Chris Dawson is spending the rest of his life in jail for the murder of his wife and preying on a former student, but for four decades, he was a free man.
Dawson, now 77, was found guilty of killing his wife Lynette so he could pursue a relationship with a schoolgirl, known legally as “JC”.
Now, a new book detailing the story of his two victims will shed fresh light on one of the country’s most notorious cases and the years-long fight to bring him to justice.
Its author, Rebecca Hazel, was working as a lawyer at a women’s refuge in Sydney when she discovered her colleague and friend was in fact the girl at the centre of the tangled relationship.
Dawson and JC married and had a child but separated in 1990.
Lynette had disappeared in 1982, but it would not be until 2022 that her husband was found guilty of her murder.
“I didn’t go looking for this story, it kind of just came to me and I thought it was important I had to tell it,” Hazel told NBN News.
“When I first heard about the story it had been 25 years since Lynette disappeared, and I could see the damage, the trauma it had caused, and so I wanted to honour those women.”
For ten years, Hazel researched and investigated JC’s and Lynette’s story – work that culminated in a new book, The Schoolgirl, Her Teacher and His Wife.
“It gives that backstory – it tells us who they are, how this happened to them, what it’s done – I think it gives them dignity in life.
“It’s a story about domestic violence. It’s a story about a murder.”
Hazel worked closely with Lynette’s sister Pat and her brother Greg in Newcastle at a critical time in the investigation.
“We were at the stage where we were thinking – we’ve been going at this for so long, nothing’s come to fruition,” Greg Simms, Lynette’s brother, said.
“Okay, Rebecca comes in, we think, ‘Ok, we’ll give it one more chance’ and we went from there.”
“That was her aim, we felt,” she said.
In the four decades since Lynette’s disappearance, there were three separate police investigations and two coronial inquests along with Hedley Thomas’s now famous podcast – The Teacher’s Pet – which played a major part in Dawson ultimately being charged in 2018.
In August last year Dawson, was found guilty of Lynette’s murder and later jailed for 24 years.
But his latest downfall came just weeks ago when he received a three-year prison term for carnal knowledge over his relationship with the schoolgirl.
“She truly is a victim in our eyes in this case,” Merilyn Simms said of JC.
“I’m sure she needs to get on with her life and try and leave it behind if she can. Never forget it – it’s always there, but we’re all getting older, and we all need to look forward rather than looking back.”
The Schoolgirl, Her Teacher and His Wife is out now.
