Witness accounts that Lynette Dawson was seen bruised before disappearing in January 1982 were small pieces of a larger photo that showed she was murdered by her husband, a judge has heard.
As the murder trial of Christopher Michael Dawson, 73, draws to a close, Crown Prosecutor Craig Everson SC explained how evidence of the bruises could lead the NSW Supreme Court to kill Ms. Dawson instead of just leaving home.
Mr. Everson said the Crown was trying to show that Dawson had three inclinations through his evidence: that he had animosity towards his wife, that he had considered using a third party to kill her, and that he wanted him to have an affair With her, known as JC, as his wife and the mother of his children.
The attorney described testimony that Ms. Dawson had been seen with black eyes and bruises on her arms and legs as a “small piece of a larger mural of circumstances”.
“The unexplained bruises of those people are just a fact that must be reckoned with like a wire in the cable,” he told Justice Ian Harrison on Thursday.
Circumstantial evidence had also been used in the 1980 trial of Adelaide woman Emily Perry, who was charged with attempting to murder her husband using an arsenic-based weed killer.
That trial showed evidence of previous spouses who had the unfortunate habit of dying from arsenic poisoning, Mr. Everson said.
Dawson’s attorney Greg Walsh argued that this evidence should be set aside, saying guilt could not be found using questionable testimony.
“The evidence at this stage, for example, regarding bruises, is so vague, so inaccurate, so speculative, that Your Honor would not be so pleased with these facts,” he told the judge.
Mr. Walsh argued that evidence from JC and Robert Silkman that Dawson had attempted to hire someone to get rid of his wife should be viewed with skepticism.
The court heard JC’s allegations that her former husband had asked about a hit man was first leveled in 1990 during a bitter custody dispute.
Silkman’s claims were also not to be trusted because he was a convicted criminal who often lied, Mr. Walsh argued.
“He was a villain. He took advantage of other vulnerable people. He freely admitted to setting up false alibis, lying to police, doctors, juries, and judges,” he said. The lawyer.
Judge Harrison also struggled with other evidence presented in the case, including a testimony from one of the Dawsons’ former babysitters that he beat up Mrs. Dawson with a kitchen towel in their kitchen.
“Some people might argue that it’s quite a long drive through a dark night to claim that waving a towel on someone is associated with killing them,” the judge said.
“They wuld, and would be right, but it is not relied upon to prove that,” replied Mr. Everson.
The court also heard further audio recordings of police-intercepted telephone conversations between Dawson and his loved ones in the months leading up to his arrest in December 2018.
In one of those calls, Dawson lamented the impact the murder charges had had on his family, who feared he would commit suicide.
‘I won’t. I wouldn’t give them that satisfaction,” Dawson said.
He was told the family should start a class action over the harassment.
In the conversations, Dawson blamed JC for making up lies about him to the police over a heated custody dispute.
He also accused the investigator who handled the case from 1998 to 2015, former Detective Damian Loone, of reviving his career. He alleged that the police officer with a noose around his neck went to a party to mock an Indigenous Australian man who had hanged himself in custody with a football sock.
Dawson pleaded not guilty to murder and denies involvement in his wife’s disappearance.
The trial will resume on Monday.
– MONKEY
