In January 1982, a Sydney woman called Lynette Dawson disappeared without a trace, leaving two small children, all her personal effects and a trail of red flags for domestic violence that seemed really obvious to everyone but the police. This has all been recounted in The Teacher’s Pet, the most compelling podcast since the first, explosive, true-life apparent failure of justice was retold by Serial.
It runs to 14 episodes, some of them over two hours long, and has recently governed all my waking thoughts, all the airwaves of the home. My Mr started walking round the house, intoning in a committed Australian accent: “By now, serious inconsistencies had appeared in the logic of the DPP.” Her husband has always denied any wrongdoings, but I was, and remain, possessed by the urge to see him prosecuted.
Years later, the police were shamed into looking again, and started digging for her body around the swimming pool but stopped for financial reasons. Now Australian millionaires are offering to buy the house and dig to the Earth’s core. Listeners all over the world are offering to chip in, and not only would I join them, I cannot imagine anybody who wouldn’t.
This much I understand: death itself has no magnetism; even murder has none. Violence only captivates when it is underpinned by some bigger, systemic injustice (in this case, mind-boggling ambient misogyny). And justice, at close range, has no expiry date. A murder committed 36 years ago should, one imagines, be less important than one committed last month. Yet, up close, if anything, the passage of time only intensifies the importance of restitution. I still don’t know what it means, this thrill of collapsing life down to its purest elements of right and wrong. Is it escapism or does it galvanise? Is it anaesthetising or empowering? In the new media ecology, global and interconnected, the blistering force of true news is as confusing as that of fake news.
