“Why haven’t they found this stuff?”: An interview with The Teacher’s Pet host Hedley Thomas
The Teacher’s Pet is a new and ongoing true crime podcast series produced by The Australian. Headed by Gold Walkley-winning investigative reporter Hedley Thomas, it examines the case of Lyn Dawson, a doting mother of two who disappeared from her Bayview home in the early eighties. Days after Lyn went missing, her husband Chris Dawson invited the family babysitter — a high school student he was teaching and having an affair with — to move in. In the 36 years since Lyn went missing, two independent coroners have found that she was murdered by her husband, but an arrest has never been made.
Poring through document archives, talking with Lyn’s friends and family, as well as police officers, school staff and others touched by the case, Thomas’ investigation has unearthed new — and at times shocking — information. It has also reawakened a darkness that has haunted various members of the Sydney northern beaches community over decades. After listening to the podcast or reading follow-up coverage published in print or online, new witnesses have come forward. Their disclosures shed new light on what might have occurred, breathing life into a case that seems far from cold.
Squeezing in a chat via bluetooth on the drive home after conducting an interview himself, Thomas spoke on the origins, challenges and evolving nature of the podcast. This July, he’ll be appearing on the panel Killer Stories: True Crime & Podcasts as part of Storyology, the Walkley journalism festival in Brisbane. Will the podcast still be ongoing then? About to start a weekend haul on episode five, Hedley couldn’t give a definitive answer. But “it’s unlikely we’re halfway”.
The following interview has been edited for clarity.
To what extent are The Teacher’s Pet episodes planned? What does it mean for the team, with new information, surprise witnesses and tips coming in as you’re still recording?
We have to be really flexible. And that’s one of the reasons why we’ve been able to develop the momentum we have with the series. Before episode one was uploaded, I had a handful largely drafted in terms of script. And these are long, too — episode four’s script was ten and a half thousand words; others have been between seven- to nine-thousand words. But they have changed fundamentally from the early drafts, because of the new information that’s come in and the different tangents we’ve taken as a result.
This has not been something I deliberately planned. It was the result of me saying, “I don’t want to just keep writing but not releasing. I want to start releasing.” It does put a huge amount of pressure on us in terms of developing this material and turning it around quickly. For example, episode four dropped yesterday. I’m writing episode five now, and it’s got to be done within the next 72 hours. I’m not looking at a blank screen — but it’s close.
The beneficial side of this is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances and fresh leads. I had done months of investigation before we rolled anything out; I’d done many dozens of interviews, and I’d read thousands of pages of documents. I certainly have a structure in my mind. But I don’t have any more of these scripted episodes. I’m adapting to news breaks, then falling back on what I have already recorded, gathered, built up in my investigations and been tipped off about. It’s a risky way of doing things, but it’s beneficial.
Throughout the series, you’re quite explicit about where you stand on Chris Dawson: you agree with the statements of two coroners, that he most likely murdered his wife. Did you begin the podcast with an end in mind?
I’m a strong believer in the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. But here you have two experienced magistrates who have said “He is guilty. This man is guilty”. They examined two detailed briefs of evidence, heard from witnesses, with five days of public hearings in the second 2003 inquest. Both came to the view that Chris Dawson murdered his wife.
So, when I approached this case, almost 15 years after the second inquest, I think it would be disingenuous of me to purport that I can have a view that is completely uninfluenced by these findings. I thought it was better for me to be honest and upfront. Right from the first episode, you hear me saying “I believe Lyn Dawson died in those hours that the coroner said she did, and is probably up there on that acreage block.” I don’t say that it was Chris who put her there — but I do express that, in my view, the coroners got this right.
I’m not trying to prove a man’s innocence; I’m trying to gather enough evidence that the DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions] says it’s still short of to run a prosecution. If Chris had a murder trial, at least he’d have the potential to clear his name. Or, he’d be convicted of murder.
I think Chris has been incredibly lucky. But I do believe that from the fresh evidence that I’ve discovered, he has benefited from what looks like the most extraordinary incompetence by northern beaches police when Lyn first went missing in the ’80s. Either that, or he has been the beneficiary of a protection racket.
There are over a thousand cold cases in Australia. What motivated you to tell this story in particular?
I thought for a long time this was a travesty of justice. I first dealt with this case in 2001 when I was a journalist for the Courier-Mail, a features writer. I heard about this case and I became interested in it. I flew to Sydney and read the police brief of evidence from the first coronial investigation and I was stunned at the depth and sadness and missed opportunities for justice. I thought it was just so unforgivably cruel that two little girls were raised believing their mother had simply abandoned them, and never bothered to contact them or anyone else again. Can you imagine being raised with that lie? And do I think it is a lie.
Then there were all of those people who could’ve helped Lyn. According to her friends, she was being battered by Chris before she disappeared. This was at a time when domestic violence wasn’t discussed as it is now — when women and their objectification was much more prevalent. But even so, there were people who were really close to Lyn, her friends and so on, who suspected at an early stage that she was a victim of foul play. But they didn’t connect with Lyn’s family (and I mean her sisters, brothers and parents) who didn’t know what the friends knew, and believed their son-in-law when he told them she’d just gone away.
Then there’s the fact that Chris — a Northern Beaches high school teacher — and his twin brother Paul were at the same time preying on schoolgirls for sex. The brothers were celebrities on the northern beaches, star footy players, and some of the police knew them pretty well. Somehow, with everything else that was going on, it all just gets swept under the carpet.
So I thought for some years this would be a story I wanted to properly tackle, if I ever had half a year to do it justice in the right format. Then the podcast concept started to develop in my mind and I thought, ‘Maybe this is the way. If I can track down people and reactivate this, get people thinking, it might flush out more leads.’ And here we are.
How does the audio storytelling and the newspaper reporting of The Teacher’s Pet investigation work together? What’s the relationship between these two kinds of media?
My colleague and good friend David Murray, who’s a crime editor from The Australian, he’s helping me produce the print and digital stories. And these stories are really stories that are obvious to us from what’s said in the script, from each podcast episode. We’ll talk several times a day sometimes, pick the strongest angle.
We’ve been mindful to not put in the paper too many fresh leads. In terms of timing, the dog in this is the podcast and the tail is the paper. We hadn’t wanted the tail, being the paper, to wag the dog. And so we’ve wanted to coordinate as best as possible revelations in the podcast with that day’s or next day’s paper.
Slade Gibson, the audio producer for the series, happens to be the former guitarist for Savage Garden. Please, tell me more — about Slade, and about his involvement in production.
There’s a digital team in Sydney and they’ve been running the website, managing the delivery of the podcast to the various channels — that’s way above my paygrade. But in Brisbane, the actual production team is really just myself and Slade.
There would be no episodes with him. He’s just a talent. He’s not just an audio engineer either; he’s creating all the original music — writing it, playing it. Everything you hear is coming out of his little studio in Brisbane.
His set of skills go right beyond audio, too. He’s got a fantastic intuition on storylines. On some of the angles I’ve been writing, he’s saying “I’m hearing this and getting a slightly different sense” or “Do you think that this part should go over here instead?”. It’s been such a fortunate pairing — and I didn’t even know him until about three months ago. He only lives about 20 minutes from my house, too, so I just drive over. We have a cup of tea and get into it.
Me, I’m just so unsophisticated with audio stuff. I’m fifty-one, my wife’s been trying to educate me on these things for a while. I bought this little Zoom H2n handy recorder in December and I still don’t know how it works. I turn it on, I don’t know how you change the channels or get the levels right. I didn’t know the best way to find podcasts through your app; I didn’t know you could look at charts of them! I think Slade must sometimes just roll his eyes.
You’ve said in a previous interview that you don’t think witnesses would have come forward and contacted you if you’d written about the story, rather than talked about it. Why?
I think that the feedback we’ve had from listeners is that they feel like they’re involved in the investigation as it’s unfolding. Not in real time but pretty close to it.
It’s this strange thing — people feel prepared to reach out to me as a result of hearing things, as opposed to reading them. They’re hearing, I hope, the authenticity in my voice, and in the voices of the people I’m interviewing. They’re realising this is something we are committed to. It’s not a witch hunt: it’s an effort to deliver some justice to the family that has been denied it for a very long time.
It makes you realise that even something that’s 36 years old can be resolved. You can find new evidence. Witnesses are coming forward, like the former babysitter who saw Chris being rough with Lyn in the house. She’s had this on her conscience all these years — but police never talked to her. Police should have found her. I’m disappointed at the pretty obvious paths the police should have gone down at times. Sergeant Damian Loone who investigated the 1982 disappearance was on his own, he did his best as a one-man show. But for years it’s been with the homicide squad. How come they haven’t found this stuff?
The Teacher’s Pet is available to stream and download on The Australian website. You can also find it wherever you get your podcasts.
Hedley Thomas is appearing as a panelist on Killer Stories: True Crime & Podcasts, a 2018 Brisbane Storyology talk on July 28. Tickets are on sale now.
