Murder: True Crime Stories - SOLVED: Lynette Dawson Pt. 2

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the four-decade fight to prove that Lynette Dawson had been murdered. The day after Lynette vanished, Chris Dawson moved the student he had been grooming back into the family home, where she wore Lynette's clothes and raised her daughters. Police took his word that his wife had walked out, waited six weeks for a missing persons report, and let the file go quiet. Two inquests found Lynette had most likely been murdered, and both times prosecutors declined to charge anyone. What finally moved the case was not a detective but a journalist: Hedley Thomas's podcast The Teacher's Pet made Lynette impossible to ignore. Police arrested her husband in 2018, and because the case had become so widely known by then, he was tried by a single judge rather than a jury. Forty years after Lynette left home to run errands, a Sydney courtroom finally answered the question her family had been asking since 1982. Her body has still never been found. 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

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. For most of their lives, Chris and Paul Dawson looked golden.

Identical twins, rugby stars turned school teachers, handsome and charming, and once famous enough to land on national television. But behind that shiny veneer something was very wrong. And no one paid a higher price than Chris's wife, a young mother named Lynette. In January of 1982, Lynette vanished near the family's home in Sydney, Australia.

Chris told everyone his wife had simply run off. But the next day, he moved in the teenage girl he'd been grooming. Slowly, but surely, she began to replace Lynette. She wore her clothes and looked after her two little girls. Eventually, they even... started calling her mom. Despite all the red flags, the police believed Chris when he said Lynette had left on purpose. At first, even her own family believed it. But eventually they couldn't ignore the signs. They became certain that something awful had happened to Lynette, but proving it seemed

almost impossible. It took 40 years, one very brave victim and a determined journalist to bring the truth to light. And when the dam finally broke, it became clear that the reality of what happened was darker than anyone had imagined. 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. New episodes come 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.

rate review and follow the show and for early add free access to every episode subscribe to crimehouse plus you get part one and part two at the same time plus exclusive bonus content to join go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the murder true crime story show page on Apple Podcasts this is the second 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. Last time, I introduced you to Lynette, a devoted mother of two whose picture-perfect life had been closing in on her for years. It turned out

her husband Chris had been grooming his teenage students, including a 16-year-old, we're calling Diana. By early 1982, Lynette was fighting to hold her marriage together. Then, just when it seemed like she was making progress, she vanished. Today, I'll take you through the investigation that went nowhere for decades.

I'll cover the false starts, the dead ends, and the podcast that dragged the case back into the light. It took four decades for Lynette's family to find justice. And even now, they're not done fighting. All that and more coming up. On January 9th, 1982, 33-year-old Lynette Dawson vanished from Sydney, Australia.

That afternoon, her family gathered at a public pool called the North Bridge Baths, where her husband Chris worked weekends as a lifeguard. Chris was there with a couple's two little girls. Lynette's mother, Helena, was there too. She and Lynette had talked on the phone the night before and made plans to meet us, up at the pool, but Lynette never showed up. Around three o'clock, Chris was called over to the pool's phone. When he came back, he said it had been Lynette. She told him she needed time away from the marriage and was leaving town for a few days. She hadn't asked to speak to her daughters, who were two

and four years old, and she hadn't asked for her mother who was standing right there. For Lynette's family, that explanation didn't exactly hold up. Just the day before, on January 8th, she and Chris had gone to their first marriage counseling session. When Helena spoke to Lynette that night, she sounded hopeful, like she still thought the marriage could be saved. Now this? But Helena couldn't entirely blame her daughter for wanting to run. Everyone in town knew that Chris a high school PE teacher had gotten too close to one of his students. The 16-year-old were calling Diana. By that point, Chris had been grooming Diana for more than a year.

It had started with attention and long talks, then a kiss, then sex, while she was still a teenager and his student. When Diana's home life fell apart, Chris had even moved her into the family, spare room, he told Lynette he didn't want her to end up on the streets. At first, Lynette believed his intentions were genuine, but eventually even she saw the signs that this was more than a teacher looking out for his student. Lynette had once caught Diana sitting on Chris's lap. Neighbors had seen the teenagers swimming topless in the family's backyard pool. One of them had told Lynette flat out that her husband was sleeping with a babysitter.

In December of 1981, Lynette told Diana to move out, and the girl had gone to stay with Chris's identical twin brother, Paul. It seems like after that, Lynette thought the marriage could be repaired, and in public, she kept making excuses for Chris. Maybe she wanted to believe it was all of big misunderstanding. and on that afternoon in January, Helena wanted to believe it too. She still thought her son-in-law was a good man at heart. So when he said Lynette had called and asked for space, Helena took him at his word.

She spent the rest of the day with her granddaughters worried sick. Chris said that he spent the evening calling Lynette's friends trying to work out where she'd gone. He'd later insist he was sure she'd be back in a few days. But that's our to square with what he did next. Because on January 10th, less than a day after his wife supposedly walked out, Chris moved Diana back into the house. To Diana, Chris said Lynette was gone for good. To everyone else, he told her.

told a different story. Over and over, he insisted his wife just needed a little time and that she kept promising to come home. On January 15th, six days after she disappeared, Chris called Helena to say he'd spoken to Lynette again. This time, he said she'd traveled north with friends and needed longer to think. He told Helena he'd beg Lynette to check in with her mother and that she'd promised she would. She never did. Meanwhile, Diana was settling into Lynette's house and Lynette's life. Still practically a kid herself, she was suddenly in charge of raising two little girls. She did her best because she believed Lynette had abandoned them. Four weeks, Lynette's family waited to hear something, anything. Chris started him.

hinting to people that maybe she'd run off to join a religious cult. And by the middle of February, Helena hadn't heard her daughter's voice in over a month and she couldn't stand it. She told Chris to go to the police. So on the morning of February 18th, more than six weeks after Lynette vanished, Chris finally filed a missing person's report. He gave the officers the same story he'd given everyone else. he admitted the marriage had been rocky but said nothing about Diana. Instead, he pointed them to a couple of purchases on Lynette's bank card, some clothes on January 12th, and a pair of jeans on the 27th,

as proof that she was alive and spending money somewhere. The police opened a file and talked to Lynette's family, but they never got far. mostly it seems they just believed Chris. There's no record of them canvassing the neighbors or even speaking to Diana in those early months. Maybe part of it was who Chris was. He was a former professional rugby player, a local celebrity.

The kind of familiar, charming face, a small community wants to believe. To the officers who took a statement, the famous PE teacher didn't look like a killer. He looked like a bewildered husband. A month later, on March 27th, Chris took out a newspaper notice addressed to his missing wife. It read, quote, Lynn, I love you, we all miss you, please ring, we want you home. The gesture didn't lead anywhere.

By that August, Lynette had been gone half a year. And police did a routine follow-up. They took fresh statements from Chris and Helena and asked for a full profile of Lynette, her friends, her co-workers, her habits. When it was done, a senior officer decided there was nothing to suggest foul play. By then, it was common knowledge that Chris was living with the teenage girl

who was at the center of his marital issues. but the officer didn't seem to factor that into his conclusions. And it doesn't seem like anyone in law enforcement pressed the obvious question. If Lynette had really run off, why had she left behind her children, her clothes, and every last dollar in her own bank account? Still, that was more or less the end of the first investigation. The case stayed technically open, but police weren't any closer to finding out what happened to Lynette. For her family, the heartbreak just kept coming.

That October, Chris drove over to Helena's house with his car full of green garbage bags. Inside were Lynette's belongings. Her clothes and other items bagged up like she was never coming back. Helena hauled the bags inside and left them untouched for years. She just couldn't bring herself to open them. By July of 1983, Chris was telling friends he'd accepted that Lynette was gone. He divorced her and word got back to Helena that he was planning to marry Diana. Helena passed that along to the police who filed it.

it away and did nothing with it. It's hard now to understand how people viewed Chris back then. Plenty of Lynette's friends were disgusted by his relationship with a teenager, but a lot of them sought as a private scandal, something shameful, not something criminal for the police to chase. And so the case sat in limbo. By 1984, Lynette had been missing for two years. As far as anyone could tell, she'd never taken a job, opened a bank account, or remarried under her own name.

Every so often a tipster would call to say they'd spotted her somewhere in Australia, but none of it ever checked out. The only evidence that Lynette was alive at all came out of Chris Dawson's mouth. and the longer she stayed gone, the thinner his excuses sounded. That year, Chris married Diana. He was 35, she was barely out of her teens. Not long after the wedding, he sold the house, packed up the car, and moved Diana, and Lynette's two daughters, more than 500 miles north to the Gold Coast. Away from the neighbors and whispers, Chris finally had.

what he wanted. But for Diana, that new life turned into something closer to a cage. According to a friend of hers named Karen Cook, Diana took to calling their house the compound. Chris controlled all the finances, doling out a small weekly allowance she had to stretch to cover everything. He controlled who she saw and when. Though she'd finished school, she was never, allowed to build a life of her own and Lynette's daughters grew up calling Diana their mother. One of his strangest demands had to do with how she looked. Several people said Chris insisted Diana keep dressing like a schoolgirl even as she got older and the same kinds of clothes as his own growing daughters. It was like he didn't want her to let her age out of his control.

Years later, Diana would say that once Lynette was gone, he treated her like a slave. Back in Sydney, it felt like the world had moved on from Lynette. But one of her closest friends, a woman named Sue Strath, refused to. In 1985, Sue did what no one else had. She wrote to the state ombudsman, the official who investigated, complaints about government agencies and asked them to look into why the police had done so little for Lynette. She didn't dance around it either. She put it on the record that Chris had been grooming a teenage student in the year before his wife disappeared. The Ombudsman's office took the

complaint seriously enough to ask senior police about the case, but there's no sign anyone chased down what Sue said about Diana. After one more interview with her, they concluded that every avenue had been exhausted that, quote, further inquiries proved fruitless. Because Lynette's parents had never formally accused Chris of anything, the police decided there was no reason to suspect him. And so, once again, the case went quiet. But it wouldn't stay quiet forever because the one person,

who knew Chris Dawson better than anyone was about to reach her own breaking point. Phoenix has bizarre crime. The canals of Phoenix, Arizona are hunted by a serial killer. People are like, well, are we safe? These are sexual saves. Two grisly homicides. I know I didn't tell anyone.

But solving these murders is just the beginning. That can't be his first rodeo. This is season six of American nightmares the Canal murders. Out now, wherever you get your podcasts. By the late 1980s, Diane had been living with Chris on the Gold Coast for years, still the one person who never doubted his story. She'd built her whole adult life around him, but under his control, cut off from family and friends, her faith in him slowly began to crack. The turning point came on February 1st, 1990, and that was the day Diana, now 26, filed for divorce from Chris, who was 41.

By then, she'd spent six years mostly cut off from the world. Her days consisted of cooking and cleaning and taking care of Chris and Lynette's two daughters. Eventually, Diana had a daughter of her own. At that point, she joined a group for new moms, and they had her. helped her see just how sheltered her life really was. But when she started to push back against Chris, he turned violent. One time after she told him she dressed how she liked, he pinned her against a wall and choked her. That was the moment something broke loose, and once Diana decided to leave, her thoughts kept circling back to Lynette.

For years, she'd believe Chris's version of events. But now that she'd felt what he was capable of, she started to seriously doubt it. After the divorce, Diana reached out to Lynette's family. Most of them wanted nothing to do with her, but a couple of Lynette's siblings agreed to sit down and listen. And Diana didn't have proof. She didn't have some secret Chris had confessed.

What she had was a firsthand account of what it was like to live with him, and it was enough. By the end of that conversation, Lynette's siblings were certain of something they'd been afraid to say out loud for years. Their sister wasn't hiding in a cult. She wasn't going to walk back through the door one day. They thought she was dead, and the man responsible was still. still walking free. Lynette's family convinced Diana to take what she knew to the police. Whatever she told them, it was enough to reopen the case.

Over the next year, detectives spent hundreds of hours re-interviewing Lynette's family and friends about the weeks before she vanished. For the first time, they started filling in the gaps the original investigation had left wide open. They even brought in experts to search the yard at Chris and Lynette's old house. They ran ground penetrating radar over the soft ground near the pool. In case Chris had buried a body there, they didn't find one, but it was a step in the right direction. By 1991, police had a lot more than they'd started with. Chris's obsession with Diana gave him a motive. Lynette's friends made it clear she would never have walked out on her girls.

Something was badly wrong with his story. But everything they had was circumstantial. To charge Chris, they still needed a body, a weapon, or a confession. So in January of 1991, they hauled him back in and pressed him. This time about Diana and about those convenient phone calls from Lynette. Chris didn't budge. He repeated the same story that his wife had left him. He reminded them about the purchases on her bank card,

and he pointed out that people had reported seeing Lynette around Australia for years. Without hard evidence, detectives felt they couldn't make an arrest stick, so once again, the case stalled. And over the years, Chris's story only got strong. stranger. First, his wife had needed space. Then she joined a religious cult. Much later, he would tell one of his daughters that he thought he'd seen her mother in the audience of a 2006 episode of the TV show Antiques Road Show, something the family dismissed out of hand. But this time, Lynette's loved ones didn't let the case die. And in 1998, they finally

got a break, thanks again to Sue Strath. For years, Sue had kept Lynette's name alive, leaning on a childhood friend who happened to be married to a police detective. Every time they met, she reminded him. When that detective was promoted in 1998, he was finally in a position to reopen the case, and he handed it to one of his sharpest investigators, a man named Damien Loon. For Lynette's family, Loon was the answer to a decade of prayers. Loon would live with a case for years, rereading statements, driving out to interviews, keeping Lynette's file open long past the point

most detectives would have let it close. And when he read the file, he decided the circumstantial case against Chris was overwhelming and set out to find the one piece of hard evidence that could finally justify an arrest. Loon re-interviewed everyone, including Lynette's parents and siblings, her co-workers, Chris's friends, and Diana. Some of the most alarming statements came from Chris and Paul's former students who described them as serial groomers who preyed on teenage girls. The most

disturbing accusations came from one of Paul's former students, a woman we're calling Betty. She alleged that both brothers had sexually abused her when she was a teenager. The details are disturbing, and I'm not going to lay them all out here. What matters is that her account, along with the others, showed investigators just how far the twins were willing to go and how casually they treated the girls in their care. Paul has always denied everything, and he has never been charged. But the sheer number of former students who came forward describing the same patterns across years told investigators they were looking at something far bigger than one man and one marriage.

By 1999, Loon was ready to escalate. He tapped both brothers' phones, hoping to catch them talking about Lynette, and he ordered another radar survey of Chris's old. backyard. The wiretaps caught the twins saying plenty of strange things, but never anything about Lynette. But by then they knew Loon was circling and may have assumed someone was listening. It wasn't all for nothing, though, because this time around, the dig did turn something up. In the dirt near the old swimming pool, Loon's team found two items, a popper juice carton with a 1981 expiration date and an old pink cardigan. The cardigan got everyone's attention because it looked

like it had been slashed apart by something sharp. Loon sent it off for extensive testing, but nothing tied it to Lynette. It was one more dead end. Three years in, the momentum was fading. Loon's file kept getting thicker, but the hard proof still wasn't there. So he tried something different. In 2001, he helped push for a coronial inquest, a public hearing meant to examine the circumstances of a death. An inquest isn't a trial. It can't punish anyone.

It can only investigate and recommend whether charges should be pursued. For Lynette's family, it was a long shot, but it was also the first time the case would be pulled apart in the open by lawyers whose whole job was to ask the questions police never had. The first inquest was held that same year in 2001. At the hearing, lawyers, not police, questioned the witnesses, and Lynette's family hoped a fresh set of eyes might see what the prosecutors couldn't. by the end, the deputy state coroner reached a stunning conclusion. She found that Lynette Dawson had most likely been murdered by someone she knew. For the first time, someone official was on the record saying Lynette was dead and that Chris's story didn't hold up.

The coroner recommended the police charged the person responsible. But it fell to the one person who could act, the new South Wales director of public prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery. And Cowdery said no. He agreed, Chris had the motive, the means, and the opportunity. But he thought the case was too weak to win in front of a jury, so he declined to prosecute anyone. For the family, that was almost worse than being ignored. A coroner had looked at the evidence and said out loud that Lynette was murdered. And still, the one office with the power to act wouldn't.

It was a gut punch. But Loon wasn't done. With a family behind him, he pushed for a second inquest in 2003. This one ran five days and included far more evidence. And it ended in the same way with a coroner finding that Lynette had probably been murdered and that the person responsible was most likely Chris. And the outcome was the same too. Nicholas Cowdery was still the prosecutor and he held his ground,

citing a lack of evidence he refused to charge. Chris Dawson. That felt like the end of the road. More than 20 years had passed since the day Lynette vanished, and somewhere in those years, the family lost someone else. Just months after that first inquest, Lynette's mother, Helena, died without ever learning what happened to her daughter. She'd spent two decades waiting for a phone call that never came.

Chris Dawson was a free man, and it looked like he'd stay that way, but the story wasn't over. Not even close, because a determined journalist was about to tell millions of people the truth about the golden boy. And this time, the authorities wouldn't be able to look away. Oh, please, not that music. That music gives me nightmares from my childhood. Could we get something a little bit lighter? Some lighter music here. Are you a fan of true crime TV shows?

And what about Unsolved Mysteries? The show that jumped started all of our love of True Crime. I'm Ellen Marsh. And I'm Joey Taranto. And we host, I Think Not, a True Crime comedy podcast covering some of the wildest stories from your favorite true crime campy TV shows all the way to Unsolved Mysteries.

Baby, you will laugh, you will cry. You'll think about true crime, in a whole new way, and you'll also ask yourself, who gave these people mics? New episodes of I Think Notta released every Wednesday with bonus episodes out every Thursday on Patreon. And every Monday, you can listen to our true crime rundown, where we go over the top true crime headlines of the week.

So come and join us wherever you listen to your podcast. By 2003, two corners had reached the same conclusion. Lynette was murdered, and Chris was almost certainly the one who, did it. Both times prosecutors had looked at that finding and still refused to charge him. For 15 more years, that's where things stood. And then, in 2018, everything changed. That's when an Australian journalist named Headley Thomas entered the picture. He had written about Lynette's case years earlier and had never been able to shake it. After more than three decades,

He couldn't believe that no one had ever answered for her death. So he did what the system never had. He spent months chasing down old witnesses and public records and turned the whole story into a podcast. He called it the teacher's pet. It came out in 2018 and became a phenomenon. Downloaded tens of millions of times and hitting number one in Australia and the UK.

It was also instrumental to our research for this episode. Week by week, Headley Thomas laid out the holes in Chris's story and the failures of the first investigation. He coaxed witnesses who'd gone silent for decades into talking on the record, and by the time it was done, the podcast had done what 36 years of police work hadn't. It made Lynette Dawson impossible to again. ignore. For decades, the pressure on the police had come from one grieving family. Now it was coming from a global audience of millions. Officially, the authorities insisted the podcast wasn't why they moved on the case. Police had taken another look at the case back in 2015, and the

prosecutor's office would later stress that it makes its decisions independently, free of any media coverage or public pressure. But the timing was hard to ignore. In September of 2018, detectives finally did what they'd never been willing to do before. They fully excavated Chris Dawson's old backyard, digging up the ground around the pool in a search for Lynette's body. They found nothing.

There was still no smoking gun. But this time, prosecutors decided the circumstantial case was finally enough. In December of 2018, four months after the podcast's final episode, police arrested 70-year-old Chris Dawson for the murder of his wife. They picked him up early that morning at a small apartment attached to his daughter's home on the Gold Coast. According to the officers, he was calm and a little taken aback.

the next day he was extradited to Sydney. Four Lynette's brother, Greg Sims, and the rest of the family, it was the moment they'd waited nearly four decades for, but it was only the beginning of the fight. Chris pleaded not guilty and dug in. His lawyers argued that all the publicity, especially the podcast, had made a fair trial impossible. And they had a point.

The podcast was so popular and so pointed about who it thought was responsible that episodes were pulled offline in Australia to protect the case. So Chris's lawyers asked the court for a permanent stay of prosecution, a rare move that would have shut the case down for good and made him untouchable. In 2022, the court refused, but it did agree to something unusual. because of how famous the case had become, Chris would be tried by a single judge instead of a jury. His fate would rest with one man, Justice Ian Harrison of the New South Wales Supreme Court. The trial laid out a case built entirely from circumstance. There was no body, there was no cause of death, no crime scene, no murder weapon. What they had instead was Chris Dawson's own long trail of lies.

The trial ran for weeks and became one of the most closely watched in the country. Through all of it, Chris never once wavered from his story that Lynette had simply left. It wasn't enough to convince the judge. Justice Harrison found that Chris had lied again and again, after Lynette vanished, about his relationship with Diana, about the state of his marriage, about the phone calls he claimed to have gotten from his missing wife. Stacked on top of each other, those lies painted a damning picture. The judge agreed that Lynette would never have abandoned the two daughters she adored,

and he rejected the idea that she'd been alive and calling Chris all those years, and he laid out why. In his telling, Chris had become consumed by a possessive infatuation with his teenage student, and he wanted a future with her. But a divorce would have cost him the house, his money, and his good name, so rather than let Lynette go, he decided to make her disappear instead. It fit everything her family had believed for 40 years, the way Chris had put a deposit on an apartment and asked,

a lawyer what a divorce might cost him. The threat one of Lynette's co-workers said he'd made, that if counseling didn't work, he would get rid of her. The bruises on Lynette's body, the nursing shift she'd missed in the weeks leading up to her disappearance. Peace by piece, it added up to a man who wanted his wife, gone, and finally made it happen. On August 30th, 2022, more than 40 years after, Lynette disappeared, Justice Harrison found 74-year-old Chris Dawson guilty of her murder. A few months later in December, Chris was sentenced to 24 years in prison. He wouldn't be eligible for parole for 18 years.

The judge noted that Chris wasn't old by today's standards, but that he almost certainly wouldn't live long enough to ever walk free. Then in 2023, there was one more reckoning. In a separate trial, Chris was convicted of the unlawful sexual relationship he'd had with Diana when she was his teenage student back before Lynette ever disappeared. He was given another three years. Chris fought all of it. He appealed his murder conviction to the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal.

That case was dismissed in 2024. The court found that the Circus circumstantial case was so strong that there was no reasonable doubt about his guilt. So Chris took it all the way to the High Court, which throughout his final bid in 2025. That same year, he lost his appeal against the sexual abuse conviction, too. After decades of getting away with it, Chris Dawson had run out of moves. For the people who loved Lynette, The verdict was everything they'd fought for, and still couldn't give them the one thing they wanted most.

Lynette's body has never been found. Outside the courthouse, Lynette's brother Greg made a simple plea to the man who'd just been convicted of killing her. Tell us where she is. Let us bring Lynn home. At the sentencing, Greg told the court how the family had once welcomed her. Chris in like one of their own, quote, We trusted you. You repaid us by committing the ultimate betrayal.

Lynette's eldest daughter, Chanel, stood up in court and spoke to her father directly. She'd been four years old when her mother vanished. She'd grown up being told that Lynette had left because she didn't love them anymore. Now she asked him the question the whole family had carried for 40 years. Why didn't you let her go

and let the people who loved her keep her? And she asked him, please, to say where her mother was. Chris never answered her. But Lynette's legacy extends far beyond him. In the wake of the verdict, New South Wales moved to introduce a no body, no parole law meant to keep killers behind bars until they reveal where their victims are.

People started calling it Lynn's law. Lynette Dawson was a nurse and a mother who wanted nothing more than a house full of kids. She spent her last months trying to hold a marriage together while the man beside her was already planning his way out. For 40 years, the system, that was supposed to protect her and then to speak for her failed her at almost every turn. What didn't fail was the stubborn love of the people she left behind. Her friends who wrote the letters, her siblings who refused to look away, the daughter who found the courage to stand up in a courtroom and face her father,

they're the reason anyone knows Lynette's name at all. And in the end, it was Diana, the girl Chris had robbed of a childhood who found the courage to walk into a police station and say the thing nobody wanted to believe. Without her, there's a real chance Chris Dawson would have carried the truth to his grave. He'll probably die in prison, still insisting he's innocent, still the only person alive who knows where Lynette is. And somewhere out there, she's still waiting to be brought home. But her family got the truth. After 40 years, they finally made the world say out loud what they'd known in their hearts all along.

Lynette didn't leave. She was taken. And she was loved every single day. She was gone. so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crimehouse original, powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crimehouse, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crimehouse

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and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Friday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team,

Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Bertsovsky, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Alex Burns, Mara della Rosa, Claire Swartlander 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.