AUSTRALIAN TRUE CRIME –

Lynette Dawson (nee Simms) disappeared from Sydney’s idyllic northern beaches in 1982 and was never seen again. Lynette was a caring nurse, a loving mother and devoted wife. Her husband, Chris Dawson, was a rugby league football legend, a popular teacher, and an exceptionally close identical twin of his brother, Paul. This golden-haired couple with their two young daughters would have been a model of domestic bliss if not for the fact that Chris was infatuated with their babysitter, his 16-year-old student, a girl he moved into the family house just two days after Lyn’s disappearance and subsequently married. Thirty-six years later, veteran print journalist Hedley Thomas revisited the story he’d first investigated nearly two decades earlier, but this time using podcast as his format. The Teachers Pet, the book, tells the extraordinary story of the crime, the podcast investigation, the sexual exploitation of female teenage students, the failure for four decades of the criminal justice system, the hopes of a family and a community desperate for answers, and the courtroom drama.

• “A tale of lust, loss and treachery about a vulnerable schoolgirl and a missing wife. From the journalist who pursued a killer” — Cover.
• Includes bibliographical references (pages 491-502).
• ix, 502 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly colour), portraits, facsimiles ; 23 cm.
• #130425/150126