During a live vigil for a family friend, Christopher Michael Dawson said his wife had been living in a commune west of Sydney for more than 25 years after she disappeared, a judge has said.
A woman who testified at Dawson’s murder trial Monday said she ran into twin brothers Chris and Paul Dawson at a vigil for Phillip Day, who was ill with cancer and died in 2007.
She said Dawson told her his wife Lynette had left the house and was living in a Blue Mountains commune. The woman asked how a woman could just get up and leave her children behind.
“Paul said something like, ‘She was a little crazy,'” she told Judge Ian Harrison.
The witness, whose husband attended Sydney Boys High School with the Dawsons, is a professional recruiter. She said she knew body language and described the Dawson twins’ behavior as “creepy” because they sat so close together.
“I think Chris was checkinis older twin sister to make sure he said the right thing. That was the impression I got,” she says.
Dawson, now 73, is accused of murdering his wife and disposing of her body in January 1982 so that he could have an unfettered relationship with a woman known as JC, his babysitter and former high school student.
He has stated that he is not guilty of the charges.
Former police officer Ian Kennedy also went to Sydney Boys. He told the court that he may have been attending a school reunion with the Dawsons in 1985 but denied that Ms. Dawson lived in New Zealand then.
“I had no part in any investigation into Lynette’s disappearance,” he said.
Paul Dawson previously told the court that Mr. Kennedy had sidelined his brother at the reunion and told him where his wife was.
The footage was played Monday of Elva McBay’s testimony at the Local Court in 2020. Ms. McBay, who has since passed away, claimed to have seen Ms. Dawson in Macquarie Street, Sydney, in March 1983 during a Prince Charles and Princess Dian visita.
The woman appeared to have emerged from Sydney Hospital, ducked under the barricade, crossed the road before the Royal Family’s convoy, and disappeared into the crowd on the other side.
While telling her husband during the parade, “I think that was Lynette Dawson,” Ms. McBay said in 2020 that the woman was speeding, andcould not confirm whether she correctly identified her.
Mrs. McBay worked at the same school as Paul Dawson and became a family friend, having been a lifelong supporter of the Newtown Jets rugby league club, where the twins played in the first grade.
Dawson’s former neighbor Malcolm Downy testified that he saw Mrs. Dawson “upset and nervous” when she knocked on his back laundry door shortly before her disappearance.
“She looked stressed and didn’t have the kids with her. That was strange. That woman never went without her children,” he said.
