Murder: True Crime Stories - SOLVED: Lynette Dawson Pt. 1

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

In January 1982, 33-year-old Lynette Dawson vanished from Bayview, on Sydney's northern beaches, and it would take 40 years to prove she had been murdered. A nurse and the mother of two young daughter...s, she had spent years trying to hold together a marriage to Chris Dawson, a former rugby league player and PE teacher the community adored. Months earlier, Chris had moved a teenage student into the family's spare room, and Lynette's friends had started noticing bruises on her arms. On the morning of Saturday, January 9th, she left to run errands and did not come home. Her clothes stayed in the closet, her bank accounts were never touched, and only her husband claimed to know where she was. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy introduces Lynette Dawson, the marriage that was unraveling behind closed doors, and the ordinary Saturday morning she left to run errands and was never seen again. Please note, this episode contains discussion of domestic abuse and the sexual abuse of a minor and may not be suitable for all audiences.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

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Starting point is 00:00:01 Hey everyone, Carter here. I am hosting a new show called What the Fact with my co-host, Connor Tomlinson, who you might know and love from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum. Every week, we take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Connor brings the tangents and an infectious energy that will make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on Earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube. at What the Fact Pod. This is Crime House. We all know how easy it is to lose touch with someone. Life gets busy, the calls get shorter,
Starting point is 00:00:54 and before you know it, months have passed since you really talked. Lynette Dawson made sure not to fall into any of those traps. She was the one who called her mom just to check in, the sister who stayed knee-deep in everyone else's business, the friend who never left to. much time slipped by. At 33 years old, she was a nurse and a mother to two little girls she'd waited years to have. She lived near the beaches of Sydney, Australia, where she'd built a home with her high school sweetheart Chris. Her family was the center of her world,
Starting point is 00:01:34 and she was the center of theirs. Then, on an ordinary Saturday in January, 282, Lynn went out to run a few errands and seemed to vanish into thin air. For the people who knew her best, the silence that followed made no sense. It was like Lynette had stopped mid-sentence in the middle of her own life. Only her husband claimed to know where she'd gone. And it would take her family 40 years to find out. if he was telling the truth.
Starting point is 00:02:26 People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon. And we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy. And this is Murder, True Crime Stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios.
Starting point is 00:02:47 New episodes come in every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crime house community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content.
Starting point is 00:03:09 To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. And this is the first of two. episodes on the 1982 disappearance and murder of Lynette Dawson in Sydney, Australia. A quick note before we start, this episode discusses domestic and sexual abuse as well as the grooming of teenagers. Please listen with care. Today, I'll introduce you to Lynette Dawson. She was a nurse and a devoted mother, the kind of woman who held her whole family together. By the early 1980s, she thought she'd built the life she always wanted, but the walls were quietly closing in, and it all came to a head one ordinary Saturday in 1982 when Lynette went to run some errands and was never seen again.
Starting point is 00:04:04 Next time, I'll follow what happened after Lynette vanished. The missing person's case, the police barely bothered to work and the secrets about her husband that took decades to come out. family would spend the next 40 years fighting to be heard. And in the end, it wouldn't be a detective who finally cracked the case. It would be a podcast. All that and more coming out. Chris Dawson was never really alone. From the very beginning, he had his identical twin, Paul, right beside him. The two boys were born in 1948 near Sydney, Australia, and they shared a bond that went deeper than most. As little kids, they invented their own private language, just the two of them, which slowed down their regular speech. From the ages of five to seven, they went to therapy to learn how to talk to the rest of the world.
Starting point is 00:05:13 It worked. The twins grew into a couple of handsome, charming young men. At Sydney Boys High School, they became star. rugby players, which made them some of the most popular kids around. And although people tended to lump them together, anyone who spent real time with them could tell they weren't the same. Their teammates even had nicknames to keep them straight, and the nicknames said it all,
Starting point is 00:05:39 cranky Chris and passive Paul. Paul was the older twin by a matter of minutes, and he liked to remind people of it calling himself twin one. He was the calmer, more confident one, maybe because most people thought of him as the more gifted athlete. Both brothers were good, but Paul was the standout. Chris was a little harder to get along with. He wasn't openly jealous of his brother, but he had a temper on the field. If a rival player crossed him, Chris would find a way to get even.
Starting point is 00:06:17 Off the field, though, the charm usually won out. tall, blonde, and athletic. Chris never had trouble getting a date. Some people saw him as a bit of a playboy, so it surprised a few of them when he fell hard and early. In 1965, at 16 years old, Chris met a girl at a school dance. There was just something about Lynette Sims that drew him in.
Starting point is 00:06:45 On paper, the two of them were kind of an odd match. They were the same age and grew up in the same part of Sydney, but their personalities ran in opposite directions. Chris liked the spotlight and wanted to stand out at whatever he did. Lynette was quieter, gentler, the kind of person who spent most of her energy thinking about everybody else. Well, that didn't mean they had nothing in common. Lynette was athletic too. She'd spent her childhood summers at the beach with her brothers and a sister, and as a kid, was the captain of her class sports team. She was also tougher than she let on. Lynette was the third
Starting point is 00:07:25 of four children, and her youngest brother Greg would describe her as someone who always stuck to her guns. The rest of the family were peacemakers. Lynette was the one who'd never run from a fight. She got some of that from her dad, a former naval officer who became a math teacher, with him teaching at the local high school and her mom running the house, the Sims family was about as steady and close as they come. So when she started bringing Chris Dawson around in 1965, her parents were thrilled. He was a star athlete with a thousand-watt smile, and he seemed like a good guy. I'm sure. It was a little unusual that a teenage boy still shared a bedroom with his twin, but if anything, that closeness read as sweet.
Starting point is 00:08:17 Lynette's family welcomed Chris like one of their own. And despite all that, not everyone thought their high school romance would last, but Chris and Lynette proved them wrong. In 1970, at 21 years old, the two of them got married at St. Jude's Anglican Church in the Sydney suburb of Randwick. They settled on Sydney's northern beaches. A few years later, in a leafy pocket called Bayview, they built a family home from the ground up with a swimming pool out back.
Starting point is 00:08:49 Paul and his own family moved in nearby just a few hundred yards away. To the people around them, Chris and Lynette looked like they had it made. There's the kind of green, beechy neighborhood family spent years dreaming about, but Lynette wasn't the type to sit back and just enjoy the good life. She finished her nursing training and went to work caring for us. Other people, which suited her perfectly. Ask anyone who knew her, and you'd hear the same thing. She was warm and generous, and above all else, she lived for her family.
Starting point is 00:09:29 Those early years weren't all easy, though. Lynette had a practical dream. Chris and his brother had a bigger, riskier one. They wanted to go pro in rugby, in a country where the competition. The competition for those spots was brutal. But unlike a lot of guys with that same dream, the Dawson twins had a real shot. Or at least, Paul did.
Starting point is 00:09:55 After high school, the top clubs came calling for him. Chris got a lot less interest. It's hard to shine when you look exactly like the guy, everyone agrees, is the better player, and Chris's cranky reputation didn't help. Some coaches wouldn't touch either twin. worried that two brothers this close would always put each other ahead of the team. And, well, they had a point.
Starting point is 00:10:21 Sure enough, Paul turned down every single offer that came his way. He refused to play without his brother. Chris and Paul were a package deal. Take it or leave it. Eventually, one club blinked. In 1972, the Newtown Jets out of Sydney's inner city took a chance and signed both twins. For a while, Chris and Paul were living the dream, but they didn't just want to play rugby. They wanted to be famous. In 1975, the twins, now in their mid-20s, were featured on a
Starting point is 00:11:03 weekly documentary series on Australian national TV called Checkerboard. The episode dug into their unusually tight bond and their plans to break into modeling and film. At one point, point, the cameras turned to Lynette and an interviewer asked her what it was like to, quote, share her husband with his twin. Lynette laughed it off, saying she admired how close the brothers were. On screen, she was the picture of the supportive wife. But while Chris was chasing everything he wanted, Lynette was struggling with something harder and mostly keeping it to herself. By this point in the marriage, she and Chris had been trying for years to have a baby. Lynette had always pictured a big family. So when doctors told her she might not be able to have children at all, it devastated her.
Starting point is 00:11:59 Then around 1976 or so, a doctor suggested a surgery that could improve her odds. It carried real risk and it was a hard call. But Lynette decided it was worth it. And not long after, She got the news she'd been praying for. She was pregnant. In July of 1977, Chris and Lynette's first daughter, Chanel, was born. For a woman who'd been told she might never carry a child, it was everything. Lynette cut back to part-time nursing so she could be home with her baby, and by every account, she absolutely loved it.
Starting point is 00:12:40 Motherhood was the thing she'd been waiting for her whole life. She threw herself into it. The people around her describe a patient, hands-on mom who put her daughter at the center of everything. That same year, everything else in Chris's world shifted to. He and Paul both retired from the Newtown Jets, which meant their professional careers were over after five seasons. Rugby's a brutal sport and plenty of players are finished by their early 30s, still walking away, when they did stung. So Chris did what former athletes do? He looked for the next thing. He and Paul joined a semi-professional league that took way less time and energy while they hunted for steady work.
Starting point is 00:13:28 And in a couple of years, that search would lead both brothers into a high school classroom. For Chris, it was a fresh start and a brand new audience. But the man standing at the front of that room wasn't the golden boy everyone remembered. And the people around him were about to find that out the hard way. One summer evening when she was 20 years old, something terrible happened to Vienna Luke. I can't figure it out, but I do know that it was a violation.
Starting point is 00:14:11 Then people started asking questions. What a creep. Who else knows about this? From CBC's personally, this is Agent Leila. The story of how a victim went undercover. So bring it on, let's go. Let's get a confession. Available now on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. By 1977, 28-year-old Chris Dawson's rugby career was over, and he and Lynette had their first daughter at home.
Starting point is 00:14:44 On the surface, he took it in stride, but privately Chris was rattled. His best days felt behind him. and slowly he started taking out his anger on the person closest to him. At first, it was her weight. Chris needleed Lynette about it in front of other people and seemed to enjoy making her feel small. Sometimes Paul chimed in too, giving his sister-in-law dieting tips. It got to Lynette. She told friends she'd changed the way she dressed because Chris or Paul had told her
Starting point is 00:15:21 she couldn't pull off certain clothes. Little by little, the criticism chipped away at her, and the digs were only part of it. With Lynette now working part-time to raise Chanel and Chris struggling to find full-time work, money was tighter than ever. But Chris wouldn't change how he lived. So Lynette was the one pinching pennies.
Starting point is 00:15:47 Now, every so often, the twins picked up an endorsement deal or a modeling gig off the back of their minor celebrity, that money went into a separate account the brothers called Twinnies and their wives couldn't touch it. Lynette never knew exactly what it paid for. She only knew it wasn't groceries. To his credit, Chris hustled. He and Paul weren't too proud to work part-time
Starting point is 00:16:18 as garbage collectors, tennis coaches, and aerobics instructors while they looked for something permanent. It took until in 1979, but both brothers finally landed full-time jobs as high school physical education teachers at separate schools on the northern beaches. Chris ended up at a school called Chromer High. For a while, things in the Dawson House probably steadied. Chris had a real paycheck again, and teaching handed him the way. one thing he'd been missing since rugby, an audience. Only now, the crowd hanging on his every
Starting point is 00:16:57 word, was a roomful of teenagers, and Chris was the adults in the room. At first, Chris seemed like the teacher every kid wished they had, the good-looking former athlete who treated students like friends. He'd listen to them, talk about their problems at home, join in on the gossip, and act like the teacher you could tell anything to. He turned up at their parties where there was drinking and acted like he was just part of the crowd. He scribbled notes in their yearbooks asking kids to get in touch outside of school.
Starting point is 00:17:38 To a lot of them, it felt like attention from the coolest adult they knew. But some of them sensed something was off and kept their distance. because underneath the charm, Chris was crossing lines a teacher is never supposed to cross. Years later, former students and police investigations would paint a much darker picture of his time at Cromer High. One woman who was 13 when she was in his class said Chris was grooming the entire class. He wanted to be our friend, not our teacher.
Starting point is 00:18:19 She said he'd take female students out of school for swimming lessons at the beach and get some of the girls to wrestle with him or climb on his shoulders in their swimsuits. And according to those accounts, it went further. Chris and his brother were both later accused of luring teenage students away from school events for swimming trips that ended with the men trying to kiss them. More than one of those students would carry what they'd seen for decades before going public about it, but out of all of them, there was one girl Chris fixated on. To protect her privacy, we're going to call her Diana. Chris first noticed Diana in 1979 when he was 30 and she was 15. the next year he arranged the class schedule so that she'd end up in his PE class. Almost right away, he made his interest obvious.
Starting point is 00:19:24 He called on her every time she raised her hand. He went out of his way to talk to her, and the attention landed because Diana was going through something awful at home. Her stepfather was abusive toward her mother, and walking through her own front door, feel like stepping into a nightmare. So when this charming teacher started paying attention and listening, it felt like a lifeline. To a kid who felt alone, Chris seemed like the one adult in the world who was on her side. And at first, that's all it was. Diana thought Chris was a kind adult who cared.
Starting point is 00:20:07 For a while, he'd sit with her after class and let her vent about her family and he'd give gentle, supportive advice. He opened up to her, too. Around 1979, Lynette gave birth to the couple's second daughter. And right around then, Chris reportedly started making cruel comments about his wife to Diana and some of the other teenage girls. Then, over the next year or so, the relationship crept past every line. Chris began arranging to see Diana outside of school by hiring her to babysit. Chanel was around three and the new baby was about a year old. Before long, Diana was coming by every week, even on nights when Chris and Lynette
Starting point is 00:20:58 weren't going anywhere. Diana became a fixture in the house. She was at the dinner table, on the couch, folded into the family's routines like she belonged there. to his wife, Chris framed the whole thing as charity. Lynette knew Diana had a rough home life and felt for her, so she believed her husband when he said that giving the girl a safe place to land, kept her off the streets and made her feel like part of the family.
Starting point is 00:21:32 But Diana was becoming something else in Chris's life. He took her to teenage parties and drank with her. he offered to give her driving lessons and took her on long drives along the coast. According to Diana, on one of those drives in 1980, Chris pulled over by the water and told her he had feelings for her that he loved her. And then he kissed her. Not long after, while she was still a teenager and his student, Chris turned that relationship sexual. At the time, nobody outside that car knew a thing. But Lynette had felt her marriage slipping for a long time.
Starting point is 00:22:19 And by the end of 1980, she was holding on by her fingernails. Her husband wouldn't treat her with respect. And he was spending more and more time away from home, right when she needed him most. Something had to give. over the next 18 months, it would. And the private mess inside the Dawson's marriage was about to spill out where everyone could see it. Diana was still around the house all the time
Starting point is 00:22:53 and still meeting Chris outside of school. And Chris wasn't the only one. His brother Paul was reportedly grooming a 16-year-old of his own around this time. someone will call Betty. There'd always been a competition between the twins. Paul had married first, had kids first. Chris felt like he was forever chasing his brother. And it seems like rivalry reached into the ugliest corners of their lives.
Starting point is 00:23:26 Then in October of 1981, Chris made his most brazen move yet. He told Lynette that Diana, now 17, was going to move. move into their spare bedroom. Things had boiled over at Diana's house. She told police that her stepfather had hit her mother in front of her. She tried to step in and was beaten too. She couldn't go home. And she didn't want to move away to live with her biological father because that would mean leaving Chris. So Chris offered up the family's spare room, telling Lynette it was so they wouldn't disrupt the girl's schooling. Out of pure compassion, Lynette said yes.
Starting point is 00:24:12 She thought she was helping a girl in trouble. She had no idea what she was really being set up for. In a world where swords were sharp. And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis. And me, Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.
Starting point is 00:24:46 So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. By the end of 1981, with Diana living in the spare room, the cracks in the Dawson marriage were more obvious than ever, and Lynette, who'd spent years keeping her troubles to herself, was starting to admit that something was badly wrong. With Diana under their roof, people started to talk. Friends noticed grab marks in the odd bruise on Lynette's arms,
Starting point is 00:25:31 and according to witnesses who came forward years later, some of them saw Chris being aggressive with his wife around this time or heard about it from Lynette herself. One afternoon, a neighbor overheard the couple arguing in the backyard. Through a gap in the fence, she watched Chris get right in Lynette's face while Lynette held her youngest daughter. The neighbor couldn't make out the words, but she could tell it was vicious. A couple of hours later, that same neighbor came over for tea, and Lynette finally opened up. She said she wanted to try marriage counseling and that she was.
Starting point is 00:26:13 was having a hard time living under the same roof as Diana. At that point, the neighbor decided to be blunt. Everyone could tell that Chris was way too close to Diana, in a way a grown man has no business being with his kid's teenage babysitter. So the neighbor flat out told Lynette that Chris was sleeping with Diana. She said everyone in the neighborhood knew that Diana swam topless in the Dawson's backyard pool, even around Chris and the kids. Lynette listened, and then she let something slip. She admitted that once she'd come home early from work and caught Chris and Diana in a compromising position.
Starting point is 00:27:05 But she still wouldn't say out loud that they were sleeping together. Maybe it was Chris's gift for talking his way out of anything. Maybe it was how badly Lynette wanted to believe her marriage could still be saved. Either way, she couldn't face the whole truth, at least not in front of her neighbor. That gave Chris room to keep taking advantage of everyone around him. Privately, he'd started pressuring Diana, still 17, to marry him. She kept saying no. but Chris figured it was only a matter of time before he wore her down.
Starting point is 00:27:48 He even put a $500 deposit on a nearby apartment in case Lynette threw him out. This whole time, Lynette had no idea that her husband was just biding his time, waiting for their marriage to collapse. But by December of 1981, even Lynette had started to face reality. that month she told Diana to move out. Now, it's not clear exactly what pushed her to it, but something in Lynette said enough was enough. Chris probably tried to fight her on it, but Lynette was firm.
Starting point is 00:28:25 Still, he didn't want Diana to go far, so he arranged for her to move in with Paul for the time being. Then a few days before Christmas in 1981, he suddenly told Diana that they were starting a new life together. He packed up his car and drove her north, hundreds of miles up the coast, toward the state of Queensland. They almost made it. But somewhere along the way, Diana got cold feet, scared of what people would think and still unsure she even wanted to marry Chris, she asked him to turn around. He did, and they were back with the family in time for the holidays.
Starting point is 00:29:09 Chris played the whole thing off like nothing had happened, slipping back into the role of husband and father as if he'd never packed the car at all. After the failed trip north, Chris seems to have changed tactics. Diana still wouldn't marry him, well mostly out of guilt over Lynette, who'd been like a second mother to her. And Chris wasn't about to file for divorce himself, not without her. house and his money on the line. That meant he needed another way to get Lynette out of the picture. In the meantime, he kept her hopeful so she wouldn't be the one to file for divorce first. In early January, 1982, just a couple of weeks after trying to skip town with Diana, Chris agreed to go to marriage counseling. On Friday, January 8th, the couple went.
Starting point is 00:30:09 went to their first session. Lynette told two very different versions about how it went. To one of her coworkers, she said it couldn't have gone worse. She said Chris had grabbed her by the throat in the elevator on the way up and told her he was only going to try this once. And if it didn't work, he'd get rid of her. But that's hard to square with what Lynette told almost everyone else. She told several friends the session had been productive, that she still
Starting point is 00:30:45 thought the marriage could be saved. One friend, Sue Strath, saw the couple walking away hand in hand afterward and remembered Lynette seeming hopeful, even upbeat about the future. That evening, Lynette called her mother, Helena. She sounded happy. She said she and Chris had made real progress in counseling and that everything was going to be fine. She even mentioned that Chris had poured her a nice glass of wine to celebrate. That detail mattered because Lynette wasn't much of a drinker. Back when Diana was living with them, Chris used to push cocktails on his wife before bed. It got her to sleep earlier, which left him more time alone with Diana. But on the night of January 8, 1982, Diana was staying at Paul's place, so if Chris was pouring his wife drinks that night, he may have had a very different reason.
Starting point is 00:31:56 Helena didn't know any of that, but before she and Lynette hung up, the two of them made a plan. The next day, Lynette would meet her mother out at a public pool. The next morning, Saturday, January 9th, 1982, started like any other. According to Chris, he dropped Lynette at a bus stop and Mona Vale that morning so she could catch a bus into the city and go shopping. The plan was for everyone to meet up in the afternoon at the North Bridge Baths, the public pool where Chris worked weekends as a lifeguard. So that afternoon, the family gathered right on.
Starting point is 00:32:40 on schedule. Chris turned up with the couple's two little girls. Helena came to see her daughter, just like they'd arranged the night before. Lynette still wasn't there. At first, no one read too much into it. This was long before her cell phones and people ran late. They figured she'd show up eventually. But she didn't. The afternoon dragged on, and there was still no sign of her. then Chris got called over to the pool's phone. When he came back, he said it had been Lynette. She told him she needed some time away from the marriage and that she was leaving town for a few days.
Starting point is 00:33:25 She apparently didn't ask to talk to her daughters, two and four years old, and she didn't ask for her mother, who was standing right there. In the weeks that followed, Chris told more the same story. He said Lynette kept calling him and only him to say she needed space. He said that in the last of those calls, she told him she didn't know if she'd ever come back. But he wasn't acting like a man who expected his wife back. Although that Christmas, Lynette had arranged for an artist to draw portraits of Chanel and her little sister. When the artist came to deliver them at the end of January, Chris turned her away at the door,
Starting point is 00:34:12 telling her that his wife no longer live there and didn't want them. And he had an explanation ready for everyone else. He told people Lynette had walked out after a fight over money and her spending. And he told his own daughters that their mother had run off. to join some kind of religious cult. But there was one problem with that timeline. Chris didn't report his wife missing to the police for another six weeks. He didn't walk into the Mona Vail police station until February 18, 1982. At first, a lot of Lynette's family didn't know what to think.
Starting point is 00:35:00 They were in shock, reaching for any explanation, that didn't end in the worst thing imaginable. And Chris was one of them. He'd been part of the family for more than a decade, and Lynette's own mother, Helena, adored him. For a while, some of them let themselves believe his story, because the alternative was unbearable. But the people who knew Lynette best couldn't make his story fit the woman they knew.
Starting point is 00:35:34 This was a woman whose whole world was her two daughters. The idea that she'd vanish without a goodbye, without a single call to her mother, her siblings, or her kids made no sense. But some people had seen the signs that something may have been very wrong in the weeks leading up to her disappearance. One woman, Rosalind McLaughlin, played tennis with Lynette and a group of friends in Bayview the week before Christmas.
Starting point is 00:36:08 She said Lynette seemed upset and was begging Rosalind to come back to the house with her. Rosalind also said Lynette had a large grapefruit-sized bruise on her thigh and bruises on her arms. Her coworkers felt it too. Lynette had stopped showing up for her nursing show. which was completely unlike her. And one colleague, a nurse named Annette Leary, remembered seeing bruises on Lynette's neck. Lynette Dawson was 33 years old.
Starting point is 00:36:49 She had two little girls who needed her and a family who adored her. And then she was gone. But her clothes were still hanging in the closet. her jewelry, her makeup, the small, ordinary things a person takes when they mean to leave were all still there. She never even touched her bank accounts again. This was not a woman who had packed a bag and chosen to go. To the people closest to her, only one explanation made any since, as one of Lynette's friends would later put it, she didn't walk away from her girls.
Starting point is 00:37:34 She was taken from them. Now, they just had to get someone with a badge to believe it. They had no idea it would turn into the fight of their lives or the dark secrets they would uncover along the way. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for part two on the murder of Lynette Dawson and all the people it affected.
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Starting point is 00:39:25 Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pritzofsky, Lori Marannelli, Sarah Camp, Alex Burns, Mara de la Rosa, Claire Swartzlander, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Thanks for listening, everyone. Before you go, I am hosting a new show with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum. It's called What the Fact. Every week we take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What The Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What The Fact Pod.
Starting point is 00:40:11 Thank you.

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