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Crime Story Episode 7: Hedley Thomas

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to sexual assault. Please take care.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story. Every week, a new crime with the storyteller who knows it best.

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HEDLEY THOMAS: We couldn't sugarcoat the story. It was a story of murder, of exploitation of a schoolgirl, of the failure of a criminal justice system of another era. And that was The Teacher's Pet.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In 1982, Lyn Dawson disappeared from her home in Sydney, Australia. According to her husband, Chris, the loving mother of two just up and left. But people close to Lyn didn't buy it. Many suspected that Chris had something to do with it. But for 40 years, that case went nowhere. No one found Lyn and Chris was free to live his life. That all changed when journalist Hedley Thomas dropped his first episode of the podcast, The Teacher's Pet.

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FEMALE SPEAKER: Well, it was a podcast that captured Australia's attention. The Teacher's Pet…

FIRST MALE SPEAKER: The crime series centring on the disappearance of Sydney nurse, Lyntte Dawson, has been downloaded…

SECOND MALE SPEAKER: Downloaded by millions that delved into Lyntte Dawson's disappearance in 1982.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The Teacher's Pet was a massive hit in Australia and pressured police to reopen the case. For some, Thomas's reporting went too far and risked sabotaging an unsolved murder.

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MALE SPEAKER: That podcast he did was as dangerous as it was useful in getting justice for Lyntte Dawson's family.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But others were just happy to see the case re-examined.

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MALE SPEAKER: It prompted new witnesses to come forward who've now testified in Chris Dawson's murder trial.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Whichever way you look at it, Thomas and The Teacher's Pet blew the case wide open.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Welcome to Crime Story, Hedley Thomas, and thank you for joining us.

HEDLEY THOMAS: Thank you, Kathleen. I really appreciate your intro, and I'm happy to be here.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So I guess you can't say that your work doesn't make a difference, can you?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Oh, look, it's made a profound difference. And not just in Lyn’s case, but in, I think, many, many other cases. I'll never know for sure how many and to what extent, but Lyn’s story has empowered so many people to take a stand and really get out of a relationship or report a suspicious event to the police. It's never too late.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, let's start at the beginning. Who was Lyn Dawson?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Lyn was a nurse who had been a very loving mother of two little girls, and they were age four and two in January 1982 when Lyn disappeared. Lyn was 33 years old when she suddenly vanished. She worked part-time as the nurse at a childcare centre near her house in a beautiful part of Sydney called Bayview. And everybody tells me you could not have come across a more dedicated, doting, loving mother.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And tell me about her husband. Who did people think Chris Dawson was?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Chris Dawson was a very charismatic, handsome, fit first grade footballer, and he played in Sydney for the Newtown Jets, and he was a powerful footballer. He was known as cranky Chris because he could sometimes blow up on the field and would occasionally use his elbows or fists. And he had an exceptionally close twin, Paul. He was known as passive Paul. He was just a little more measured, less likely to unravel with anger. And these two brothers were incredibly close. They both became school teachers. They both played rugby together. Everything they did was a mirror reflection of the other. And it was, for many people, a bit creepy. But Chris was popular, and he was popular at the local high school on the Northern beaches where he taught. He was a PE teacher, which is physical education in Australia. And the students thought he was pretty cool because he'd not only been a well-known footballer, he was also an occasional male model.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And what did Chris say happened to his wife?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Chris claimed that on Friday, January eight, 1982, he and his wife went to marriage counselling because they were having some difficulties. The counselling had gone well. In fact, Lyn's friends had seen her walking out of counselling and into the childcare centre with Chris holding hands. So they were surprised because they knew the relationship was fraught. Then, according to Chris, on the Friday night, after they'd had a glass of wine and been enjoying each other's company again, Lyn was suddenly a little distressed because she was ruminating on problems that Chris claimed she had in her own family and so on. And he said that the next morning, she got up early, put on a load of washing, prepared some lunches for him and the girls because he had a part-time job as a life saver. And he said that he drove her to a bus stop, because Lyn didn’t drive, so that she could take a bus. She went to return some clothing and then he was expecting that she'd join him at the pool. And he said that's the last time he saw her, and that the last time he actually spoke to her was a couple of weeks later. But that at the swimming pool, she had called him, that he took a phone call in the kiosk of the pool, and he came back from the kiosk and he said to Lyn’s mother and the friend, that was Lyn. And she said that she was on the Central Coast with friends and she needed some time away to think things over, meaning in the relationship. And he said he had a couple of other calls over the ensuing weeks, and then he never heard from her again.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And this didn't sit well with her mother, her friends. Why not? What made them suspicious of this story?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Well, it didn't sit well, but her mother and Lyn's family, that is Lyn's. Two brothers and sister were not initially and not for several years suspicious of Chris, and that's partly because he was a trusted member of their family. They believed him when he said what had happened, but they knew that Lyn was in some stress because of the relationship difficulties. They also knew, though, that what Chris was describing was so out of character for Lyn because she was a very responsible person. She had a reputation for being utterly reliable, very loving. Over the previous 10 days, she had talked to her mother or seen her mother on every day, and she was organizing this surprise birthday party. She had so much to look forward to with her girls, and everybody knew that she absolutely adored those little girls. So why would she suddenly take off while on a purported shopping trip carrying just the shopping bag and wearing a pair of pink shorts? But because of Chris's standing in Lyn's family, they accepted what he told them. But on the other hand, Lyn's friends, particularly those at the childcare centre, were immediately and deeply suspicious about what had happened. And I think that unfortunately, there was just a disconnect between those friends and Lyn's family, including Lyn's brother, who was a serving police officer at the time, such that those suspicions weren't conveyed.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you mentioned that Lyn's friends knew the relationship was fraught because there was something going on with the babysitter that he wasn't hiding, was he?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Well, he was not hiding it from everyone because it was impossible to disguise. Chris Dawson was actually infatuated with a schoolgirl, a girl who was in his physical education class when she was in her second last year of high school. In fact, he ensured that she would be moved into his class and that he would teach it because he had seen her around the school and really liked what he saw.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I mean, this schoolgirl, just how old was she?

HEDLEY THOMAS: She was 16 years old when he started having sex with her. He was grooming her for months beforehand. She was vulnerable. She had difficulties in her own life because her stepfather was a drunk and violent. She lived in a relatively small home with her mother and him and the sisters. And it was very difficult to get away in this place from the anger and the alcohol and the tensions. So when Chris Dawson offered her opportunities to babysit his daughters in his beautiful new and very spacious home with his wife, who was so caring and gentle and prepared to help this child, of course, she ran towards it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What happened when she moved into the house?

HEDLEY THOMAS: So the grooming and the sexual connection, and I'm loathed to call it a relationship anymore. Certainly, she hates it being described as a relationship. She calls it abuse, but it leads to him becoming very close and continuing to see each other at every opportunity. And while she's in the house, Chris is taking every opportunity behind his wife's back to have sex with her in the spare room in the house, sometimes after mixing his wife a spirit drink which would make her go to sleep, sometimes in her chair. And you have to question whether there was something other than bourbon or gin in her alcoholic drinks.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And eventually, he tries to push Lyn out, right?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Yeah, absolutely. Chris wants to sell the house. He wants Lyn and he to separate. He has been unable to hide any longer the connection he has with the girl. Lyn has actually seen them in bed together. Her friends are telling her, Lyn, he's fucking the babysitter. That’s as bluntly as it was put to her. And she's come to the realization that this has been going on, but she's still utterly devoted to Chris. And so she tolerates what's gone on and forgives him after throwing the girl out.

HEDLEY THOMAS: Then we get to the 23rd of December, 1981, and that's the date on which Chris and the babysitter pack up the car and plan to drive north to Queensland, where I live, to effectively start a new life, to run away from his job as a teacher, from the home, from everything. But it's on that trip that the babysitter becomes just so distressed and homesick and she breaks out in hives. She's very anxious and she says, I can't go through with this. This relationship is too hard. And they turn the car around near the border with Queensland, drive all the way back to Sydney about 10 hours, and they spend Christmas night in the school gymnasium sleeping on mattresses. And she goes and stays with her mom, and then she's staying with a sister who's moved out. And then in early January, she goes to a place called South West Rocks with her friends from high school. They’re having like a schoolies break at the beach. And Chris becomes incredibly concerned that she's going to hook up with one of her school friends, someone her own age. And so on this Saturday, the 9th of January, which is the day Lyn’s mother discovers that Lyn hasn't turned up, Chris is making preparations to drive to South West Rocks in the evening or the following day, and he drives up there. Lyn’s suddenly disappeared, and Chris fetches the babysitter, brings her back to the family home. And within three days maximum of Lyn having disappeared, the baby sitter is now living in the family house. She’s living in Lyn’s bedroom. She's using all of Lyn’s belongings, and is from that point on the replacement wife and stepmother.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So just so I understand. On the very same day that his wife goes missing, Chris decides to bring his 16-year-old girlfriend, the family babysitter, to live in his house. So how does the neighbourhood, Lyn’s friends and family, how do they deal with what they're seeing?

HEDLEY THOMAS: That’s a really good question. There's different reactions depending on which part of the family or friendship group they're coming from. So Lyn's mother and Lyn’s siblings, they were not immediately aware that the babysitter had moved in. But one of Lyn's good friends, who was her next door neighbour, a woman called Julie Andrew, she knew, and she was a very powerful witness in the ultimate murder trial. And she was also an incredibly compelling interviewee for me because she describes her near certainty that Chris had killed Lyn and replaced Lyn with the babysitter. And she has struggled for years with the fact that she didn't raise the alarm about this at a very early stage. She waited, she says, for police to come and talk to her. And it seems extraordinary now that such a phenomenon would occur, that an intelligent woman who believes her friend has been murdered by her husband and replaced by a babysitter doesn't immediately go to the police, waits 16 years. And Julie has herself talked about this very candidly against her own interest and just described how different things were for women in 1982. I think she was also a bit scared and intimidated by Chris. But she says she'd waited for the police to knock on her door. And at that time, in that era, you trusted police, you trusted your doctor, you trusted judges. If they didn't come to her, then did they know something that she didn't know? And so she just waited and nothing happened.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Why didn't the police knock on her door? What were the police… what did they know? What were they doing when this woman just up and disappears and a babysitter moves in?

HEDLEY THOMAS: I have wondered this question so many times. Here's what we know for certain. Chris Dawson and his brother, Paul, were well known on the northern beaches for their footballing talent. They were also playing for a team called the Belrose Eagles after they had retired from first grade football with the Newtown Jets. The Belrose Eagles president was a copper, a senior detective on the northern beaches. His name was Brian Smacker Gardiner. And Brian was regarded as a no nonsense cop. And I'm not suggesting for a moment that he suspected foul play and covered it up, but it's unquestionably the case that there was a very lame police investigation. And I wonder whether Chris, through the influence he had on the police, persuaded them to turn a blind eye, persuaded them that his wife was a bit unstable, might have gone off with a cult, don’t look at this too deeply, you know me, I'm Chris, and they backed off. It's either that or something worse like corruption.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: At what point do you enter the story and what do you know? I mean, this is so much.

HEDLEY THOMAS: It's incredible. When you look back on all of it and you try to put all the pieces of the puzzle together and do the timeline, it's just such an incredible case and story. But my connection to it starts in 2001. At that time, I was a reporter for the Courier Mail newspaper, and I'd gone into the library of the newspaper to catch up on what the Southern Papers had been reporting. And so I was going through some of the bound files, and the Sydney Daily Telegraph had some really interesting stories coming out of an inquest that had just wrapped up, and it was an inquest into the presumed death of Lynette Joy Dawson in 1982. So I'm reading these files in 2001 at a time when, you know, I was a very proud new dad myself. My son was a toddler. My wife was heavily pregnant with our second child, our daughter. And reading about how these little girls had been raised with this lie that their mother had just decided to leave them and didn't love them enough to get in touch again, but was no doubt living somewhere in Australia and started a new life. And it just was the cruelest thing that I could imagine a child being raised with. And then I discovered that Chris Dawson had been a school teacher at my old high school at Southport in Queensland. I went there through the eighties and I left at the end of year 12, 1984, and Chris gets a job teaching at the start of 1985 at my old high school. So I've missed him by just weeks, and I'm fascinated by that connection as well. And I have friends who repeated or friends who were a year below who knew Mr. Dawson. And so I decided to go to Sydney and try to research this case that had been unfolding in the inquest. And I rang Damien Lewin, who was the police officer who had assembled the brief of evidence for the inquest before I left Brisbane to fly to Sydney, and I asked him about it and he was very open and he said, look, I've got permission to show you the brief of evidence. You come to the d y police station, you can sit and read it and take notes. So I did that. And I wrote this article as a result of hours and hours in that police station just taking notes. And I just thought, this is the most extraordinary case I've come across. I must commit to something more than, you know, just this weekend article.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But the inquiry did rule that her death was problematic and that the police should look at the husband, but nothing ever came of that. Am I correct?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Absolutely right. So there were in fact two inquests, two separate coroner's grand proceedings that led to recommendations that Chris Dawson be considered seriously by the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions as a murder suspect and prosecuted for the suspected murder of his wife, Lyn. And yeah, that's a big step for a coroner to take. They don't do that willy nilly. And both times, the office of the DPP rejected those recommendations and refused to prosecute, said that there was insufficient evidence to be reasonably confident of a success and therefore they declined. And as I got into the podcasts investigation, I formed a very clear view that the DPP had fundamentally misunderstood key parts of the evidence always in Chris's favour.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So we'll jump ahead to the release of Teacher's Pet. And from what I gather, the response was pretty intense.

HEDLEY THOMAS: You know, I had no idea what might happen, but it began very encouragingly in that people started contacting me immediately, people who knew Lyn, who had held on to information for years or who had taken information to the police and they felt ignored by police. And at the end of every episode, I issued a call saying, hey, look, if anyone has any information, you can contact me confidentially. And I gave an email address and people did that. I would be ripping parts of the completed episodes out and replacing it with this new material. And so it ended up that I got way behind in terms of the Head Start that I thought I had on my listenership. I thought I would always be about a month ahead of the listenership because I had five episodes that were done and we were releasing them weekly. I quickly lost that buffer and got to a point where we were producing 12, 14,000 word episodes within a few days each week to try to maintain the flow and the momentum of the series. And the demands became completely ludicrous, but we were running on adrenaline and there's so much material coming in we couldn't stop. And listenership kept growing, and the biggest risk was that we would screw up and make a terrible error, a factual error that would undermine everything. But we had a sense that if we could pull this off, we could possibly solve this case and make a difference after what was then 36 years.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Can you give me one or two of the biggest pieces of either new evidence or sort of examples of something that you heard about that really shifted the case for everyone?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Yeah, absolutely. There was a serving magistrate called Jeff Linden, and he had played football with Chris. He knew Lyn. He’d even acted as Chris's solicitor when Chris needed to get a divorce from his missing wife, missing and murdered wife. But of course, that wasn't known to Jeff. And so before Jeff became a magistrate, he was talking to a guy on the northern beaches who had moved into Chris's old house. And this fellow, he was talking to Jeff about the former owner, Chris. He kept coming back to the house, walking up into the grounds of the house, and he was saying that there was landscaping going on. And he made a point of asking, where are you digging every time? Where are you digging on the property? And Jeff, he told me that that just sent chills through him. And he explained to the new owner, look, don’t you know the woman who used to live there has been missing all this time? And this guy, he went white and he just said, well, he keeps coming back and he wants to walk over the grounds. So that was a fascinating piece of information early in the piece.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And can I just say, because there became suspicion that probably if Chris killed her and her body is somewhere in the backyard.

HEDLEY THOMAS: Well, that's right. The police were suspicious that Lyn's body could have been buried on the grounds. And in the year 2000, they actually did a dig just before the first inquest of the grounds. They dug around the swimming pool. And in the dirt around the swimming pool, they found a woman's cardigan that had multiple cut marks that the police forensics officers said looked like it had been repeatedly stabbed with a knife. So there was always suspicion about the grounds, but the police never thoroughly searched the whole block. It was a large acreage block. So that was the first piece of significant information. The other very powerful piece of evidence was the fact that I knew from interviewing one of Lin's very good friends at the childcare centre, a woman called Sue Strath, that in 1985, she had made a formal complaint to an office of government known as the Ombudsman. And the Ombudsman is there to take in citizens’ complaints and investigate whether there's been failure by bureaucrats or different elements of the government in performing their functions. Sue complained that the police hadn't properly investigated her friend's disappearance. And she said that, you know, nothing happened. So I knew the government departments, a bit like journalists, could be hoarders, and this file could have been kept, possibly stored some way. It could be in archives, who knew? And it was bugging me, and I just started thinking about the possibilities. And I went to the New South Wales state archives and began making inquiries there, and they found Sue Strath’s original complaint file from 1985. And in that file, there were a number of internal police documents. Because the police, in trying to cover their asses, have written back to the Ombudsman what they did and have set out their procedures and so on. And amazingly, despite the detail of Sue's complaint, which is in the file, her handwritten complaint, the police don't make any actual fresh inquiry on her complaint. They spend all their time trying to cover up what they didn't do the first time in 1982. But incredibly, there's another document in this folder. It's a handwritten statement signed by Chris Dawson. It’s dated August 1982. And in this statement, he just lies about the situation in his marriage. He omits any mention of the babysitter. He omits the fact, for example, that he had left with her to start a new life. But he does talk about how he went away around Christmas time on his own, he says, and that shortly thereafter, Lyn said that she wanted to do the same thing, go away on her own. So these lies and omissions in this handwritten statement hadn't been seen before, and the statement had been lost because so many files were lost. And when I found that, it was a real eureka moment. You know, it seemed to me that it was evidence of a consciousness of his own guilt, that he lied to avoid addressing his guilt over the probable murder of his wife. I also spoke to a witness, a former babysitter in the house, who saw Chris being violent towards his wife.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: This is a different babysitter, not the one he ended up grooming.

HEDLEY THOMAS: That's right. This is the babysitter who came before the one he ended up marrying. And she believed that at that time, she was being groomed too. She was in a vulnerable situation, but she got out of the house. Before she parted company with Chris, she saw him pushing Lyn very roughly into a doorway. She also saw him whip her with a tea towel across her bare back when he had a dirty glass handed to him. And in her view, if something was just a little bit out of place, because he had a very ordered life, his wardrobe, everything that was on display needed to be perfectly lined up. If something was a little bit out of whack, he would lose it and that would fire his temper.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So I listened to every second of your podcast frustrated and angry and shocked about everything you were telling us about the lack of any kind of movement. But eventually, I get a podcast in my feed that tells me he's been arrested finally. How much do you feel like the podcast made that happen?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Yeah, I think the podcast made a very significant difference in the court of public opinion. There was rage in Australia and many listeners because they were hearing a podcast that was describing accurately an utter failure of the criminal justice system over many years. And I was speculating with the benefit of documents and letters that the DPP had written, that the DPP had actually misunderstood the case and had wrongly believed that Lyn was seen at a time when the police were telling the DPP she must have already been dead. These sightings, so-called sightings, were, I believe, completely bogus. One of them was reported by Chris, and he literally tells the homicide detectives that his footballing mate, Ray, his wife, Sue, saw Lyn outside a fruit barn on the Central Coast, and then Lyn drove away. Now, Lyn didn't drive. No one took a statement from Sue, but that was enough for the early investigation to be terminated, even though the police never went to Sue to say, hey, is this true? Your friend Chris says that you saw someone you thought could have been Lyn outside this fruit barn before she drove away. They never checked at that. And yet, that purported sighting, which was complete crock of crap, in my opinion, but came out of the DPP’s narrative that Lyn must have been seen or Lyn was possibly seen. And the listenership, I think, you know, smelt a rat. We know that in this day and age, a mother of two young children who suddenly disappears while her husband is completely infatuated with a teenager who he then marries, and no one ever sees the wife again, and she makes no claim on any assets and has never used a credit card or a bank card or a passport or a hospital card, never voted ever since. So all of this is coming out, and I think people were applying enormous pressure on the office of the DPP and on the police to do something.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Did the DPP, the prosecutor, respond to your podcast? Did they admit to any wrongdoing?

HEDLEY THOMAS: The DPP is like a vault in terms of explaining itself. It doesn't need to be publicly accountable. It would never say the rage of the community, new material and evidence from the podcast, all of that combined, along with the realization that we screwed up earlier to cause us to change their minds. They’ll never say that. And I got a very strong sense that I was the annoyance for both the DPP and the police. You know, they’re like investigative journalists, intruding on what they regard as their patch, even with an unsolved 36-year-old case. But it took a very robust, hard hitting, front footed and risky journalistic investigation to either make it or break it. And that's where we ended up.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In fact, it nearly broke it. Didn't the defence try to use the podcast to get the case thrown out?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Well, it's possible that it nearly broke it. The defence, as a result of the podcast, said that Chris Dawson, having been arrested at this stage, could never get a fair trial, that everybody who heard the podcast, because it was so detailed and had relied on witnesses who had been witnesses in the inquest some 16, 17 years earlier, those witnesses had been contaminated, the defence said, by Me, and the evidence couldn't be relied upon, and no jurors could possibly be found who could put out of their minds the podcast and all of the associated publicity because it had been so widely heard and downloaded and there's been so many thousands of stories spinning off.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How did the judge see it?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Of course, the DPP argued that while the podcast was certainly pervasive and had dealt with a huge amount of evidence, that many of the witnesses I talked to, they’d already given their evidence, they'd already given written statements and they had given testimony in the inquests. So all it would take would be a comparison of what they told me and what they previously said to work out whether or not they had changed their story, and then it would be open to the defence in a trial to question them on any inconsistencies. There was no evidence, in fact, that there was any contamination of witnesses. So the judge eventually threw out the multiple arguments of the defence, but it became very clear to me that the judge really didn't like the podcast. I think I probably got a one half star review from the main judge in that case.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What was that like, though? Were you nervous? I mean, it isn't usually journalists sitting there having to defend their work.

HEDLEY THOMAS: Yeah, Kathleen, it was like the podcast became a showcase of shame, you know, for the system which had failed this woman for so long. But then it's like shoot the messenger. And I had to hand over thousands of emails, WhatsApp messages, Facebook messages, all of my audio files, my interviews, so much material all under subpoena. I decided that, you know, we just had to endure this. I knew some very senior lawyers and former judges who said that, you know, it's theoretically possible for a murder proceeding to be permanently stayed the course of pre-trial publicity, but highly, highly unusual. It would take something very exceptional, that it's a bit of a trial and it's futile. You just got to have to endure this. And so endure it we did. I had three days, just under three days in the witness box, being cross-examined by one of the best criminal defence lawyers in Australia. And there's some very curt exchanges between us. And I just decided that, you know, you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound. And I was not going to be defensive or acknowledge or admit to anything that I thought was being unfairly put to me. I was proud of what the podcast achieved. I was righteously still indignant about the failure of the criminal justice system, a system that now wanted to attempt to put the journalism on trial. So there are all of these different things going on, and, you know, it was a tense time.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In the end, there was a verdict. Can you tell me what that was?

HEDLEY THOMAS: Chris Dawson was found guilty of Lyn's murder at the end of August 2022. The judge, the very senior judge, Justice Ian Harrison, said that he was in no doubt that Chris Dawson had murdered Lyn, who was utterly faultless, unsuspecting, and that he did it most likely on the evening of Friday, January 8th, 1982.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What was it like to hear that guilty pronouncement? It must have been something.

HEDLEY THOMAS: We were waiting for five hours of the judge's oral reasons before we got to that final sentence, guilty. And soon after that, two officers in uniform moved very briskly across the courtroom and held Chris and put the handcuffs on him. And this man, aged 74, was then bundled out of the courtroom limping like a wounded animal. I mean, he had football injuries that troubled him for years and dodgy knees. And he was taken down to the cells. And outside the court afterwards, it was just the most incredible crowd, and helicopters flew the media over the court building, and huge contingent of Press and TV and other media. And I stood with Lyn's family and my wife, Ruth. And looking back now, I still get chills thinking about it and the risks that were taken by all of us to sort of produce this story, because we were effectively Colin Chris Dawson, through the podcast, a murderer.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, listening, I mean, one of the things that really struck me was that it felt like as a listener, that you were saying that he was a murderer.

HEDLEY THOMAS: Yeah, I accept that.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: With lots of evidence and lots of reason to say it, but it absolutely felt to me, and that was something that set it apart for me, was that it was clear to you that he was guilty of killing Lyn.

HEDLEY THOMAS: Yeah. And it's a very big step for a journalist to take.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It really is.

HEDLEY THOMAS: Yeah. And I wouldn't have done that without the evidence that had come before my podcast and all of the lies that we had uncovered. You know, it was unavoidable. I didn't believe that when I was doing the podcast, I could ethically pretend with such a long fall of the story that I could give him the benefit of the doubt. So it would have taken a very different style of podcast to try to frame it that way, to try and make it almost like a 50-50, to try and come up with scenarios where Lyn had gone to live in a cult or moved overseas with a false passport and changed the way she looked or something. You know, how do you come up with such farfetched things in good faith? None of it actually was true in the evidence. So I thought, well, we either crash or crash through it. And he's got remedies. You know, he could sue us for defamation. And we took the view that if he did launch civil proceedings against us for defamation, for libel, we would defend those and we would put him in the witness box for the first time because he had avoided both the inquests in 2001 and 2003, and we would attempt to prove in a civil proceeding that he had murdered his wife. So we were up for that fight. We thought it's now or never. It's 36 years since this much loved woman who had kind of fallen through the cracks needed to be addressed. We couldn't sugarcoat the story. It was a story of murder, of exploitation of a schoolgirl, of the failure of a criminal justice system of another era, but it had sort of carried through many years and caused so much pain to so many people. And, you know, that's what we ended up with. That was The Teacher's Pet.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, thanks, Hedley. I am so appreciative of the time you gave me, and I really am appreciative of the work that you do. So thank you for joining us.

HEDLEY THOMAS: Thank you so much, Kathleen. I really, really appreciate you taking me through that. I never get tired talking about it. Sometimes, I get a bit sad thinking about parts of it, but it's such an important case. And I genuinely enjoy these conversations because they remind me of things that happen, sometimes funny, sometimes distressing, but all part of the overall picture.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Absolutely. Thanks again.

HEDLEY THOMAS: Thank you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Hedley Thomas's new book, The Teacher's Pet, is out now.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We drop a new episode every Monday. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcast’s YouTube channel or by subscribing to the CBC Podcast True Crime Channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to early Access, subscribers to our True Crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound Design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Agaard. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcast’s senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 7

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