advance his interests – first by attempting to put a permanent stay on the trial and later to discredit prosecution witnesses.
Tapped phone calls caught Thomas riffing with one man later called as a witness on who might portray him in the film version of the podcast. Hugh Jackman’s name came up. There was a real possibility that by bringing attention to the case,Thomas had neutralised evidence that might bring a conviction.
Justice Ian Harrison’s reasons for his pronouncement of guilt,which he read over nearly five hours,surged and receded like a sea tide,beginning on an ebb flow with the improbability of the Crown proving beyond reasonable doubt that Dawson had killed his wife.
In order to return a guilty verdict,Harrison observed,he would need to find beyond reasonable doubt that Lynette was dead and that her death was caused by a conscious,voluntary act carried out by Dawson with the intent to kill. And yet there was no body,there was a set of “facts” that were open to interpretation,memories were faded and witnesses had died.
“The Crown case is wholly circumstantial,” Harrison said.
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Dawson’s family nodded their heads. A male supporter leaned forward on his knees.
But as Harrison methodically discredited various claimed sightings of Lynette as fabricated,mistaken or otherwise unconvincing,the sea drew back to expose the paucity of evidence that she was still alive,and the Crown case rushed to fill the void.
When Harrison outlined the evidence given by the former schoolgirl,who had been given the court pseudonym JC,one of Dawson’s supporters stood up and left the room in disgust,with a dozen faces leaning forward to peer after him. Harrison found JC’s evidence to be plausible in almost all respects.
“I was left with the impression that[JC] felt that she had been,and was in fact,swept up in circumstances over which she had only limited control,” Harrison said.
He visited the evidence given by witnesses who had been interviewed by Thomas,finding them credible apart from one woman who might have conflated what she remembered with what she had been told by the journalist. He pulled apart weaknesses in the Crown case and discussed the high bar to establishing that Dawson had caused her death.
But towards the end of the fourth hour,his focus narrowed back towards the events leading up to the disappearance of Lynette on January 8,1982,when Dawson sensed he was about to lose JC. He hatched various plans for them to live together – looking for a flat in Manly,attempting to sell his marital home in Bayview and driving with JC to Queensland – but each of them fell through.
It was then he executed his final plan:to kill Lynette.
As Dawson was led down to the cells on Tuesday afternoon,Lynette’s sister-in-law Merilyn Simms stood before the flashing bulbs of a large media pack and reflected on what Lyn would have made of it all.
“Lyn would be very humbled by the attention that she has got,” Simms said. “She was not an attention-seeker,she was a fun-loving person who loved her family,loved her children,but she would never have expected this.”
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