Chris Dawson Joanne Curtis Wedding & Full Update – Schoolgirl lover of suspected wife-killer Chris Dawson now a gran, 54

Joanne Curtis, now 54, was just 16 when she was first groomed for sex by her teacher Chris Dawson. When Mr Dawson’s wife Lyn disappeared in January 1982, Joanne moved into their home at Bayview. Ms Curtis is pictured on Sydney’s northern beaches where she still lives

Chris Dawson was twice the age of Joanne Curtis (pictured) when they began having sex while she was in Year 11 at Cromer High and he was a teacher there. The pair married when she was 19 years old

Chris Dawson Joanne Curtis Wedding pictured on their wedding day on March 26, 1970. Mr Dawson would go on to marry his teen lover Joanne Curtis in 1984 and is now onto his third marriage with Sue

Joanne Curtis pictured with her daughter Kristen on Sydney’s northern beaches last week. Ms Curtis does not believe Lyn Dawson would have chosen to leave her own two daughters

Joanne Curtis (left) holding her grandson. Ms Curtis lives a quiet life on Sydney’s northern beaches and is troubled by the events that led to Lyn Dawson’s disappearance 36 years ago

Lynn Dawson was a nurse and devoted mother to her two daughters. She met Chris Dawson  at school. He went on to play first grade rugby league for Newtown

Chris Dawson, now 70, lives at Mt Coolum on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. He has always denied any involvement in his first wife Lyn’s 1982 disappearance and presumed murder

A crew from Channel 9’s A Current Affair confronts Chris (right) and Paul Dawson last month

‘In general, you know, her life’s pretty good. I don’t think it’s easy. It’s a pretty big thing to live with.

‘She just wants to keep her head down.’

Another friend said he had recently been in contact with Ms Curtis to check that she was all right.

‘I didn’t mention the podcast but just asked if she is OK,’ he said. ‘She said yes. There is a lot of support coming her way from friends.

‘All I will add is she has attracted good, loyal friends because she is a really lovely person with integrity and compassion.’

While Ms Curtis stays close to her daughter Kristen on the northern beaches, Mr Dawson, now 70, is living in Queensland near Noosa with his third wife Sue.

Mr Dawson’s twin brother Paul, who played rugby league alongside him for the Jets in the 1970s, lives a couple of hours’ drive south on the Gold Coast.

The Dawson brothers lived in the same street – Gilwinga Drive, Bayview – when Mrs Dawson went missing and have always been exceptionally close.

They were both physical education teachers – Chris at Cromer High and Paul at nearby Forest High – when Mrs Dawson disappeared and each has been accused of having sex with female students.

As children the brothers had their own secret language which had to be corrected with speech therapy. Paul, the older and more dominant of the pair, drives a car with ‘1 Twin’ number plates. Chris has ‘2 Twin’ on his vehicle.

They have watched as new evidence has been uncovered by The Teacher’s Pet and have not been enjoying the renewed attention.

New South Wales Police Commissioner Mick Fuller revealed recently that investigators will return to the Bayview home to dig for Mrs Dawson’s remains or other evidence.

When the investigation was revived in 2000 police in the company of Ms Curtis dug up a small area near the pool where a disturbance in the soil had been detected.

They found the remains of a pink cardigan said to be Lyn’s. It had been separated into panels and appeared to have been pierced with a knife in a manner consistent with stabbing.

Ground-penetrating radar was used on the property in 1990, 1991, 1999 and 2016. Digs were conducted in 2000 and 2016 and the entire block was mapped by a burial site expert in 2015. Cadaver dogs have been led over the ground.

All the while, Ms Curtis has declined to speak to media but she has spoken at length and on the record to one long-time friend.

Former lawyer Rebecca Hazel got to know Ms Curtis when they were both working for a women’s refuge on the northern beaches.

She has written a book with Ms Curtis’s co-operation called The Schoolgirl, Her Teacher and His Wife, which she expects to be published in January.

Her account of the story will be a more ‘intimate and emotional’ version of events than The Teacher’s Pet, in which Ms Hazel has also featured.

Ms Hazel did not wish to discuss Mr Curtis’s personal circumstances but said the podcast and the publication of her forthcoming book meant the case would continue to capture the public’s attention.

‘This time I think it’s going to be resolved once and for all, one way or another,’ she said.

Ms Curtis had last been photographed in public in 2003 when she gave evidence at the second coronial inquest to result in a finding Mr Dawson had killed his wife.

Despite those findings – the first was in 2001 – the New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions has so far declined to take action against Mr Dawson.

Having told Westmead Coroner’s Court about her difficult relationship with Mr Dawson, Ms Curtis wept as members of Mrs Dawson’s family hugged her after the 2003 hearing.

‘Lynette’s life was sacrificed, but he gave Joanne a dog’s life,’ a relative of Mrs Dawson said outside the court back then. ‘I bear no malice towards her.’

Ms Curtis had given evidence of Mr Dawson’s possessive and sometimes violent nature, detailing their relationship from its start when she was a schoolgirl to its conclusion in Queensland a decade later.

She had met Mr Dawson when he became a PE teacher at Cromer High in 1979 and she was in Year 10. He had been married for nine years, had two daughters and was 16 years older than Ms Curtis.

The following year Mr Dawson became her teacher and was initially someone the quiet but headstrong girl believed she could confide in.

‘At the time I was having problems with family at home… and I guess I felt that I could go to him with this problem because he seemed to be drawn to me in some way,’ Ms Curtis told police in 1998.

‘And so I did and he took advantage of that and abused me, really.’

Ms Curtis began socialising with Mr Dawson at the Time and Tide Hotel at Dee Why on Friday nights, became babysitter to the Dawsons’ children and often stayed the night in their home.

According to evidence at the 2003 coronial inquest, Mr Dawson began having sex with Joanne when she was still 16 and he was 32.

‘Joanne describes their relationship as “strong” and on several occasions from 1980 onwards Chris Dawson placed love letters in Joanne’s bag at school and invited her to marry him,’ Matt Fordham, the police advocate assisting the coroner told the court.

Joanne – who had a troubled home life with a violent stepfather – told the coroner that in October 1981, while she was studying for her HSC, Chris Dawson invited her to move into his family home.

‘I had nowhere else to go,’ she said.

While it is unclear just how much Mrs Dawson knew of her husband’s relationship with Mr Curtis, the affair was no secret at Cromer High and neighbours had seen the schoolgirl swimming topless in the family’s pool.

Ms Curtis told the coroner that Mr Dawson chipped away at his wife’s confidence while they were all under the same roof.

‘He was very cold and used to sing songs to her that had double meanings, that he didn’t care about her and that she was physically unattractive,’ she said.

‘Just digging away at her. Just singing songs that were to wear her down, just upset her.’

In early November 1981 Chris was booked into hospital for a nose operation and asked his wife not to visit but her mother did and found Chris with Joanne.

‘This would appear to be one of the first times that Lynette had seriously considered the possibility that they were having an affair and this led to Lynette confronting Joanne about their relationship,’ Sergeant Fordham told the coroner.

Ms Curtis told the same court: ‘Lyn confronted me… and said to me, “You’ve been taking liberties with my husband.” I didn’t know what to say.’

That was the last time the schoolgirl spoke to Mrs Dawson.

Ms Curtis moved down the road for a short period with Paul Dawson and his wife Marilyn who lived with their three daughters. Days before Christmas she agreed to run off to Queensland with her lover but changed her mind just south of the border.

On January 9, 1982 Lyn Dawson made plans to meet her mother at Northbridge Baths, where her husband worked casually as a lifeguard. He told police he dropped his wife off at a Mona Vale bus stop about 7am.

Mrs Dawson did not arrive. Instead, Mr Dawson took a phone call at the baths which he said was from his wife who told him she was taking a break and needed to be on her own.

Ms Curtis was on holiday with family and friends at South West Rocks on the NSW mid north coast when she says Mr Dawson called her on January 9 or 10.

She told police Mr Dawson said: ‘Lyn’s gone. She’s not coming back. I need you now. Come and live with me and the girls at Bayview.’

Ms Curtis believed it was the next day that Mr Dawson arrived by car to collect her. She moved back into the Dawson family home as his lover and effectively mother to his children, four-year-old Shanelle and two-year-old Sherryn.

She wore Mrs Dawson’s clothes and jewellery. No one other than Mr Dawson has ever claimed to have spoken to his wife since the day she disappeared.

 Ms Curtis told police in 1998 the situation was ‘very strange for everyone.’

‘I mean I tried to leave on a number of occasions because I didn’t want, I didn’t want to be in that situation with him,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to be in a relationship with him. I wanted to get away… because I was just a kid.

‘I was kept right in the dark and I was quite oblivious to, to lots of things, I was just under this sort of spell, I suppose.’

Asked if her older lover had been ‘distressed’ by the disappearance of his wife, Ms Curtis told police: ‘No, I don’t think he was distressed.’

‘I think he was, you know, he had what he wanted,’ she said. ‘That was what he wanted, that was his, his goal was to have me and have the children and have the house and have no Lyn… He was ecstatic, as far as I am concerned.’

Mr Dawson told Ms Curtis his wife, a softly-spoken nurse who worked part-time at a child care centre, might have run off with a cult. However, she took no belongings with her.

He reported his wife missing six weeks after her disappearance, claiming she had telephoned him several times, and made his first written statement to police in August that year.

For the rest of the 1980s the disappearance of Mrs Dawson was ignored by police. This was despite it being undisputed the doting mother would ever abandon her daughters and there being no further signs she was alive.

Ms Curtis married Mr Dawson at their home in Gilwinga Drive on January 15, 1984 with Paul and Marilyn Dawson as witnesses.

Mr Dawson gave Ms Curtis one of his missing wife’s rings to wear for the ceremony. He was 35 and she was 19.

The couple later sold the home at Bayview and moved to Queensland where they had a daughter, Kristen, now aged in her early 30s. Mr Dawson continued to teach.

Witnesses have described Mr Dawson returning to the Gilwinga Drive property from time to time over the years, jogging and driving past the home and once asking where a new owner had been digging.

Mr Dawson allegedly treated Shanelle and Sherryn as princesses and largely rejected Kristen.

‘He was even more possessive of me and regretted Kristen,’ Ms Curtis told the coroner in 2003. ‘He wanted me to himself. He just wanted her out of the way.

‘I did as I was told. He chose what I wore. If I was going somewhere, he would have to approve it.

‘He was violent. There were some times when I locked myself in one of the bedrooms and he would try to break the door down.’

When Ms Curtis eventually left the marriage on February 1, 1990 and moved back to Sydney she went to police with her suspicions Mrs Dawson was buried on the property at Bayview.

She told police she left Mr Dawson because she was frightened and desperately unhappy.

‘He was always possessive but once our daughter was born I think he felt a rivalry there with her,’ she said.

‘He didn’t like sharing me, he wanted me to stay in the confines of the property and not go and see people, so I didn’t have any associations until our daughter was two when I took her to playgroup, and I found out how other women had marriages.

‘I thought ours was just normal, in that he made all the decisions and I just followed them, his orders…

‘Then when I realised that there was something very strange about our relationship and he, he was getting more violent, and he would be violent in front of our daughter.

‘He would send the other two away, and there was all sorts of control, games he was playing, he used to start singing to me too, like he did to his former wife, and, you know, there were times I felt physically threatened.

‘I feared for my life at that point and I made the decision to leave, because I was scared and I was desperately unhappy.’

Asked if Mr Dawson had ever asked her to do anything ‘out of the normal’ sexually, Ms Curtis said: ‘Well, yeah, you know… do this and you can have this.’

‘Yeah, I mean, yeah, you know. If I wanted a pair of shoes, well, you know, you have to pay for it type of thing.’

Detective Sergeant Damian Loone, who began re-investigating the case in 1998, told the coroner in 2003 that both Dawson brothers had been involved in numerous sexual encounters with students on the northern beaches.

‘Joanne Curtis admits that at Christopher Dawson’s instigation she had sexual encounters with Paul Dawson, including both Christopher and Paul Dawson together,’ Detective Sergeant Loone said.

Mr Dawson, his brother Paul and Paul’s wife Marilyn did not appear at the 2003 inquest.

By that time Chris Dawson has been put on ‘light duties’ and removed from contact with pupils at St Ursula’s College, a private girls’ school in Yeppoon, Queensland.

Some of Lyn Dawson’s family and friends initially considered she might have left home voluntarily but they now seem united in believing Chris Dawson is responsible for her disappearance.

Those who loved Mrs Dawson want her daughters to know their mother would not have left them of her own free will.

Chris Dawson has always denied any wrongdoing and blames his onetime teenage lover for waging a campaign of lies against him.

He has said Lyn could still be alive and has pointed to a woman in the background of a 2006 episode of the television series Antiques Roadshow as looking like his missing wife.

Shanelle and Sherryn are adults with children of their own. Shanelle has said she would like answers about her mother’s disappearance while Sherryn has openly backed her father describing a ‘witch hunt’ against him.

In his last lengthy media interview Mr Dawson told a reporter in 2003 the case had driven him to contemplate suicide but decided killing himself would make him look guilty.

Ms Curtis told police life was still hard when she returned to Sydney. She rarely discussed Mr Dawson with friends.

‘I don’t, don’t generally publicise that sort of stuff,’ she said. ‘I mean, you know, friends of mine know that his wife went missing…

‘I don’t go into it because, you know, it’s a tough issue and it’s very strange, yeah. I don’t like people asking a lot of questions about it… I guess I’m afraid of… what I might find.’

There is a $200,000 reward for anyone who has information which leads to the arrest and conviction of Lyn Dawson’s killer. Anyone with information can call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.