Teacher who killed his wife receives new sentence for abusing a 16-year-old student

() – An Australian professor who killed his wife In order to start a new life with a teenage student, he was sentenced to an additional year in prison for a crime committed when the girl was 16 years old.

Chris Dawson, 75, sat with his head in his hands waiting for Friday’s sentencing from a room at the Long Bay Correctional Complex south of Sydney, where he is already serving a 24-year sentence for killing his wife, Lynnette.

Lynnette’s disappearance in the early 1980s became one of Australia’s most intriguing mysteries, baffling police for decades and inspiring a podcast that delved into the whereabouts of the mother, whose body has never been found.

On Friday, Judge Sarah Huggett sentenced Dawson to three years in prison on one count of “carnal knowledge with a girl aged between 10 and 17” for a sexual act committed in 1980.

The sentence carries a two-year non-parole period, meaning Dawson will spend an additional year in prison before becoming eligible for parole in August 2041, Huggett said.

At the time of the offence, Dawson was a teacher aged in his mid-30s who took active steps to become the girl’s teacher by pointing at her and telling her she was beautiful, the court heard.

Huggett said Dawson did not use threatening words or behaviour “to secure the victim’s consent and silence” but there was a “degree of manipulation and exploitation”.

Dawson knew the girl was having problems at home and told the victim “that what he was doing was indeed something the victim needed and/or would be helpful,” she said.

“The crime was committed on a Friday or Saturday night, when the attacker took the victim to his parents’ house (…). He told him that his parents were on vacation, that it was nighttime and that no one was home,” said Huggett.

The court heard that Dawson and the girl had a lawful sexual relationship for many years after she turned 17 and later married and had a child.

Their relationship continued despite intense speculation about the whereabouts of Dawson’s wife, Lynette, who Dawson says abandoned his family when his children were just two and four years old.

No trace of Lynette Dawson has ever been found despite multiple police investigations and searches, which included digging up the backyard of the couple’s former home on Sydney’s northern beaches in 2018.

Dawson has continued to maintain his innocence, even after being found guilty in 2022 of murdering Lynette sometime around 1982.

During the trial, multiple witnesses claimed to have seen Lynette Dawson in the years since, but Judge Ian Harrison dismissed these as false or mistaken.

Harrison said that although the verdict was not supported by direct evidence, he was satisfied with the Crown’s claim that Dawson had become so infatuated with his student that he saw no other way to be with her than to kill his wife.