You're Wrong About - “A Dingo’s Got My Baby”

Episode Date: December 19, 2018

Sarah tells Mike how a tragic story became a hacky catchphrase. Digressions include raccoon anarchists, flu remedies and late-night Arby’s. Sarah's Google Alerts will surprise none of our listeners. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

You know, I went to a wolf sanctuary once which was run by this very sweet lady who she was giving her spiel about how wolves are unfairly maligning. She was like, and a wolf has never killed a human. And I was like, that's not true. I love wolves, but that's not true. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we circle back to everything you don't remember from your childhood. And that one's not that good. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where every week we're wrong about what tagline we want. Yes. I'm Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm a writer in residence at the Black Mountain Institute, currently

interstitially a dog sitter in residence in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Yes, we're nearing the holiday period where we all go and dog sit our favorite dogs. And this is a very doggy episode, so it's setting that tone. So today we're talking about an episode whose title I do not know. What are we, what are we calling this one? Okay, so when we first started talking about this to explain what I wanted to do to you, I was like, you know, the dingo baby case. And you were like, oh yes, of course. And then I was like, but we can't call it that because it's disrespectful to the baby. And so the title that I wanted to use originally and still is like

one of my two top titles is The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain. Yes. And in my head, I've been calling this The Disappearance of Azaria Banks because I cannot remember the name that you had given me last week. Yeah. And so my, and also my cynical rationale for calling it that is if you make a podcast with the word disappearance in the title, people will be strapped in for 12 hours of ambient field recordings and doors slamming shut and, you know, people stretching out 45 minutes worth of material across 12 hours, which we don't do because we're honorable and also because we don't have any money and we don't know how to do that. Yes. I do think that, you know, if you talk about the disappearance of

somebody, like that's one of the podcast food groups. Yes. However, Lindy Chamberlain, Azaria's mother wrote a memoir called The Dingo's Got My Baby. And if that title is good enough for her, it is good enough for me. Oh. And this relates to the two ways that I think most of us think of this case and certainly like the only way that I had heard of this case growing up, even though I have family in Australia and grew up spending significant time in Australia as a child, which is, A, the Merrill Street movie that was made about this and came out in 1988. Yes. And then in a very early episode of Seinfeld, Elaine is at a party, like in the suburb, this woman is sitting across from her and is like, I just can't find my fiance. Where is

my baby? And Elaine goes, might be the dingo achal baby. Right. And that's the legacy of this case in the United States. Yeah. I think that's how most of us heard about it. It was from this movie and from Elaine Benes. Yeah. But this is also a different episode in that usually we go through something where people have the misconception in their heads. And I feel like for this one, most of us know this case from the Merrill Street movie. So most of us sort of know the debunking before we know the original story. Yeah. We tend to be right about this in the sense that we're like, oh yeah, dingo achal baby. And it's like, yes, that is what happened. And that is what Lindy Chamberlain spent between eight and 32 years attempting to prove depending on how you

count these things. And so to me, the central you're wrong about this is that like, we remember that movie for that one line and that weird scenario, but a huge faction of people in Australia really believed that Lindy Chamberlain had murdered her baby. And just what's astounding to me is why people thought that how that was allegedly proven in a court of law. I sort of went in and I was like, oh, I don't really know the details of this case. This will be interesting. And then just got so sad and so angry. Like the way that you experienced the Exxon Valdez, you know, I was the other night watching the Merrill Street movie, like crying in the bathtub. Yeah. Why is there so little justice in this world? It really pissed me off. And so I really wanted to talk about it.

Let's get into the sad and angry. Okay. Is there anything else that you know about just how this went or what happened? Or is that, you know, is it all Merrill and Julia? So I've only seen the Merrill movie once, probably 10 or 12 years ago. And my understanding of the case is that this woman Lindy and her husband were camping there, Australia, and this is in the Australian Outback, and they left their baby in a tent and a dingo, which is essentially a wild dog, came and stole their baby. It's a very rare and weird event, but it actually took place. And then because this couple comes back from the Outback with a disappeared baby, the entire Australian media, UK media, world media decides, no, no, that's too implausible. Actually, these people are psychopaths that murdered their

own baby. Yeah. So to start at the beginning, Lindy Chamberlain and her husband, Michael, live in Mount Isa, which is a town a couple days drive from Ares Rock. So Ares Rock is like in the dead center of Australia. That's where they go on this camping trip. It's now called both Ares Rock and Uluru, which is its aborigine name. It's this huge red rock that's sacred to the aborigines who have lived in that area since time immemorial. And the dingos have also been there since time immemorial. Dingos are as distinct from domesticated dogs as wolves are. They're their own species. They're opportunistic. They're used to living in a harsh environment, so they'll eat anything. They've been seen eating each other like a dingo that finds a dead dingo in a trap will potentially eat it,

which is very rare for animals to do. They're the largest predatory mammal in Australia. There's non-mammal predators for you to also worry about. Crocodiles, sharks, snakes, fish. Everything in Australia kind of wants to kill you. Yes. And I think that's relevant to this as well. So the Chamberlains are Seventh Day Adventists, which is going to be important later. Okay. Lindy's husband, Michael, is a pastor. Lindy and Michael have two sons already named Regan and Aiden four, six, and four. They want a daughter. They've prayed for a daughter. And in the summer of 1980, Lindy gives birth to a daughter. They name her Azaria Chantel Lauren Chamberlain. So when Azaria is nine weeks old, they go on vacation. They decide to go camping at Ares Rock. So they have a nice

day and then they are having dinner. And there's been dingos around that everyone has been noticing. Is this just like a normal part of camping in Australia? Just the dingos are around? Yeah. And they just treat them like chipmunks. Okay. Michael Chamberlain at one point tosses a crust of bread to a dingo. Okay. And Lindy's like, you really shouldn't encourage them. She talks about like when she was walking around with Azaria at one point, she saw a dingo kind of looking at her and described it as feeling like the dingo was casing the baby. Right. There had been a few weeks prior a dingo attack on a three-year-old. Oh, wow. And the ranger there had been like, can I, I should, I maybe shoot some dingos. Like this whole thing of like people going camping

and bringing their tiny children to a place with a predatory wild dog. Like there could be complications. Right. What's funny to me is that the dingo took my baby story has never seemed implausible. Like if I were a dingo and I saw a baby, I would be like, oh my God, like first, you guys give me all these bread scraps and like camping scraps and now a whole baby. Like, thank you. It's also not that it's not that implausible in Australia either where going to Starbucks, there's like a 60% chance of death in that country. This did not happen with no warning. You look at all the factors and you're like, this almost seems inevitable. There's people camping out. There's tons of food around. They're acting very casual about these wild predators. Lindy seems to be one

of the only people who had some tremors of like, this doesn't feel great. But the lion is still like nobody has ever been killed by a dingo in Australia. There's no, like people just have this feeling of like, it doesn't happen. It can't happen. A dingo has never killed a human. So that's true. Or as far as people know, it's true because white people are very new to Australia. Yeah. So like, what do we know? But we're very confident in the things that we think we know. And so it's gets to be nighttime. They're having dinner. Lindy is holding Azaria. Azaria falls asleep. Lindy goes to put her down. One of her sons is sleeping in the tent already. Lindy puts Azaria down in the bassinet. She's away for six to 10 minutes is what one of the other campers who's with them

later says. She comes back to the campfire. People hear a baby crying and then suddenly not crying. Oh my God. Lindy runs to the tent. And what she later says is that she can see a dingo running out of the tent flap and then running away. And she yells, the dingo's got my baby. Okay. And the story begins. And so immediately people start mobilizing. They find an aberrationary tracker. The tracker finds dingo paw prints. There are specks of blood inside of the tent. The defense theories of the dingo came into the tent, put its jaws around Azaria's head, and then like shook her rapidly to break her neck and kill her so it could eat her. Because that's what you do with a prey animal. The dingo has disappeared into the night. And so immediately

people go out and start searching and there's eventually a human chain of I think 300 people searching for her. And the first thing that the chamberlains do that people don't like is that they're pretty fatalistic about it, which to me also is very logical. Like if there's evidence that a dingo has walked into your tent, put its jaws around your infant's head, shaken it vigorously and then run off into the night like, yes, it's possible that your baby survived that, but it's a snowball's chance. It's like sort of reasonable to be fatalistic in that situation. I think so. And one of the tenets of Seventh Day Adventism that is relevant to this is a belief that the resurrection is very imminent. And also that what happens is God's will

and you have to accept that. So is this going to be one of those stories where it's like they're already scrutinizing the parents of a dead child and they're like, well, I wouldn't act that way if my child was dead. Doesn't it seem suspicious because a normal way to act if your child is dead is this. Yeah, which we see so constantly in cases like this. And like, I just look at that and I think, how could you possibly think that you know how you would behave if your nine week old baby has disappeared into the night unless it's happened to you? Totally. Maybe you'd be screaming, maybe you'd be totally calm. Yeah. And so Michael Chamberlain, who's a Seventh Day Adventist pastor at the time, he doesn't join the search. He says,

I think Azari is probably dead. Whoa. They're very stoic for this night and then for everything that happens. Wow. Lindy is seen as someone who's just like too calm and too together to really be a grieving mother. And apparently she was very emotional behind the scenes, but not when the press was on her, not when she was in the courtroom. Okay. You can't win in this situation. If you're being scrutinized by national media, you're not going to act in a way that seems right. Right. If she had been crying and emotional and inconsolable, then people would have accused her of overacting. Yeah, of histrionics. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, the search party goes out, they find dingo tracks, they find baby blood, they in the tent, they find a depression where it looks like

Azaria was dragged, they don't find Azaria. Do they ever find the body? No, they never have. So to this day, the body is gone. I mean, if you take a baby for the purposes of eating it, right, the dingo was not trying to hurt anyone's feelings. The dingo was just doing what a dingo do. Yes. And it's initially reported as, you know, this unusual thing, but apparently a dingo took the baby. There's a coroner's inquest into it where the experts are like, yeah, you know, looks like a dingo did it. You know, the press comes and they're swooping in and trying to get the chamberlains to talk and the chamberlains having never been at the center of a media frenzy before. Like, well, if we tell our story, then people will print the truth and that's that. Oh, no.

That's always such a bad strategy. It's so, I'm always shocked by this when I interview people that, you know, there's conventions of journalism of on the record and off the record and background and all this kind of stuff. And 99.7% of the US population has no idea what those things are. Most people, for totally understandable reasons, has no savviness with dealing with the media, which is fine. We shouldn't have to know that as conditions of being a citizen. Yeah. But then that it seems like in these cases that always become so crucial because these conventions of journalism or just trusting which kinds of journalists to talk to seems like if you make one mistake in that entire process as you're becoming a national talking point,

that sets the template for the entire coverage that it's going to get. The entire narrative gets formed in those first couple of months. If you're not doing this deliberately, which is a completely normal thing to do, then you just get completely screwed over by this entire process. Yeah. And like, you're not going to not make a misstep. You're just not. So some of the rumors that start are that Azaria means sacrifice in the wilderness. No. It does not. In what language do they say that is? Like Latin or something? I don't know, like Hebrew or Aramaic or something, because it is from the Bible, because they were very devout people, but it means blessed by God.

Lindy had taken Azaria to her first checkup wearing a little black dress. Can you guess what significance people ascribe to that? Oh, it's going to be a funeral sacrifice something dress. Yeah. And Lindy also wore black occasionally. We all know everyone who dresses their child in black clothes is planning to murder them. Yeah. You don't just want them to be like, you know, moracy fans or something. And there's this rumor that starts that the Seventh Day Adventists, which there are not that many of in Australia, are some kind of cult and that Lindy had sacrificed Azaria

sort of for the entire sect of her religion as some sort of totemic thing. Oh my God. Another rumor is that the Chamberlains are somehow related to the people's temple. They took their baby into the wilderness and murdered her on the instructions of Jim Jones, who has been dead for two years. So that's still in people's heads as something religious weirdos do. Yeah. Sometimes they just do mass sacrifices in the woods.

Yeah. And they're like, well, you know, this woman who lives on another continent and belongs to a different religion that has nothing to do with with Jim Jones. Like, that makes sense. That seems plausible. Right. It's like, well, she plays tennis and one time a baseball player used cocaine. So she must be using cocaine. It's like this kind of zigzagging from different thing to different thing. Yes. And she has the same haircut as Pete Rose.

So. But where are these rumors starting, right? Because this is pre-internet, pre-social media. So how do these rumors even begin? It's weird. I have not been able to find a source for the sacrifice in the wilderness rumor. Some of these very well may have just started, you know, grassroots. So it could have been like a folklore thing, like the razor blades and the apples, that it's literally just one person tells another person something

and then like a game of telephone, it just morphs from there. Yeah. One of the rumors that we can trace the origin of is that Lindy had done a thesis, you know, had dedicated her studies in college or at some time in her life, had done some major work on dingos. This was printed in a women's day article about her. This turns out to originate with the fact that Lindy, when she was in the Australian equivalent of Girl Scouts,

had done an assignment on different kinds of dogs. And one of the parts of the assignment to, you know, get a bag or something was write a paragraph each on five kinds of wild dogs. One of them was dingos. Oh my God. So it's basically like she once mentioned dingos somewhere. Yeah. And like try growing up in Australia and not writing about dingos at some point in your curriculum.

You know, it's this degree of tenuousness. And the author of the article actually later says that she had filed the article and gone home and the editor had changed a bunch of stuff without her consent. Oh wow. So these rumors start growing and there's a quote by Michael Chamberlain. So Michael says later on that the way he felt about the way the turn that this investigation took was you can't have dingos running around killing kids or the fear of that happening. So if you can't accept that reality, then the people did it.

And so after the initial search, the jumpsuit that Azaria Chamberlain was wearing when she disappeared is found in a dingo layer. Oh God. And it's found with only the top button undone. Okay. And so there's blood all over kind of the top part of it, but it wasn't like ripped off or torn apart or, you know, and this doesn't match with what people assume a dingo would do with a baby's onesie,

despite the fact that we've never seen a dingo take a baby wearing a onesie into its layer before. So we're like, this doesn't seem like what a dingo would do. And the theory that starts developing is that Lindy must have decapitated her baby using the only tools that she had at that time that anyone knows of, which are nail scissors. Oh my God. And keep in mind that she was away from the campfire for six to 10 minutes. Right. And presumably she didn't come back with her blood all over her hands.

No. And she and she came back with her one of her children with Aiden, I think. So presumably he is standing by watching his mother slowly like hack off his baby sister's head with nail scissors. Right. Because his name probably means something weird in Hebrew too. I'm sure that's the explanation. I mean, they did have a kid named Regan, which has felt like Reagan.

Like one of their children was named after something horrible, but no one knew that at the time. And so Lindy is being interviewed on TV and the interviewer is like, well, isn't there a discrepancy there where only the top button was undone? Like, isn't that inconsistent with dingo attack? And Lindy is like, not really. I mean, have you ever seen a dingo eating something? I mean, dingoes will use their paws and peel back the skin of what they're eating

and just they peel it like an orange. That's what she says. And people find that. Yeah. Really distressing that she is able to be kind of clinical. But even though, you know, she's being put on the spot and asked how this is plausible and supplying a plausible answer. And they're like, how dare you supply a plausible answer?

She's being asked a forensic question and she gives a forensic answer. I mean, one of the things that drives me nuts about these, and we saw this was shaken baby too, people whose loved ones have been killed and are accused of killing them, are also asked to supply the alternative explanation. They're asked, why wasn't the house broken into when your wife was murdered? It's like, well, I don't know. I didn't murder her. So how would I know?

As the person who didn't do it, I'm actually the least well placed to know how somebody got into my house without breaking the lock. Yeah. How would a random woman living in rural Australia know what is a plausible way for a dingo to eat a baby? Because she wrote an exhaustive thesis on dingoes, Michael. She's an expert. Another thing that the crown, which is the Australian for prosecution,

does in this case is when they're asked, well, what motive would Lindy Chamberlain have for murdering her baby daughter who she loved and had prayed for and who everyone at the campground and everyone elsewhere in her life saw her loving and doting on and so enclosed for and being thrilled about existing in her life. They're like, it is not our job to supply a motive. We have circumstantial evidence. That is enough. And it's like, all right.

And then presumably she, her long game was that she had exhaustively studied dingoes in college for the express purpose of faking a dingo attack if it was ever necessary for her to murder her baby, which God knows we all choose our majors that way. Yes. And also, if you're going to fake a disaster to kill your child, you definitely want to fake something that's never happened before. That's what the smart people do.

So for me, I'm going to say that a house cat killed my child because that's so rare that it's going to put me under intense media scrutiny and that's my master plan from day one. Yeah, the criminal mastermind narrative is always like, so you're telling me that someone played directly into the hands of the prosecution, like what a mastermind. So at what point does the legal system get involved? Because it sounds like there's a period where there's rumors kind of flying around

and then eventually the government has to decide to prosecute or not to prosecute, right? Yeah, there's an initial coroner's inquest in 1980 where all this evidence is examined. The jumpsuit has been found. They look at that. They look at where the blood is, the marks on the jumpsuit. And the first coroner's inquest is like, you know what, there just isn't compelling evidence of the Chamberlains having done it.

So it's over. But it doesn't end there. The Northern Territory police especially feel burned by this because they really are like, no, this makes us look bad. We have our own thoughts. Oh, wow. So the police keep working. They do a search of the Chamberlain's home in September 1981.

And they seize 300 items. They get the scissors. They take the car that the Chamberlains drove to the campsite. They find a child's coffin in the Chamberlain's home, which they find to be very spooky. What Michael Chamberlain tells them is that he uses it as a prop for his talks where he goes and tells people to stop smoking. Right.

Michael Chamberlain through all of this just seems like a nice, decent, boring guy. Yeah. They examine the car. What the investigators then announce is that they have found a pattern in the trunk of the car that is consistent with an arterial spray. They found what looks like blood in a configuration in the car's trunk that makes them think that Lindy opened the trunk, put Azari in it, slashed her throat, and then the artery sprayed all this blood on the trunk of the car.

They bring in an expert named Joy Cool who does a test on the interior of the car and announces, yes, this is a positive for blood, and that she has conducted a test that has confirmed the presence of fetal hemoglobin elsewhere in the car, which is something that is only in a baby's blood for the first three months. That would appear to be consistent with how old Azari it was. The police also, undeterred by the initial testimony about the jumpsuit, sent it to a dingo expert in London to which Lindy Chamberlain says, I didn't know there were any dingo experts in London.

Yeah. And the dingo expert says, oh no, no, no, these couldn't possibly be dingo teeth marks. These were made by scissors. Oh my God. And I have found a bloody handprint on this baby's jumpsuit made by a small person's hand, like I don't know, a woman. Oh no way. And so based on this new evidence, the Chamberlains go to trial.

So it's like all these bullshit medical testifying industrial complex people. It's like you're wrong about greatest hits. Yeah. How many of are like, no, that's what I call your wrong abouts. Do you see in this? I mean, maybe you'll get to this, but what is this fucking guy in London doing? Why, what the fuck? I don't know.

Destroying the life of a woman he's never met for money, I guess. Because he's not like a bad person, I presume. I mean, I presume that he believes these things. But how is this happening that he's being fed these conclusions somehow by prosecutors and regurgitating them back? Like why, I just don't get why people do this. This guy, I think, just went into it even just so consciously with an attitude of like, dingoes don't eat babies.

And then you shape that initial perception. It's like the thing where you have a jar and you put a big rock in it and then you can only fit pebbles around it. And fiber evidence is incredibly unreliable, saying this was made by a scissors versus this was made by a dingo tooth. You can't really say that with confidence. Fiber evidence is a junk science. Right, because you're looking at a torn piece of fabric.

I mean, that's all you're doing. So it's pretty hard to tell from frayed threads exactly the manner in which they were frayed. Yes. And there isn't an exhaustive body of dingo fiber research at this point, and probably not today. Their whole thing is like, well, this kind of thing never happens. This has never happened before. And so we know that this evidence is inconsistent with dingo attack on a baby.

And it's like, you have just admitted that you have no way of knowing that. They're like, this is implausible because it's never happened before. And we know exactly what it would look like if it did though. Right. Because we're the fucking crown. And another thing that just I cannot get over is that one of the detectives, as this is first happening, he's having some brusquies with the other cops and is like, a dingo couldn't carry a 10-pound baby for however many hundreds of meters.

Like, look, and then he goes and gets a bucket and fills it with 10 pounds worth of sand and puts it in his mouth and is like, see, I can only hold it for a few seconds. And it's like, you're not a dingo. That's not a baby. Right. I don't even need a third thing. And also, you know, and I think there's some false equivalency here because people think of dingoes as dogs and like, they're not dogs.

They have different teeth than dogs. Right. They have teeth much more similar to wolves because they are wild animals and they do things like eat wild boars. And like, they hunt a lot of game that's bigger than them. They can handle themselves out there. Like, it does not seem unbelievable at all that a dingo wouldn't be able to carry away a 10-pound baby.

Right. There's also a fallacy that I think we see a lot where we have two different specific explanations for the crime. One, a dingo took the baby, two, the mother killed the baby, right? And then when we find weaknesses in one specific explanation, a dingo couldn't have carried a baby that far, we think that it strengthens the alternate explanation, that the mother must have done it. But what's really happening is there's an infinite number of specific explanations,

right? So if a dingo couldn't have done it, it doesn't mean the mother did it. It means that maybe a wild boar did it, or maybe a snake did it, or maybe one of the other campers that night did it. Right. Even if the dingo explanation was debunked, it doesn't mean the mother killed her. You still have to prove that explanation. Right.

And it is weird that there's, as far as I can tell, never a moment where anyone's like, what if someone else from the campground, this very populated campground of lots of people, many of whom are strangers to each other, what if somebody snatched the baby? One of the rumors that does crop up is that one of Lindy's other two children who are four and six years old at this time killed his baby sister, and then Lindy's covering it up for them. My god. And it's like, okay, so like one of her kindergarten aged sons decapitated his baby sister, or he killed her in some less violent way.

Lindy found out about it and decided, I'm going to hide this, and so I will decapitate her myself because you can't hide a baby body without decapitating it. My niece is four, and she cannot put on a jacket. I think that murdering a baby is pretty far beyond her motor skills, not to mention moral kin. I mean, little kids do accidentally kill babies, but she was an intent with a sleeping child, like there wasn't. And then it also makes no sense for the mother to cover that up, right? Because that does happen, and mothers don't go to jail for accidental deaths.

Well, not in Australia, they don't. Yeah, true. It's just, it's like to believe that she did this, you have to believe that she's just a black hole. And she wasn't. She had like a not great resting face. So the trial begins. People are outside wearing t-shirts that say things like the dingo is innocent. Oh my god.

Which I submit is also instructive in this, like yeah, what do you think of that? Maybe this makes no sense, but I do think the fact that dingos are cute and sort of funny. The way that like we think of raccoons, like we don't think of raccoons as evil necessarily. Raccoons are anarchists. They are chaotic neutral. Right. We think of them as like cute and mischievous, but we don't think of them as capable of real harm. Yes, the dingo is innocent.

It innocently found like a really great meal and grabbed it. Yeah. It did what you would do if you were driving on a dark highway for hours and hours and you saw an Arby's. Yeah, one of the other t-shirts that people are wearing around the trial is a shirt that says Darwin's theory and it's Lindy wearing a dingo suit. They see her as a monster. Oh man. One of the other big pieces of what the crown is calling evidence, although I don't tend to see it

that way, is that Lindy says that when Azaria disappeared, she was wearing a white jumpsuit, white onesie, and a white matinee jacket with pale lemon and edging. And the jumpsuit is found and the jacket isn't. One of the other arguments that the crown makes is that there wasn't dingo saliva found on the jumpsuit or at least on the parts of the jumpsuit that were tested by this famous London dingo expert. And Lindy says, well, you know, she was wearing a jacket. So the saliva probably ended up on that and the crown is like, what jacket? No one ever saw her in a jacket. You didn't tell them that she was wearing a jacket. And she's like, well, I did tell the police, but they were

agitated because they were running off to look for a baby. Right. Like I did tell them and they're like, we don't remember you telling us about any jacket. Who's to say this jacket even existed? Right. The jacket is like the bloody glove in this case. So it starts to look like an inconsistency, like she's making stuff up on the fly when it could just be that the cops didn't happen to write it down at that moment for whatever reason.

Yes. And as we have learned in so many other episodes, whatever the cops happen to bother to write down as it is happening becomes what happened. Right. So Lindy and Michael go to trial. Lindy for murder, Michael has accessory for murder. Oh my God. And one of the things that reporters comment on at the time and then later on is that infanticide is something that women don't even necessarily serve jail time for in Australia. What?

Australia is very lenient about that. Okay. I mean, I don't really know how to feel about that because it sounds like a lot of infanticides are stuff like shaken baby where it's actually just an infant stroke and the mother gets blamed for it, but there's also like legit infanticide. In the US, we have a lot of babies that die under mysterious circumstances and in a country with a lot of low birth weight, a lot of difficulty accessing decent nutrition, decent medical care, it makes sense that babies would just kind of die a lot. Right.

It will surprise absolutely no one to know that I have a Google news alert for dead baby. And so I get like a dead baby aggregated news every day. Oh my God, Sarah, really? It's not for fun. There are so many cases of dead babies, dead newborns being found just, you know, on the side of a highway. Oh God. In a bathroom that like it's not even news.

Like it's this little blip. It's like and today and Western Pennsylvania and now moving on to the penguins, you know. Really? It's not something that there's any follow on typically. Oh God. It happens a lot. Sarah, Jesus. I'm engaging in necessary self care.

I feel that things are at a good balance between my research and my life. You're like so easy to get Christmas presents for. It's like what's the what's the saddest thing I can find? Like how can I help Sarah wallow in it for a little while? In the United States, you know, if you have a baby die and you can't prove that it wasn't you, you're kind of fucked and you're going to get the book thrown at you. Oh yeah. And so in Australia and still isn't a national policy of like if your baby dies,

we are going to assume you're a murderer. But in this case there was. This was the exception that proved the rule about how mothers are normally treated. So Lindy goes to trial. She once again makes the mistake of being calm and composed and reserved on the stand, which is not what people want her to do. And Joy Cool who had done the blood analysis of the car testifies, yes, there's fetal hemoglobin in this car.

There's an arterial spray in the trunk of the car. Azaria's throat was cut. We know that this is forensic evidence. Like you can't argue with science. Yeah. Right. How might you argue with that science? Like what do you have any alternate theories about that?

Like nose bleed or changing a diaper or something. Yeah, they've got little kids. Kids bleed a lot. Yeah. They also picked up an injured hitchhiker not that long before the camping trip, which would also account for the presence of some blood. What ultimately turns out to have been the case is that the Chamberlain's live in Mount Isa,

which at the time has an enormous copper mine. There's copper dust at large in the air. It just sort of is in the atmosphere. It's sort of on everything. Oh no. The reagent that the scientists used to test for the presence of fetal hemoglobin in the car created a false positive based on the presence of copper dust. You got to be kidding me.

I am dead serious. That is like a pretty big caveat with the test, right? That this is a test that only detects tiny baby blood. Unless? Unless there happens to be copper dust. Like that seems like something that you should disclose in the positive test result that this test is positive for tiny baby blood or copper or zinc or or something totally unrelated that's like

atmospherically present in the town in which these people live. Oh my god. In the grand tradition of forensic science they're like, oh, we figured out just in the last few hours that you can use this test to find this thing. So we're just going to plow straight ahead. This reminds me of the thing that you're always talking about which is that forensic evidence takes on this magical property where it's like because of the forensic evidence we have to convict.

But it's like it still doesn't explain the fact of how a woman left a group for six minutes murdered a baby. With nail scissors. With nail scissors. And then came back with no blood, no other evidence. It seems like there's no evidence that this woman has a history of any violence. No, none, nothing. The actual events of the night are totally implausible.

And the fact that it's this woman doing it is also totally implausible. But it's like, oh, we have a test result that's positive. So all of a sudden all of this other implausible stuff just goes right out the window. And it's like, no, no, this is science. Yeah. And then later on, this is what the experts at the defense team finds later on. They debunk the fetal hemoglobin and then they look at the arterial spray inside the trunk. They find out that that actually was something that was put on that model of car in the factory as a sound deadener.

It's part of just the process of making the car. No way. Once again, I mean, you know, you can see how the prosecution just had no choice, but to plunge ahead without checking out their findings even for five minutes. It's like the way you act when like you really want something to be true. Like we all do this in our own lives, like the thing where you like, you think you're getting the flu, you're pretty sure you're getting the flu, you really feel fluey.

But then you're like, oh, I had like a beer last night. So it's a hangover. And it's like, it's not a hangover. It's not the thing you want it to be. And they also have an expert named Bernard Sims who says, you know, it would be impossible for a dingo to fit a baby's head in its mouth. And then the defense says, well, here's a picture of a dingo with a baby doll's head, a baby doll the size of a very chamberlain that had in its mouth.

And the expert is like, whoa, okay. And then to me, this is like the ultimate and check your goddamn work. The London dingo expert comes in and says, you know, I found this bloody handprint on the jumpsuit, the hand of a small person, a woman. And they have Lindy put her hand up next to this alleged bloody handprint. He also didn't test it for blood. He's just like, ah, it looks like blood. On the print, there are four flanges on each finger,

which is, you know, the different bits of your finger. Four segments. Four segments. Humans have three. Lindy Chamberlain has three. It's not a human handprint. It is manifestly, obviously not a human handprint. Oh my God.

It's like you look at it real quick and you're like, oh, kind of the same size. If you actually look at it for like a minute, you're like, human hands don't actually look like that. This is literally their defense. It's like, look at it and everyone looks at it and they're like, oh. Yeah, it's like a really bad magician. One of the other crown arguments is that when Lin, or when Azaria's jumpsuit was found in the dingo layer,

it had been neatly folded as if by a human. Oh my God. What in fact happens is that the jumpsuit is discovered by a hiker, who he's there. He has his camera, but he doesn't take pictures of it. He's like, oh fuck, this must be Azaria's. I'm going to go get the authorities. They will know what to do.

Classic mistake. Yeah. The police come and they immediately pick up the jumpsuit and start looking at it. And then they put it back down. Oh no. The way that they think it looked before they moved it. So yes, it was kind of neatly placed there because a policeman did that. Oh my God.

Yeah. Also in the six minutes where Lindy Chamberlain killed her own baby, she then put the child's onesie in a cave during that six minutes. Like that's another thing that I don't see how that makes any sense either for the prosecution's case where it's like she then kills her own baby, sprinkles her baby's blood in the tent, leaves a little divot that looks like it had been dragged away, runs like jogs to a cave, puts her baby's onesie in a cave, jogs back, and says, oh my God, I didn't go got my baby all in the same six minute period.

Or as Meryl Streep puts it in a cry in the dark, you're crediting me with the perfect murder. That was quite good actually. Thank you. One of the theories is that she takes Azaria to the trunk of the car, she cuts off her head with nail scissors, and then she stuffs her body and presumably also her head into her husband's camera bag. Oh God.

And you know, cameras were bigger in 1980 than they are now, but they were not the size of a baby. Right. She stuffs the body in the camera bag, and then while the Chamberlains are not with the search party, they did like step away and walk around for like 15 or 20 minutes in the dark, which is something that you might do if you wanted to kind of take a look for yourself or have a private moment.

But the theory is that Lindy hides the body in the camera bag, and then she and Michael go off and bury it somewhere, and they do such a good job that there's no trace of it that is ever, ever, ever found, and no evidence of them having dug a hole somewhere and put a body in it. Right, hastily dug a hole in 15 minutes. Again, superhuman speed. Like if you dug holes, it takes a long time. It's like...

Yeah, and then of course Lindy also would have had to then go to the tent with baby blood, which she presumably was able to like save somewhere in like a vial or something, despite not having any of it anywhere on her person, and then like just, you know, sprinkled it around the tent. Yes. Not only would she have had to do all this in about six minutes, six to ten minutes, but she would have had to have been planning it for really quite some time to be able to fake,

like she needs a vial to put the baby blood in, she needs a faked and go pop, and she needs all of the stuff to make it work. Yeah, it's like gone girl level fuckery, right, that she's planning this for months and months, and of course leaving no trace of her planning, no post-it notes or reminders or to-do lists of all the go-to home depot and buy vial to fill with baby blood. There's no evidence of any of her planning, of course.

No, because she's so brilliant. She's like a genius sadistic psychopath, seventh day Adventist housewife who seems to, for all this time is just pretending that all she wants to do is like so close for her family and have a daughter, but really her plan was to murder her. One of the things that I remember from researching the shaken baby syndrome episode is that most people who kill their babies,

there's almost always an escalation. I mean, most parents start doing smaller abusive acts, like they won't feed their kid for an entire day, and then once that becomes normalized, they'll escalate. One of the things that they said in the literature was that people will actually confess to child abuse, and it's quite easy to figure out who child abusers are, because lots of child abusers don't consider it abuse.

So they'll say, oh yeah, I smack my kids around, or yeah, I'll hit them upside the head in the grocery store, right? And so you have these accounts from neighbors saying, yeah, I saw him hit his kids all the time, but it's very rare to not be abusive and then be extremely abusive. That doesn't really happen very often. Yeah, and I think that's another reason we love the figure of the psychopath, because it's someone who can maintain a facade of being a normal loving mother for 30 odd years,

and then suddenly it was all part of a master plan that culminated. And also if you're really an evil genius and you want to murder your baby, wouldn't you linger over it? Would you really just do a quicky six-minute decapitation? And then get your jogging shoes on and run out to the cave to drop off her onesie that you, of course, lovingly fold because you're that stupid. Yeah, and then another piece of crown evidence of alleged evidence is that when they do the search on the Chamberlain's house,

they have this old family Bible, and they look in the Bible, and what do they find but a violent scene, which like, I've read a lot of the Bible, it's wall-to-wall treehouse of horror in there, right? There's so many decapitations in that book, but what they find is what they believe to be, Lindy having underlined a passage where someone, I don't know where in the Bible this was, but it seems like an Old Testament kind of a thing,

a woman has murdered someone by driving a tent pole, or like a tent stake into their head. This is in the Bible? Yeah, of course it is. Yeah, of course, yeah. What Lindy says is like, it was a family Bible, it was like 100 years old, there's illustrations, there was an illustration facing that page where you could see that the dye

from part of the image had sort of transferred over many use of use onto this passage, that there's a little shadow over one of the hundreds, if not thousands of extremely violent passages in the foundation of our religion. Also this whole thing of people underlining shit in books as evidence for them. If I'm being framed for something and people use my reading material and might like, I'm fucked. That is not surprising. I mean, I just think that shouldn't be evidence of guilt,

like if you murdered somebody, there are witnesses or there is real forensic evidence, this idea of you underlined a book. To me, that sort of thing just doesn't have any place in the courts. It also doesn't even have anything to do with the way they said she committed this murder, it's just a murder. Right, if we're going to convict people of murder, we should have good evidence that they murdered someone, not evidence that they're weird.

Not that they were reading? Yeah. So what happens, you know, this is the evidence, right? These are all the smoking guns. There's, you know, what looks like a human handprint on Azaria's camsuit, if you look at it real quick, there's the fact that it was folded because the police folded it. There's the presence of fetal hemoglobin in a test that apparently gets false positive for fetal hemoglobin when it's exposed to one of those common substances in the town where the

Chamberlains live. There's the Bible underlining, there's the imaginary sacrifice in the wilderness name, there's the imaginary connection to Jonestown, all of this stuff. So it's like an avalanche of circumstantial evidence that once you have 40 pieces of evidence, even if each one of those 40 pieces is kind of janky, you're going to be like, well, we have 40 pieces of evidence. I mean, I can see how this would be appealing to a jury or to just people, you know, reading tabloids or people that are kind of low information,

like most of us are for most things. You know, there's a lot of evidence, right? You're looking at the quantity, not the quality. And I can see how people on the basis of this just amount of evidence would be like, yeah, she's probably guilty. We've got this stack of stuff, right? It makes sense in a way. Yeah.

And in a way, also not because, you know, speaking of RBS, so you go and you're like, hello, I'd like one big beef and cheddar, please. And then they give you a bag with 40 dead mice in it. And they're like, no, I wanted a big beef and cheddar. And they're like, well, we gave you 40 of this other thing. No, like that's not the thing I asked for. Like none of this evidence works in any way, but there's a lot of it. We have a lot of terrible stupid theories,

many of which contradict each other. So this is the Crown's case. And as we talked about in Shaken Baby Syndrome and in other episodes, I think, and will inevitably continue to talk about, it's a case where also then the defense has their own experts who say, no, it's not scissors. It's a dingo bite. Actually, dingoes can carry babies.

They can get their jaws around a baby's head. It's very plausible that only the top button would be undone because of the way that dingoes eat and because of the tests that we've conducted. And it's the kind of thing where essentially it falls to the jury to decide which expert witness is more credible, which shouldn't be their job. What happens because of that is that you're given these two wildly contradictory accounts. You as a layperson have no way of knowing how to test for fetal hemoglobin reliably.

Like that's not your job. And because of that, it comes down to narrative versus narrative. Do you want to believe a dingo did it or do you want to believe Lindy did it? Right. And on some level, it's more plausible to believe weird religious kooks did it than cute wild dingoes who've never killed anybody before. I mean, to some extent, being part of a small religion that's foreign and kind of weird to other people is a huge liability for them.

It was a huge blow. And then another thing I forgot to mention is that actually, she's a trial because of when it gets scheduled. Lindy is very pregnant. Because she and Michael want to have another daughter. And so you can see how the jurors would be like, we have to save this next baby. Yes.

How dare she, right? She's like seven months pregnant when they go to trial. She's very pregnant, which normally makes women more sympathetic, but doesn't work in this case. And it's an all white jury. It's a jury of three women and nine men and what emerges later because the press gets its hand like 30 years later on the jury's confidential notes from deliberations is that all of the women wanted to convict her.

Interesting. And the men were pretty evenly split. Wow. What is what do you make of that? Women don't like other women. It's the classic crabs in a bucket thing, right? Why do you think they found it plausible and the men didn't? I don't know.

I think that maybe as women like there is the need to condemn other women for not dancing as fast as they can hard enough. Women I think know that like the kind of performance of maternal virtue that women have to do that there's a limit to it. Women who have babies often have some amount of depression. They can have trouble bonding. You know, you have unwanted thoughts a lot when you have a baby potentially. Like no one is the perfect mother in the sort of socially mandated way.

And so there might be a thing of like women sacrificing Lindy for their collective sins. I think that that's a dynamic that comes up in cases like this. I don't know. I like her. I like Lindy Chamberlain. Everything I've seen her say or do in like all of my research of this, I'm like, wow, like what a strong, sensible human being who was very, very strong throughout all this.

And from a very early stage, from the point where this narrative started to gel, like it would not have mattered what she did. Right. Because like once the world sees you that way, anything you do can be construed as evidence of your murderer. So the jury deliberates for six and a half hours. They find her guilty.

She's sentenced to life. Fuck. And the judge who seems to not agree with this verdict sentences Michael Chamberlain to 18 months. Oh, wow. For being an accessory to the crime, but he gives him a suspended sentence because he's like, you have two small kids at home and they need a parent, which that's not something we do in America.

And I'm awfully fond of it. It's also, I mean, I can't imagine the press and the public was happy about that. No. But, you know, the judge also is just sort of like, I don't really super buy this. Yeah. But, you know, and Michael Chamberlain goes home

and takes care of his sons and can't work as a pastor anymore because of just being seen as an accessory to murder. Lindy is sent to prison and she two months later gives birth. Oh my God. Yeah, fuck. The prison, they decide to induce labor because they want to have her give birth before the shift change happens. She wrote a memoir, The Dingo's Got My Baby memoir,

where there's just this really heartbreaking passage where she just talks about they make her go into labor and she's like holding her baby in because she knows that once she actually gives birth, she will be able to hold her for one hour. Oh God. And then they're going to take her away. And then she won't be allowed to see her even in supervised visits

for one year. Really? What? Because presumably she's too much of a danger to her baby, even if she's supervised. Oh my God. Like, we cannot trust the demon Lindy Chamberlain to not find a way to somehow saw her new baby's head off.

Yeah. So, in 1986, Lindy has been in prison for three years. By complete happenstance, a tourist is climbing at Ares Rock and he falls and dies. OK. And the people who come to investigate this happen to find Azari's white matinee jacket. No way.

About 150 yards from the Dingo lair. And they're like, oh, the jacket that we saw never existed. And that was the lynchpin of the crown's case. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. They find the matinee jacket, which allegedly never existed. And now it turns out that it did. The one that explains why there wasn't Dingo saliva on the jumpsuit.

It's not that crucial a piece of evidence. And that's what I was just going to say. It's not like, why does this matter? We're still talking about a prosecution narrative that makes no sense. And then it's like, oh, there's a jacket now. But the wheels have also started moving. The defense is finding new experts

who are able to go in and be like, actually, the fetal hemoglobin was copper dust, actually. And so a judge gives Lindy compassionate release. He's like, this is not because of the jacket, which, of course, it kind of is. But he's like, I'm just doing this because it is within our purview and our national character to sometimes release prisoners.

And so they give her compassionate release. The evidence is reexamined and the convictions are overturned. And she and Michael are exonerated and compensated by the Australian government. But it is not until 2012 that there is finally a new coroner's inquest where they change the cause of death on Azaria's death certificate to dingo attack. And this is like Lindy's vindication.

She waits 32 years for the official verdict to be, yes, what you said happened happened. She also, much later on, one of the three female jurors who convicted her, she and Lindy became friends. She came forward and was like, I was wrong. I'm sorry. And they became friends. And there's a picture of Lindy pretending

to strangle the woman in this joke photo that they both wanted to do. When you've been through something like that, things become funny. Yeah, it sounds really dark, but OK. My two overall thoughts on this are, one, that it seems like we learned nothing. I mean, what's annoying about this whole thing

is that this whole case happens in the early 80s. A cry in the dark comes out in 1988. The whole movie is about the dangers of circumstantial evidence, the dangers of not believing people, the dangers of saying what kind of a mother acts like that after her child dies, right? It's all about how we got everything wrong. And then three years later, Amy Fisher,

four years later, Tanya Harding, Monica Lewinsky. We spent the entire decade after this movie, after the story, doing exactly the same thing, making precisely the same mistake, right? Taking circumstantial evidence, taking incomplete stories, and not believing women when they talk about, I am a whole person. It doesn't seem like the newspapers learned anything.

It doesn't seem like prosecutors learned anything. It doesn't seem like most of the population fundamentally understands the difference between evidence and circumstantial evidence. This is still something we fuck up now. It's like the sad aftermath of the story is like, it's this warning cry. It is a cry in the dark.

A cry in the dark. That we didn't learn anything from. I wonder if Americans were able to watch this and be like, wow, what a crazy thing to happen in Australia. That couldn't happen here. Yeah, wow. It's like, mm-hmm. Well, and it's like, yeah, it couldn't happen

to the extent that in America we don't apologize or compensate people who've been wrongfully convicted all that much. 00:53:17,120 --> 00:53:20,320 Yeah, and it's like a bellwether case for faulty forensic evidence. Yeah. Where there's all this stuff that, you know, the false positives in the fetal hemoglobin tests and the fiber evidence on the onesie.

And, you know, oh, Dingo's can't possibly do this thing because, you know, we've never studied them, but we have a feeling. 30 years ago, we could have been like, wow, junk science seems like a major contributor to wrongful convictions. We should keep an eye on that. Right.

And I just, I don't know why people wanted her to be a murderer so badly. But I just like, I don't get it. What is your theory? What do you, what have you concluded? I mean, there's no correct way for women to behave in the public eye. And I think that that gets exacerbated at trial, right?

Like if women are picked apart for like anything we do in the media, then it's going to be much worse if you're at trial publicly accused of something terrible. You know, like Michael Chamberlain said, I think it was really hard for people to accept that Dingo's were dangerous. And since then, there have been fatal Dingo attacks. In 2001, a nine-year-old boy was fatally attacked

by Dingo's on Fraser Island. Oh, that's awful. There has, you know, this established precedent for something that has continued. Right. Humans were also encroaching on Dingo territory in Australia in a way that they hadn't before. The population was consistently growing.

There are these sort of clashes between wildlife and humans. And I mean, one of the things I found myself actually thinking about a lot was picnic and hanging rock. You know, to me, one of the really powerful dynamics, especially in that book, is like white people from the UK coming to this place that is wild and ancient and mysterious and not taking it seriously enough. But, you know, walking into this big rock and disappearing.

And I see that in what happened to Azaria Chamberlain, where if you're living in this wild, uncontrollable place that, like, you know, your family lives there, your parents live there, or maybe your grandparents live there. Maybe you've been there for generations. And it's still, like, it's profoundly other. It's wild, and it's not yours. Right.

And on some level, you know that. And you can't just come in and put down your fences and control things and keep the wild and the human separate or turn the wild into something cute. Right. And I feel like there's just, like, part of it maybe was a feeling of, like, we need to believe that the place we live is basically safe.

And so therefore, Lindy Chamberlain is a murderer. Right. I don't know. It always feels like with these things, once we overturn a wrongful conviction, we're like, who, close one. But then we never go back. Yes. To, like, every single person who testified at that trial,

what are our jury selection procedures? What evidence is allowed to be presented? We don't go back and systematically do a postmortem on, okay, what actually went wrong here, and how can we fix it? It seems like there's a lot of things in this case that, frankly, we're still getting wrong now. But we're adjudicating these things case by case.

It's like the legal system is smog, smog the dragon, not the pollutant. Instead of having one little, like, missing scale where you can stab it, you know, and find its vulnerability, it's just like a mangy ass smog with just, like, hardly any scales on it. And you're like, smog, you are just, can we get some dragon cream for you?

Like, what can we do about this situation? Like, you are more wound than dragon. Right. What should we conclude? What are our lessons? I mean, I don't know. What comes up for me is the way that things got sent down the wrong track, is that we,

in a very understandable way, as humans, are prone to superstition about the things that we don't want to happen to us. Especially if you were an Australian in 1980, and maybe you go camping, and you are in areas where there are dingoes, and you have kids, you have every incentive to want to believe that this horrible, horrible thing

could not possibly happen to you, or to someone that you love, or in the world that you live in. And because of that, it's easy to be like, okay, so Lindy's a murderer. Right. You know, again, it's like we, some of us are in a position to go put the cream on the dragon.

And many of us aren't, and those of us who aren't can just kind of like sit with ourselves. Like, when we're looking at something in the news, or when we hear a story that makes us have that knee-jerk reaction of like, oh, I don't buy that. Like, this thing must have happened. And it's like, why do I think that?

Is it because it seems logical, or is it because I'm scared? Is it because, like, this is hitting me too close to home, and I want to render myself invulnerable to this particular tragedy. And therefore, it has to be about malice, and not something happening to Lindy Chamberlain that could possibly happen to me. Right.

Even if I'm making the best decisions possible and doing all my due diligence. One of the scariest things, I think, to parents seems to be the idea of acting in good faith and being wrong. Right. In some ways, in many ways, it's easier to believe in murderous malice and six-minute nail scissor to capitations

and in the fact that like, you could just be doing your best as a parent, and one day something terrible will happen, and you couldn't stop it, and you couldn't have known. Right. My main takeaway is that any theory that requires a murderer to be carrying around a vial full of blood with them, we should just not do those anymore.

Nobody has vials of blood with them. Also, any theory of a murder where someone had to be like a mastermind to do it, like there are not that many smart people in the world. Like, if we're living in a world where there, you know, where people are like voting for Brexit and listening to Coldplay, then why is it that there are all these

genius murderers running around and why aren't any of them voting for better or for worse?