It was the unspoken question during Chris Dawson’s trial that couldn’t be openly discussed before his murder conviction: Did the ex-football star drug his wife’s drink on the night he murdered her?
Evidence heard at the trial included that Dawson repeatedly mixed her drinks at the family home which made her pass out, allowing him to have sex with the schoolgirl babysitter he had moved in, JC.
So effective were the drinks to render her unconscious that Lynette Curtis – a social drinker in her early 30s – was sometimes so stupefied that she drifted off while still in her lounge chair.
The idea that the drinks made by Chris Dawson – a lifelong teetotaller, along with his identical twin brother Paul – could have also contained a sedative was never mentioned during the ten week trial.
What was mentioned was Lynette Dawson’s eerie last conversation with her mother Helena Simms, which was in fact the last time the then 33-year-old devoted mother-of-two ever spoke with anyone other than her violent, unfaithful husband.
Helena thought that in the conversation, Lyn sounded ‘sozzled’ and she told her mother that Chris ‘has just made me a lovely drink’.
Whether it was drugged or not, and whether Dawson then smothered his wife or killed her another way before contemplating on how and where he could dispose of her body, Lyn’s poignant last words have taken on a sinister significance.
Lynette Dawson’s poignant last words on the night she was murdered, sounding ‘sozzled’ to her mother have taken on a sinister turn when she said Chris had made her ‘a lovely drink’
How Chris Dawson murdered his wife was not revealed in the trial, but he may have spiked her drink with a sedative and then smothered the trusting 33-year-old before disposing of her body
Untold stories from Lynette Joy Dawson’s tortured but secret existence with her controlling and ultimately murderous husband are now emerging less than a day after his sensational murder conviction.
Dawson’s spent his first night in custody at the Surry Hills police centre, in a cell in conditions which are notoriously squalid, with cockroaches, wailing inmates and walls and floors which have to be frequently hosed off.
Dawson arrived at the vast Silverwater Correctional Centre in western Sydney just before lunchtime, where he will be strip searched, body scanned, his clothes replaced with prison greens and his jail mug shot taken.
Justice Ian Harrison firmly told the NSW Supreme Court that Dawson had murdered Lynette ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, although he couldn’t say how nor where the then PE teacher disposed of Lyn’s body.
Chris Dawson has been taken to Silverwater Correctional Centre in western Sydney after his sensational murder conviction, but will he tell Lyn’s family where her body is buried?
Lynette Dawson beaming on her wedding day in 1970, but in a secret which she never shared with anyone, her husband was a controlling monster beneath the charm
His Honour found that Lyn was murdered on or about January 8, 1982, the day after which Dawson attended Northbridge Baths and told lies to Lyn’s accepting but bewildered mother about her phoning to say she ‘needed time away’.
It was the first of many lies which Justice Harrison detailed in his four-and-a-half hour long verbal verdict on Tuesday.
The fact his lies were accepted by Lyn’s family were due to his charisma and convincing duality, which was described by relatives as long ago as the 2003 second inquest into her disappearance.
‘He was just so gorgeous, of course you believed him,’ Lynette Dawson’s aunt, Lee Fletcher, said after deputy NSW coroner Carl Milovanovich had just recommended a ‘known person’ be charged with Mrs Dawson’s murder.
‘But behind closed doors,’ said another of Ms Dawson’s relatives, ‘he was a monster, a domineering control freak.’
Lyn Dawson’s brother Greg Simms and sister-in-law Merilyn Simms (above, after the verdict) now want her killer Chris Dawson to reveal where he disposed of his first wife’s body
The murderer’s twin brother Paul in a confrontation with a TV cameraman in Hyde Park after the verdict went against Chris Dawson and Paul stormed out of the court
In the window of opportunity Chris Dawson had to dispose of Lynette’s body – deemed to be by Justice Harrison, between the afternoon of Saturday January 9, 1982 and Monday, January 11 – he drove north.
It was a six hour drive to South west Rocks, north of Port Macquarie, where Dawson went to retrieve his teenage lover, JC, telling her Lyn had gone and she was free to come and live with him.
At the time Dawson’s twin brother Paul and his wife Marilyn and their children were on a caravan holiday at Lake Munmorah where, Paul testified, Chris did not stop in en route.
If he was to dispose of Lyn on that drive, Chris could have turned off at any number of locations for a suitable body dumping site.
It is precisely where that Lyn’s devoted family, headed by her brother Greg Simms, his wife Merilyn Simms and her sister Pat Jenkins, want an answer to?
Whether Dawson in his prison cell ever deigns to give the answer to the question remains to be seen.
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