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Despite a judge making “problematic” remarks in finding Chris Dawson guilty of murdering his wife four decades ago, his conviction and sentence should remain unchanged, a court was told.
The 75-year-old is appealing a New South Wales Supreme Court ruling in August 2022 that he killed his wife Lynette Dawson and disposed of her body in January 1982 because she was an obstacle to a relationship with his nanny teenage girl.
Today, Attorney General Brett Hatfield of SC admitted that the judge’s reasoning had its problems, particularly when he used Dawson’s many lies to show a consciousness of guilt.
“We cannot escape the fact that the language (of the sentence) is problematic,” he told the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal.
However, he said a finding of guilt must still follow from a finding that Dawson lied about receiving a phone call from his wife on January 9, 1982.
The former teacher claims Dawson told him on that call and in subsequent phone calls that she wanted time alone to think things over.
At the time, Dawson had been stalking his teenage student, who can legally only be named JC, sending her love letters and sleeping with her at his family home on Sydney’s northern beaches.
Judge Ian Harrison found Dawson was dead by January 9 and that her husband had lied about the call.
“Once you’ve established beyond a reasonable doubt that he’s lying about the call that day … there was only one outcome that could have followed,” Hatfield told the three-judge panel on Wednesday.
Dawson’s version of what happened — that his wife completely abandoned her home, children, family and friends because of his infidelity — was patently implausible, the prosecutor said.
The former teacher’s various claims about his wife’s whereabouts, including in the Blue Mountains commune and in New Zealand, are meant to be “vague, unverifiable and unlikely to attract suspicion in his direction,” Hatfield said.
Claims that other people saw Dawson alive after Jan. 9 were also inherently problematic and weak, he added.
“Are you saying that the strength of the Crown case, regardless of what the judge did, was so great that it reduced the defense argument to a fantastic hypothesis?” Justice Christine Adamson asked.
“Yes, we say that,” replied Hatfield.
On Monday and yesterday, Dawson’s barrister Belinda Rigg SC argued the court could not find he killed his wife beyond reasonable doubt.
She also defended the possibility that Dawson, 33, had left home and family to start a new life after her husband’s infidelity.
Judge Harrison is accused of making several key mistakes when sentencing Dawson, including ignoring a significant flaw he had in his defense of a 40-year-old murder case.
If the former teacher is successful in his appeal, he could be acquitted or the case sent back for a new trial.
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