Christopher Dawson first noticed the teenage girl in the playground at Cromer high school on Sydney’s northern beaches.
According to evidence that the girl known as JC gave to the NSW supreme court, Dawson later told her that after this sighting he decided he wanted to know her better because of how attractive she was.
It was early 1980. She would turn 16 the coming February. Dawson was 31 and a teacher at the school.
Within two years of that playground sighting, Dawson had become so infatuated with JC that he had murdered his wife, Justice Ian Harrison ruled on Tuesday.
The verdict marked a stunning conclusion to a 40-year mystery that was thrust into the international spotlight by a phenomenally popular podcast.
But it also laid bare in stark detail Dawson’s pursuit of the teenager, her struggles to break free of his orbit and the decade she spent with him before fleeing what she claims was an abusive relationship.
“On the one hand, Mr Dawson offered her friendship, stability and guidance as a well-respected and charismatic male figure of a kind that had been lacking in her life,” Harrison said of JC’s evidence.
“On the other hand, JC appears to have found herself in an emotional bind with a man whose enthusiasm for their relationship was not matched by hers.
“I found that JC’s insistence during her evidence that she was at the time only a child to be an evocative description of her predicament with wider metaphorical implications.”
JC said that not only was she a child when she met Dawson, but that her home life was falling apart. Her parents had separated and she did not often see her father, with whom she had previously had a good relationship.
Her stepfather, who lived with her and her mother and sisters in an apartment, was very controlling, she said. He and her mother drank heavily and became aggressive with each other.
“JC spoke to Mr Dawson about her unsatisfactory home life and she might have confided in her friends about this as well,” Harrison found.
“Mr Dawson was an adult and she felt she could trust him as her teacher.”
It was in this context that Dawson’s pursuit intensified, Harrison found.
She told the court that in 1980, when she was in Year 11, she went to help Dawson at a school carnival. She said he put his hand on her leg while they were sitting next to the finish line, but Dawson disputes this.
He bought her a school bag and often left love letters inside, including one in which he referred to himself as God, she said.
In mid-1980, she started to babysit Dawson and his wife Lynette’s two young daughters.
About the same time, they had sex for the first time, she told the court.
From this point, she said they had sex every Friday night. Dawson would pick her up, stop at a convenience store to buy her chocolate and they would have sex in his car at Manly Point, she told the court.
JC said that during this time Dawson asked her to marry him “over and over and over again” until she agreed in 1981 while still at school, but Dawson disputes this.
She told the court that her home life was becoming increasingly violent and she had tried to escape her stepfather’s outbursts by staying in her bedroom with the door closed.
By October 1981, she was living at the Dawsons’ home at Gilwinga Drive, Bayview.
Harrison found that in the context of Dawson’s increased possessiveness of JC, his behaviour towards Lynette worsened (though, despite evidence given by multiple witnesses, Harrison did not agree that Dawson was physically abusive towards his wife).
The relationship was no longer as clandestine: JC went to the Cromer high school end-of-year formal in 1981 with Dawson as her “date”, and the couple sat with the other teachers and their partners.
In early November 1981, when JC returned to the Bayview home from a shift at a local supermarket, she was confronted by Lynette. JC told the court Lynette said to her: “You’ve been taking liberties with my husband.”
JC moved out that night and never saw Lynette again.
An aborted attempt by JC and Dawson to move to Queensland occurred the following month, and she tried to break up with him soon after but he resisted, Harrison found.
On either New Year’s Day or 2 January 1982, JC went camping with her sisters and friends at South West Rocks, in the state’s north.
She said Dawson put pressure on her to stay in Sydney with him, but she did not want to. After she left, Harrison concluded, Dawson made the decision to kill Lynette. He did so on or about 8 January 1982, Harrison found.
JC was phoning Dawson every day during her holiday, and she said in her evidence that on one of these calls he told her: “Lyn’s gone. She’s not coming back. Come back to Sydney and help me look after the children and be with me.”
By 12 January 1982, she was back living in the house at Gilwinga Drive.
On 11 February 1982 – her 18th birthday – he gave her a card that read: “To the most beautiful girl in the world on her 18th birthday.”
But JC said she had not wanted to be there, saying she wanted to be a normal 18-year-old with her friends, rather than the “sex slave”, “housekeeper”, “stepmother” and “babysitter” she was in her relationship with Dawson.
Two years later, the couple were married at Bayview, and then moved to Queensland. The marriage wouldn’t last.
JC told the court that during one argument, she said to him: “You got rid of your first wife, you could easily get rid of me.”
She said he stood completely still, before responding: “Don’t say things like that.”
