He didn’t go to Lynette’s house that day, because he had his own family pressures at that time of year.
“I felt bad for not coming back with her, especially in retrospect … I found out I had asked other people,” McLoughlin said.
In cross-examination, he said he did not ask Lynette how she had suffered the bruises and that she did not remember being told. “Domestic violence in those days was not talked about,” he said.
Dawson’s attorney, Pauline David, asked, “You have no idea if it was caused by domestic violence or otherwise, do you?”
“Okay, no,” McLoughlin replied.
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Asked by David when he first learned that “Lynette Dawson had left her home,” McLoughlin said she didn’t think she didn’t know it until tennis a couple of weeks after January.
“We certainly talked about Lyn. She wouldn’t mind leaving her kids behind,” she said, describing them as “the pride of her life.” “If I had to leave, I would have caught these girls.”
McLoughlin said no one contacted her after Lynette disappeared, and she appeared after seeing a police call for witnesses published in the Manly Daily in 1999.
The Crown alleges that Dawson murdered Lynette on or about January 8, 1982, and was motivated by her desire to have a free relationship with her former student and babysitter, JC.
The former Dawson babysitter, before JC, gave evidence that she had admired them and initially thought they had a “fantasy home.” He said Dawson was a practical father, whose shirts were always “pristine in neat rows,” and he considered Lynette a friend.
He said Dawson assured him it was a good relationship, “but over time and seeing more things happen in the house, I was very disappointed with what he had told me.”
The former nanny said she once witnessed Dawson take a glass out of the closet and say something about it being “dirty,” before passing a kitchen towel over Lynette’s back.
“She just made a sound, like pain, a gasp … I could see her in pain.”
Again, he claimed that Dawson “grabbed a pile of clothes and threw her on the bed.”
On a third occasion, the former babysitter said that the couple was leaving one night in 1980, but she heard the children crying and went to the girls’ door.
“I saw Chris Dawson grab Lynette by the top of her arm and basically take her to the bedroom in an angry, blunt act,” the former babysitter said.
“Lynette was almost like a rag doll because she was much older. As she grabbed it and spun it, she picked up the door frame with her shoulder.
He said he spoke to a police hotline, possibly between 1983 and 1985, and was assured that if they needed more information they would contact them, but “never, never did they.”
He said he was embarrassed by his reaction to the door incident and that the first person he spoke to decades later was journalist Hedley Thomas after listening to his Dawson podcast called The Teacher’s Pet.
“The guilt he had felt had been accumulating and … the story would not go away,” he said.
She denied a suggestion from David that he was “taking every opportunity to demonize” Dawson.
“I had a good time with Mr. Dawson, but I also saw some things that were … terrible and left scars on me.”
The trial before Judge Ian Harrison continues.
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