The Teacher’s Pet, prepare to be outraged

Prepare to be outraged.

Imagine you are the devoted young mother of two little girls and your attractive, star footballer husband whom you love very much, begins abusing you? That would be enough, but there’s more. He is having an intense sexual affair with a sixteen year old girl, a girl who is one of the students attending the high school he teaches physical education at. He begins having the girl babysit your daughters and then it becomes obvious to you that his relationship with her has become way too close for comfort and your marriage begins to derail… But wait, there’s more! One day you disappear and you are never seen or heard from again.

The sixteen year old steps into your bed and your life, with your daughters calling her Mummy and you their “pretend Mummy”. Your ‘loving’ husband marries the sixteen year old and incredibly, she even wears your wedding ring. The police don’t really investigate your disappearance, seemingly hero worshipping your husband and believing his weak story. He is granted a divorce, gets full settlement of the beautiful house you shared, custody of your daughters and is free to live his life as he pleases…

Thirty six years later, enter Hedley Thomas, the award winning national chief correspondent for The Australian newspaper. He has created an investigative journalism podcast which delves into the unbelievable circumstances surrounding the suspicious disappearance in 1982 of 33 year old Sydney mother Lyn Dawson, her former rugby league star husband Chris Dawson and his overly close relationship with his twin brother Paul.

Through his investigation of Lyn’s probable murder and Chris’s affair with his sixteen year old student Joanne Curtis at Cromer High School, Hedley Thomas has uncovered a sinister paedophilic teacher/student culture which was apparently ignored by police. In the seventies and eighties, Sydney’s beautiful northern beaches (often locally dubbed as “the insular peninsula” due to its inhabitants’ penchant for keeping to themselves) was alive with sexually predatory teachers preying on young high school students.

All these years later and prompted by The Teacher’s Pet, the scarred and dysfunctional casualties created by this sordid reality are coming forward in numbers. To hear Robin Wheeler (former vice captain at Cromer High School) speak of the scale and outcomes of the abuse in episode 11 “Loyalty” is heartbreaking, however, this ‘awakening’ after so many years has led to real questions being asked of both the NSW Police Force and the Department of Education.  

Episode 12 “Momentum” reveals that the NSW Police Force has now set up Strike Force Southwood to investigate this fallout; apologetic about their predecessors, while the mystery remains as to why police were so remiss about it at the time.

In 1982, seven months after Lyn disappeared, Chris was interviewed by police once only. He portrayed himself as a sad and abandoned husband, desperate to find his wife. He made no mention whatsoever of his sexual affair with Joanne, which had been ongoing for fourteen months prior to Lyn’s disappearance and who moved into the marital home just two days afterwards. This statement curiously ‘disappeared’ along with the police file on Lyn Dawson sometime in the 1990’s and has only recently been unearthed as a result of intense investigation by this podcast.

Two separate Coroner’s Courts in 2001 and 2003, delivered findings that Chris Dawson should be charged with Lyn’s murder without even seeing his statement, yet the Director of Public Prosecutions has always insisted that there is not enough evidence to mount a prosecution.   

The Teacher’s Pet is one of those podcasts which has opened a real life Pandora’s Box with the investigation an ongoing one. It is having major effects on what was thought to be a cold case, but which is turning out to be anything but. Listeners find themselves very much hoping for a crucial breakthrough with each episode they listen to, and it isn’t over yet.

The Teacher’s Pet has been incredibly popular worldwide, with a million downloads in just six days last week and more than four million total downloads. This podcast is a must for listeners who enjoyed Up and Vanished, Dirty John, Trace and the podcast I cut my teeth on, Serial. Having binged the current twelve episodes, I am keenly awaiting the next as, I should imagine, are the other millions of listeners. I give you fair warning: if you start this one, expect it to take over your life for a while. You won’t be able to stop.

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