Chris Dawson has faced court today in Sydney on the charge of murdering his wife, Lyn Dawson. Lyn’s disappearance 37 years ago was the subject of true crime podcast Teacher’s Pet, and last December Chris Dawson was arrested on the Gold Coast before being extradited to Sydney and charged with murder.
According to the ABC, the court was told during a short hearing that Chris Dawson’s legal team had been given 4,500 pages of material from the Teacher’s Pet podcast team, but police were still working through 100 gigabytes of documents, audio files and video from the podcast. Magistrate Megan Greenwood granted the prosecution 12 weeks extension given the “voluminous nature” of the material.
Once outside the court, Dawson’s solicitor Greg Walsh reportedly told journalists that prosecutors only gave him the partial brief two days ago, and that within it was a hand-written diary of Lynette Dawson’s mother.
He said of the diary:
“We have never seen that before — in both inquests there was an edited transcript but we have now been provided with the actual hand-written copies of the diary and they are very significant. That type of evidence is critical in a case like this, it helps my client significantly.”
Walsh also reportedly said he will be calling Hedley Thomas, the journalist behind Teacher’s Pet, forward to give evidence when the matter goes to committal hearing later in the year. Walsh said:
“He well knew that police were reinvestigating this very serious matter and he interviewed witnesses in the full knowledge that they had previously been actual witnesses in the [two previous] inquests, and he knew the risk of contaminating them and affecting the reliability of the evidence.”
The case will return to court on May 9.
