The state’s top criminal appeal court has rejected Chris Dawson’s bid to overturn his conviction for the cold-blooded murder of his wife Lynette, whose disappearance in 1982 became one of Sydney’s most enduring mysteries.
Dawson was convicted in 2022 of murdering his then-wife Lynette Joy Simms, then 33, who vanished from the couple’s Bayview home in January 1982. Her body has never been found.
Justice Ian Harrison found Dawson, a former teacher and rugby league player, killed Lynette “for the selfish and cynical purpose of eliminating the inconvenient obstruction she presented” to a new life with JC, his former student and babysitter to the couple’s two young children. JC moved into the couple’s home within days of Lynette’s disappearance.
Harrison sentenced Dawson to a maximum of 24 years in prison with a non-parole period of 18 years.
Dawson, now 75, appealed against that conviction in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal. In a decision on Thursday, the court – Court of Appeal president Julie Ward and Justices Anthony Payne and Christine Adamson – dismissed his appeal unanimously.
Adamson said Dawson had “shown himself to be entirely without credibility, both by reference to direct lies and half-truths, of which there is a litany in the evidence and his versions”.
