Shanelle Dawson: ‘I now firmly believe my father killed my mum. A devastating revelation by a psychic leaves no doubt in my mind’

The date is etched in Shanelle Dawson’s memory: on December 19, 2009, having spoken to a psychic, she finally voiced her fear that her father, Chris, a charismatic former rugby league star, had murdered her mother – in order to marry his schoolgirl lover.

For 27 years, Shanelle had clung to the belief that her mother Lynette, known as Lyn, had deliberately walked out of the family home in the secluded suburb of Bayview in Sydney, and chosen to vanish without trace.

Her father’s story was that Lyn, 33, had abandoned her children to go and join a commune, though strangely she had taken nothing with her.

In fact she’d left everything behind: all her clothes, her passport, even her wedding and engagement rings, her nursing certificates and her newly dispensed prescription contact lenses.

Lyn’s family, especially her brother Greg Simms, had been sceptical about Chris Dawson’s story from the start. 

He and his wife Merilyn could not believe Lyn would just walk off on a Saturday morning without a word, and willingly leave her adored little girls, Shanelle, who was then aged four, and her sister Sherryn, two. 

They became even more suspicious when Dawson, a schoolteacher, moved one of his former pupils into the family home and the marital bedroom in Lyn’s place, just two days after her disappearance in 1982.

But the Simms family suspended their disbelief for years, because despite their mother Helena having documented the tensions in Lyn’s marriage to Chris prior to her vanishing, she didn’t want to consider her son-in-law was a liar and murderer.

Shanelle’s beloved grandmother Helena Simms died in 2001, never knowing what had happened to her daughter Lyn.

That same year, the first coroner’s inquest into Lyn’s suspect 1982 death was held, followed by a second in 2003.

Both inquests recommended that charges be brought against Chris Dawson. Nevertheless, Shanelle continued for years to refuse to believe her father had done anything wrong. 

He was a ‘hero’ to her growing up, she says now, and she could not bring herself to think of him as a cold-blooded killer. Indeed, for years state prosecutors refused to carry out the coroners’ recommendations, taking the view there wasn’t enough evidence to convict.

It was only after the psychic told Shanelle that she believed her mother had been strangled with ‘her favourite blue belt’ that the truth dawned.

Flashbacks of her father’s occasional flare-ups of black-eyed anger started falling into place, as did his odd responses when she stumbled near to the truth. Later, she would have an induced memory of her mother’s body slumped in the car.

‘I believe I’d always known this truth and had repressed it,’ she says now. 

‘All of a sudden, so much made sense – the snapshots of incoherent memories, the flashes of weird moments I’d had with my dad, where the cracks had shown. 

‘The way my mother’s memory was banished, and we never spoke of her, nor had any photos of her, or ever mentioned her birthday or anything about her…’

Yet it would be another 13 years before Dawson faced justice. He was found guilty of Lyn’s murder just two years ago, then aged 74, after an award-winning true crime podcast investigating Lyn’s disappearance, The Teacher’s Pet, sparked global public interest in the case.

Although it was never established precisely how Chris Dawson murdered his wife, or how and where he disposed of her body, NSW Supreme Court Judge Ian Harrison SC ruled that Lynette Joy Dawson did not leave her house alive on or soon after January 8, 1982.

His Honour could not say if Lyn had been strangled or smothered, but the trial heard the mother-of-two’s last words to her own mother were slurred, suggesting she had been drugged, saying her popular high school teacher husband had just mixed her ‘a lovely drink’.

She vanished without a trace thereafter and Helena Simms took her desperate search for her daughter to the grave.

Justice Harrison found Dawson had murdered Lyn and disposed of her body because he was ‘besotted’ and infatuated with the schoolgirl known as JC.

Dawson’s 2022 trial heard the star footballer used an ‘engineered window of quiet seclusion’ to get rid of Lyn’s remains which were never found, despite searches of the back yard and swimming pool surrounds. 

It was not until 2012 that Shanelle agreed to a police request to be hypnotised to try to recover memories about what she had witnessed on the night of January 8, 1982. 

Under hypnosis, she saw her four-year-old self standing in her pyjamas at the kitchen door and hearing the sound of fighting, and ‘seeing my father’s hands around my mother’s neck’. 

Shanelle also remembered being in the back of the family car with ‘my mother slumped in the front seat’ and her father ‘retrieving a shovel from the boot of the car, and I see him digging’.

Her memories, recounted in her book, My Mother’s Eyes, could not be used in her father’s murder trial, but Shanelle did participate in The Teacher’s Pet podcast, which helped advance the re-opening of the case by police. 

Presented by journalist Hedley Thomas, the podcast topped the charts with 60 million downloads worldwide, and put the spotlight on the lives of Chris Dawson and his identical twin brother, Paul. 

The pair were closer than most siblings: they dressed in matching clothes and had matching number plates on their cars. They were both former models and played professional rugby for the same team in New South Wales, before both going on to train as teachers. 

Neither smoked nor drank, and they chose to live within spitting distance of each other, first in Sydney and later in Queensland. They were nicknamed ‘Perfect Paul’ and ‘Cranky Chris’, the latter a nod to Shanelle’s father’s notorious black temper.

Chris Dawson’s murder trial heard that when he moved 16-year-old schoolgirl JC into his home as ‘stepmother’ to his two little girls that his twin Paul and his wife Marilyn were soon aware of the arrangement.

Although it is not suggested he was in any way involved, surely Paul, who knew Lyn well – she had been his twin brother’s sweetheart since their teens – would have been concerned about his sister-in-law’s sudden disappearance?

Shanelle, now 47, would like to know, but can’t ask because of the rift that has divided her relatives over her mother’s disappearance even in the years before Lyn’s side of the family suspected Chris Dawson of murder.

‘I haven’t spoken to Paul in more than 15 years,’ Shanelle tells us. ‘In Paul and his wife Marilyn’s statements, there are still a lot of unanswered questions.

‘I asked the detective on the case, as it seems obvious to me there’s more detail to be gleaned there. His response was: “There is no evidence to suggest that further questioning is needed”.’

Shanelle vividly recalls the day she first discussed with someone else her fears that her father had killed her mother. 

Several months after seeing the psychic in 2009, she drove to visit her mother’s brother Greg and his wife Merilyn at their home in the harbour town of Newcastle in New South Wales. She told them: ‘I believe my father murdered my mum.’

She remembers: ‘My aunt and uncle gave me big hugs, there were tears, and they expressed so much relief that I had finally come to know the truth.’

Her uncle Greg, a former police officer who had spent years investigating his sister’s disappearance, then showed her the evidence he had compiled from the inquests.

‘Reading those files helped to make it all sink in, in a very grounded and solid way,’ Shanelle recalls. 

‘Part of me still wanted to believe that it might have been an accident, but that was yet another grasping of hope that my dad might not be that horrible. The evidence suggested otherwise, and I had to let that hope dissolve along with so much else.’

Her father had gone on to marry JC, who had been the family’s babysitter, on January 15, 1984. JC was barely 19 years old, he was 35, and she wore Lyn’s wedding ring for the ceremony.

JC and Chris had a child together, and she had acted as not the most sympathetic of stepmothers to Shanelle and Sherryn, it was alleged at the murder trial, as her own unhappy marriage to coercive and controlling Chris began to take on a disturbing semblance to his previous one to Lyn.

JC fled the marriage in 1990, when Shanelle was just a teenager, and Chris would later go on to marry for a third time, taking his two daughters into a blended family with their new stepmother Sue and her children. 

It was only after JC aired her suspicions about what had happened to the first Mrs Dawson that police conducted a proper recorded interview, in 1991, with Chris about his wife’s disappearance.

Shanelle would not break contact with her father until she was in her early 40s and had a daughter of her own.

The Teacher’s Pet podcast had begun airing five months earlier, its revelations and interviews throwing all the facts and memories of Shanelle’s life into uncomfortable perspective.

It was Father’s Day, September 2, 2018, three months before he would be arrested and charged with murder. 

Despite fearing the very worst of him, Shanelle had maintained contact until then because she still felt torn inside. She also wanted desperately not to fall out with her sister, who to this day still believes their father is innocent.

The day Shanelle finally broke contact, she sent him a text saying: ‘You are my father, and I’ll always love you; you are a part of me and me of you. But I won’t live a life based on lies, nor will I keep subjecting myself to emotional manipulation and control.’

His response was to shoot back and blame her: ‘This is not about me. You have continuously pushed your family away and made the choice to be “free spirited”.’

Even today, she is conflicted between her innate love for him and her revulsion of him.

Shanelle, who has autism, travelled the world in a bid to escape her demons and now lives in a camper van in New South Wales with her daughter Kialah, ten, whom she home schools.

‘Kialah suggested that we go and visit him in prison?’ she says. ‘But I’m not sure he would want to see us. He’s still in denial about what he did. I still feel deep grief and disbelief and am trying to psychologically understand the father I thought I knew.’

Shanelle is also now estranged from her younger sister, who has described the case as a ‘witch hunt’.

Tragically, Shanelle barely remembers her mother, who met Dawson at a school dance when they were both 16 before marrying him five years later.

‘When I was little, there were no photos of Mum around except for a few kept in a shoebox alongside a lock of my baby hair, up high and shoved to the back of the cupboard,’ she writes in My Mother’s Eyes, published last year.

‘I cherished those tiny remnants of Mum so much, though I certainly never pulled them out to look at them when my father was around, or often at all,’ she said.

‘Growing up without my mother was as though I had a deep and huge wound that nobody but her knew how to tend to. Nobody else in the immediate family acknowledged my mother and we didn’t discuss her, so she became the elephant in the room.

‘If anybody in the outer circle of family ever mentioned Mum, there was an uncomfortable silence. Obviously, they weren’t aware of the unwritten code. Pretending somebody never existed doesn’t make it so.’

Shanelle remembers a happy early childhood but says that ended abruptly the day her mother left home.

‘Dad told us Mum had left because she didn’t love us anymore,’ she said. ‘It was a viciously cruel thing to say to us… the abandonment issues ran deep within me.’

After Joanne left in 1990, Shanelle, then aged 13, had three years alone with her father and sister, before Dawson married Sue, a maths and science teacher, and moved to the Gold Coast, where Sue lived with her twin children.

‘That was the first time I started observing glimpses of deeply concerning traits in my father,’ she said. 

‘Up until then he could do no wrong. But he would bully my stepbrother and pretend to ‘play’ rough with him, scowling at him not to be a sissy if he started to cry. I’d catch a glimpse of the dark look in dad’s eyes and know he wasn’t playing.’

Other recollections began to emerge. A key memory was being rebuked by her father for contradicting his insistence that on the morning of Lyn’s disappearance he had driven her mother to a bus stop so she could take a break from the family.

‘I remember the feeling that that’s not actually what happened,’ she says. ‘”Why is he saying that?” I remember correcting his version of events and he took me into the bathroom and scolded me.’

When she was 14 years old, her father said to her: ‘It’s a shame your mother let herself go. She had such a pretty face.’

She says: ‘I don’t remember the context of the conversation. I just remember vividly the line my father spoke and the creepy feeling it gave me at the time.’

There was another moment, when she was 17 and about to leave home. ‘I for some reason said to him: “I feel like you need to forgive yourself for something.” And he flashed me a look, and looked deep into my eyes. I remember thinking that was a strange deep look.’

It was only when her father was arrested in 2018 that the truth fully sunk in.

While Shanelle will never know whether the psychic was right and her mother was strangled with a blue belt, a police search under the pool surrounds at the Dawson’s old home in Sydney’s northern beaches uncovered a pink cardigan.

Lyn was known to have owned a favourite pink cardigan, but a DNA test of the garment yielded no results. 

But on her father’s arrest, and despite his continuing protestations of his innocence, Shanelle knew at last that her deep suspicions of his guilt were true, and the heavy weight of her father’s crime finally registered.

‘The image that stays in my head of that sad, sad day is of my father wearing shorts and being escorted from his Gold Coast home by suit-wearing detectives,’ she says.

‘His head is bowed down. “My dear dad,” I thought as I watched him being taken off to jail. “I know you’ve done a really, f***ing horrible thing and this is necessary justice”. But still, it breaks my heart, again and again.’

After the guilty verdict, Chris was sentenced to 24 years in jail. Last year, he was also given a three-year sentence for having unlawful sexual activity with the student AB.

The last time Shanelle saw her father, who’s now 76, was when she read out her victim impact statement in court, her now-convicted murderer father a broken old inmate in the dock.

‘When my father was brought into the courtroom, I started to cry at the sight of him,’ she recalls. ‘As he limped toward his chair, in his prison greens, the tears kept coming.’

Dawson didn’t look at his daughter as she read her statement to him, weeping, to a stunned court room.

‘The night you removed our mother from our lives was the night you destroyed my sense of safety and belonging in this world for many decades to come,’ she said, her voice occasionally wavering.

‘Almost all of the love, nurturing and kindness vanished from my life. Why didn’t you just divorce her? Because of money? For God’s sake.

‘Please tell us where she is. I hope you will finally admit the truth to yourself and give us the closure we need.’ 

Shanelle said when she heard that her father would be in prison until he was in his 90s, virtually a death sentence, she didn’t celebrate for her mother. 

‘I didn’t rejoice when the sentence was handed down,’ she said. ‘I was consumed with a heavy sadness. 

‘I accepted the trial and sentencing as a necessary part of the process and I’m glad at least part of the truth has been told that my mother didn’t abandon us. But I dearly wish the whole situation never happened at all.’

As he was jailed for murder, Dawson split from his third wife Sue after an almost 30-year marriage.

My Mother’s Eyes ($34.99, Hachette Australia) is available online and in book shops.