Chris Dawson appeal rejected – MASHAHER

Dawson remarried twice after his marriage to Lynette formally ended in divorce in 1983. He married JC on January 15, 1984, at the Bayview home he had built with Lynette, and they moved to Queensland in December that year.

JC left Dawson in early 1990. She made her first statement to police about Lynette’s disappearance in May that year, triggering a renewed investigation.

Grounds of appeal

Dawson’s team had identified five grounds of appeal, including that Harrison failed to find Dawson suffered a significant disadvantage as a result of the delay in instituting the criminal proceedings, “and to take that disadvantage into account when considering the evidence”.

They also argued Harrison’s verdict was “unreasonable and unable to be supported”, either because the Crown relied on inadequate evidence to disprove that Lynette was alive at any stage on the afternoon of January 9, 1982, or it was not open on the evidence as a whole to be satisfied of Dawson’s guilt.

Harrison said in his judgment in August 2022 that “proof by the Crown that Lynette Dawson died on or about 8 January 1982 is an indispensable link in the chain of reasoning upon which the Crown relies”.

“The Crown must prove beyond reasonable doubt that Lynette Dawson’s date of death was on or about 8 January 1982, which description includes the early morning of the following day.”

The ‘call’ at Northbridge Baths

Dawson’s barrister, Senior public defender Belinda Rigg, SC, argued during the appeal hearing in May that it was a “reasonable hypothesis consistent with innocence” that Lynette was alive the following day on January 9 and made a long-distance call to Dawson at Northbridge Baths, where he had a part-time job, to say she needed “time away … to sort things out”.

Harrison said the “only evidence” Dawson received a call from his wife on January 9 came from Dawson himself, who did not give evidence at the trial. The judge found his claims were a lie.

Justice Christine Adamson, one of the trio of judges who heard the appeal, noted that “we don’t have the phone records, and there’s no way of knowing whether the phone records are going to be completely neutral, or exculpatory, or inculpatory”.

Rigg submitted during the appeal that Dawson has “lost, because of delay, the capacity for that account, if it’s right, to be independently verified by phone records”.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.