17

It’s only words

IT WAS NO EASY TASK to prepare an address in a case of this complexity. There had been seventy-three witnesses, and one hundred and forty-five exhibits, and the transcript now ran to more than two thousand eight hundred pages. The scientific evidence presented particular difficulties. Conclusions could be stated simply, but if the defence sought to undermine them, it had to meander through a verbal jungle of polysyllabic words, esoteric concepts, and practical difficulties. It had to canvass not only the relative eminence of the scientists concerned, but the relevance of their experience to the particular concepts at issue, and it had to find some error, incongruity, or other factor that might cast doubt on their opinions. Somehow or other, this all had to be reduced to a coherent and understandable form. If twelve members of the community chosen at random were to be required to resolve scientific controversies amongst some of the most eminent experts in the world, they would need all the assistance they could get.

The old common-law rule, since abrogated in most jurisdictions, required defence counsel to address the court first. This meant that the hapless defence barrister had to try to anticipate the prosecutor’s arguments even before they were advanced. One could invest a great deal of time and effort seeking to negate a particular argument, only to have the prosecutor disavow it and take a different approach altogether. One could also strengthen the prosecutor’s hand by trying to answer an argument that he or she had overlooked until it was ‘suggested’ in this manner. Then there was the danger that one might fail to anticipate an important point in the prosecution’s argument and be condemned to sit in frustration as it was urged upon the jury, and curse the fact that the law permitted no reply.

Such a situation was likely to engender a passion for thoroughness, but that, too, could be dangerous. Few jurors take extensive notes, and much of what the defence counsel said could be lost in the wake of the prosecutor’s address and the subsequent ‘summing up’ by the judge. If the weekend intervened before the jury retired, the best part of a week might have elapsed between the defence address and the time when the jury sat down to resolve the issues. It was also necessary to keep in mind the difficulty of holding the jury’s attention for a substantial period of time. University studies have established that the attention span of the average student is only about fifty minutes. It is frequently impossible to deal with the issues in a complex criminal trial within such a period, but barristers were usually conscious of the need to be brief. Consequently, experienced counsel often felt compelled to jettison any argument about apparently peripheral issues, stick to the main points, and to try to ‘ram them home’. It was ultimately a matter of judgement.

Phillips began with an appeal to the ‘fundamentals,’ reminding the jurors that they were obliged to act on the evidence alone, and that the Chamberlains were to be presumed innocent until their guilt was proven beyond reasonable doubt. He asked them to reject any proposition Barker might make that strayed outside the ambit of his opening address which, he said, defined ‘the case we were called upon to meet’. Then he delivered his first salvo:

Ladies and gentlemen, women do not usually murder their babies, because to do so would be contrary to nature. One of the most fundamental facts in nature is the love of a mother for her child; the love of a mother for her baby. A mother will make all manner of sacrifices for her baby. A mother will die for her baby. We all know that. It happens again and again. But we know, too, from the evidence in this trial that sometimes mothers may harm or even kill their babies. But we know from the evidence in this trial that that’s not really contrary to nature at all when it happens, because we know that the natural love of those mothers for their babies has been distorted and warped and removed by the effect of severe depressive illness. So that the killings by mothers of babies in that connection can be said to be motiveless killings; killings without reason.

Just listen to what Dr Milne — Mrs Chamberlain’s doctor — had to say about it.

Question: ‘On the occasions you saw Mrs Chamberlain …’ — and I interpolate: we know there were many, daily in hospital and routine check-ups thereafter — ‘on the occasions you saw Mrs Chamberlain, did she show any symptoms, even of a mild form of post-natal depression?’ Answer: ‘No.’

The result of that, is this, isn’t it? That the defence which doesn’t have to prove anything has proved beyond any doubt that Mrs Chamberlain does not come within the category of mothers who might commit a motiveless killing, because we know that’s confined to mothers who suffer from this severe form of post-natal depression — and she didn’t even have a scrap of symptoms, even of a milder form. So the question of a motiveless killing caused by illness in this case is gone forever, in our submission. Now, what are the alternatives? There is only one alternative and that is a killing with motive; a killing with reason …

He broke off to deal with Barker’s proposition that the Crown did not have to prove motive. As a matter of law, that proposition was perfectly true but, for practical purposes, it had ‘nothing to do with the circumstances of this case’. He then returned to the attack:

You know, the learned prosecutor put many allegations to Mrs Chamberlain when she was in the witness box, didn’t he? Many, many. But there was one allegation, the most important allegation in this trial, that was never put, and it’s the allegation which would have started with the words: ‘Mrs Chamberlain, I put it to you that the reason that you cut your child’s throat was …’ That’s the most important allegation. It was never put. It was never put, because Mr Barker, one of the best men in the business, just cannot think of any reason why she would do it. The prosecution have had two years and three months to think of a reason, any reason, good, bad or indifferent, and they can’t. They can’t supply you with a reason why she should do it. And we have excluded a motiveless murder, haven’t we, on Dr Milne’s evidence? In this area of the case, the supply of a reason why this mother would kill her baby, the prosecution are bereft. They are stone, motherless broke. They are bankrupt. There’s no other way to look at it.

But we’re not bankrupt in this area of the case. The defence isn’t bankrupt in this area of the case because we have been able to obtain from witness after witness after witness, 90 per cent of them independent of the Chamberlains, proof after proof after proof of this mother’s love and affection for her baby. That’s what we’ve been able to obtain, and we are not bankrupt in this area, ladies and gentlemen. If anything, we are suffering from an abundance of riches.

He went through the evidence, referring them to witness after witness who had spoken of Lindy as a warm and affectionate mother who had loved her baby:

Now, where have we got — ten people there from north, south, east and west of our country — Tasmania, Western Australia, Queensland — every one of them telling you the same thing. And we’ve traced it, haven’t we ladies and gentleman, from the time of the pregnancy through to the birth, through the nine-and-a-half weeks and up to within minutes of that child’s disappearance. And all these people tell you the same thing. This mother was not the sort of mother that Dr Milne explained might commit a motiveless killing, a mother who has rejected the child. These people all tell you the same thing. This lady was a caring mother a mother who loved the child, a mother who wanted it, who welcomed it and who looked after it.

He then turned to the evidence of Sally Lowe. He reminded them of her confidence that it was a baby cry and not some creature of the night:

I submit to you that that woman’s evidence ought to be accepted, applying any criteria you like to it — accuracy, firmness, independence, knowledge of what she is talking about — and I submit to you that that evidence stands as an absolute barrier, on its own, to a conviction for murder in this case.

His address was logical and forceful. He ran through the evidence of those who had been present at the camp site and barbecue area, then turned to the evidence of the tracks and drag marks which had been seen on Sunrise Hill, the sand dune to the east of the tent. He reminded them of the unusual spate of attacks and other uncharacteristic behaviour by dingoes at Uluru in mid-1980. All of this evidence, he suggested, pointed strongly to the Chamberlains’ innocence. He reminded them that the Chamberlains had little, if any, chance to bury the child and clean up the car as the Crown had suggested. He dealt with the criticisms of the Chamberlains’ response to the tragedy, and then began the long task of wading through the scientific evidence. He was later to confide to a journalist, ‘We’ve answered the Crown, scientist for scientist. I had never seen a defence case better put together.’

He concluded with an appeal to fairness:

Now you don’t want a lecture from me about beyond reasonable doubt, do you? We’ve all got that perfectly clear. We all understand the fundamental importance of it. You can’t go wrong, in our respectful submission, if you keep that centrally in your thoughts while you’re considering the case. By all means, give Mr Barker the same fair hearing you’ve given me. But remember, he has got to prove his case beyond reasonable doubt. The defence does not have to prove anything. I cannot stress that rule of law too much. A distinguished judge once described it as the golden thread that runs through the fabric of our criminal law. That’s how important it is. If you stick to that, you won’t go wrong.

In the weeks to come, John Phillips, like Stuart Tipple, was to receive his share of criticism. Most of it was ill informed, and the rest relied heavily upon the wisdom of hindsight. The Chamberlains themselves took no part in this. They remained grateful to Phillips for all that he had done. Yet the thing that is most hurtful is not the criticism of others, but the self-doubt that frequently follows the loss of a case which the barrister had regarded as a just cause. One tends to brood about things that, in hindsight, loom as potentially crucial errors, and the agonising reality is that one might be right. Even the most eminent barristers never brag of having conducted cases perfectly. There is always something that might have been done better. In fact, many tactical questions simply have no right answer. When every alternative involves an element of risk, one can only ‘play the odds’ and hope for the best. Experienced barristers understand these things, but they offer little consolation to someone who fears that an innocent woman might have been sentenced to life imprisonment because he failed her. John Phillips was to take the loss of this case very hard.

In reality, his approach had been well-nigh impeccable, and the logic of his final address had drawn the threads of the evidence together and welded them into a series of seemingly unanswerable arguments. By the time he sat down, there was a general feeling that the case was as good as over. It didn’t matter what Barker said now.

A student of literature might have recalled the contrasting speeches which Shakespeare attributed to Brutus and Mark Antony. Brutus, too, presented an argument of impeccable logic. The crowd was with him to such an extent that Mark Antony could get a hearing only by assuring them that he did not intend to blame him for killing Caesar. Hence, the famous line, ‘I come to bury Caesar and not to praise him’. Yet, as the speech progressed, he built up sympathy for the slain emperor until the groundswell of outrage had totally erased the logical arguments of Brutus. It was a scene which reflected a deep understanding of human nature. Mere reason is not always an adequate defence against appeals more strongly attuned to human psychology.

Barker’s final address was brilliantly persuasive. He began in a seemingly incongruous manner:

It’s just as well, isn’t it, that we wear wigs and gowns in courts. I don’t know why law reform societies and commissions seem to want to do away with them. It permits people like me to take one faltering step towards people like Mr Phillips in elegance if not in eloquence; and a gown, of course, enables me to cover up my old shirts. That’s what distinguishes the Melbourne Bar from the Sydney Bar.

Yet there were a number of subtle hints conveyed in those innocuous sentences. The force of Phillips’ address had lain in his eloquence, not in the justice of his cause. He was a ‘silvertail’ from down south. In contrast, Barker was a humble, practical man; one of them. He was to reinforce these concepts again and again:

You’ve heard a very skillful address by counsel for the accused in which references to evidence has been selective, perhaps necessarily so but nonetheless selective. I’ll try to fill in the deficiencies.

He did not directly assert that there were deficiencies; that was assumed as self-evident. His task was merely to spell out what they were. He gave a number of examples before returning to the theme of Phillips’ address:

These are matters to which I will have to take you but, without being critical of my learned friend, you have heard what I suggest is a rather one-sided view of the evidence. Again, you’ve heard Mr Phillips as he had to try to have the best of all possible worlds with the evidence of Mr Harris.

In other words, what he’s really suggesting is that you should pay attention to the examination-in-chief, but disregard the cross-examination, which was where we had the image of the dog with its head erect and the child in its mouth coming from the tent, the head well above the shoulders: a fact which, if it be the case, rather devastates the story told to you by the accused, Mrs Chamberlain, that the dog emerged from the tent but she was unable to see the baby because the head was below the shoulders and in darkness.

Again, the underlying message was clear. Phillips’ address had been a clever piece of oratory, but it had depended upon a selective and one-sided approach to the evidence, which would simply not stand up to an honest appraisal.

He then turned to Phillips’ criticism that much of the Crown case had been purely speculative:

Now, speaking generally, as I must at this stage of the address, Mr Phillips said to you a couple of times, and rather unkindly I thought, that some of the allegations of the Crown are mere theories advanced by me and no one else. Well, it was a little unkind and really he does know better because I am not here to propound theories and I haven’t done so. All I’ve done is to suggest to you that as intelligent jurors you can draw inferences from proven fact. Because that’s what you’re here for. This is probably a classic textbook case of circumstantial evidence. We don’t have eyewitnesses in the sense that anyone saw the child killed, so the whole case must be, in substance, a drawing of inferences from established facts. If those inferences point to the guilt of the accused, and if there was no room for alternative reasonable inferences, well then, your duty is to convict …

With great respect to Mr Phillips, his approach to all this rather suggests that nobody could ever be convicted of anything unless he did it in the presence of an eyewitness. Or that nobody could ever be convicted of anything if some eyewitness were to put forward a contrary proposition … Out the window would thereby go a huge body of scientific learning from fingerprints to blood grouping because, as I understand the argument, such evidence goes only to support theories, whereas if you want good evidence you need eyewitnesses …

Please, let’s be sensible.

Of course, Phillips had never suggested that all circumstantial or expert evidence should be ignored. But the message had been subtly conveyed that what he had said was not merely untenable, but silly. By equating the Crown case with a ‘classic textbook case’, the message was being conveyed that other juries had convicted in similar cases, and the appeal to be sensible suggested that the absurdity of Phillips’ position was manifest: the real question was whether they would act capriciously or responsibly.

The possibility of a dingo having taken the child was dismissed with a few deft sentences:

What is this dingo supposed to have done? It managed, if her story is true, to kill the child in the bassinet, drag her from the basket, divest her of two blankets and a rug and shake her body vigorously at the entrance to the tent, and carry her off into the night in such a way that it left virtually no clues in the tent in the way of blood or hairs or anything else … At the shortest it walked some four or five kilometres, if the story is true, to the base of Ayers Rock and, if during part of that distance it walked through the bush, it managed to do so without tearing or pulling the fabric of the jumpsuit, collecting almost nothing in the nature of seeds or sticks or other vegetation along the way. So, all in all, ladies and gentleman, it was not only a dexterous dingo, it was a very tidy dingo … It managed to cut the collar and the sleeve with a pair of scissors. An unlikely circumstance, you may think, even if we’re dealing with the most intelligent and perceptive of animals … But supposing the dingo were on trial here. How could you possibly convict it on this evidence? Where is the evidence? Where is there one substantial clue, apart from the account given by the child’s mother, pointing to the killing of this child by dingo? There isn’t one. The case against the dingo would be laughed out of court because it’s a transparent lie.

He turned to the various accounts of dingoes biting children and otherwise harassing tourists:

But don’t be confused by all this. The way the defence is presented, we are here dealing with a man-eating dingo who raided the tent like a tiger in an Indian village. Indeed, it’s even suggested by Mrs Chamberlain that the animal planned the attack. Now I don’t contend, ladies and gentlemen, that dingoes are gentle creatures, nor do I contend that they are never dangerous, but what we do know as Australians, and you don’t need experts to tell you, is that they are not notorious man-eaters. In the same way that you know as Australians, particularly as Northern Territorians, you don’t need experts to tell you that crocodiles are notorious man-eaters. Now, no doubt the ordinary crocodile would go out of his way to eat this baby. The experience of Australians suggests that the dingo does not bear such a reputation, and in saying this I am conscious of Mr Roff’s evidence about the peculiar conduct of dingoes at Ayers Rock, and that is something which you will take into account, but if this case was set at Cahill’s Crossing on the East Alligator and not at Ayers Rock, and if this were a crocodile case and not a dingo case, well, you might have much less difficulty with it and questions of inherent improbability might not arise. But you are entitled to take account of your general knowledge and commonsense in a case like this, and if your general knowledge tells you that dingoes are not known as a species for killing and eating human beings, then you can take all that into account, in deciding the likelihood of the truth of the dingo theory.

All this was brilliantly done from a tactical point of view. It implied that the suggestion that a dingo might have taken the child was an affront to common sense.

In March 1987, a man was taken by a crocodile near Cahill’s Crossing on the East Alligator River, and a journalist covering the incident ran into a police officer who reminded him of this passage of Barker’s address and exclaimed, ‘That Barker, he’s always right. He predicted that this would happen and now it has.’

The jury was not to know that he would be credited with the gift of prescience, but the appeal to the jury’s experience as Australians, ‘particularly as Northern Territorians’, was an effective tactic. Barker was a well-known local identity who was well placed to appeal to fellow Territorians by referring to the familiar and very real danger of man-eating crocodiles, and contrasting that with the seemingly implausible suggestion that an animal that looked much the same as their neighbourhood dogs might prove to be an equally dangerous predator. It was also an appeal that might have subtly conveyed the message: ‘Never mind what these smart southern lawyers say; we Territorians understand these things.’

The evidence of the tracks and the depressions in the sand on Sunrise Hill were dismissed with equal scorn:

Let me talk about the tracks in the sand. When I opened this case, I said they were a red herring and I still say they are a red herring. If there were as many eccentric snow-dropping dingoes as the evidence suggests, ladies and gentlemen, it would be surprising if that ridge were not covered in dingo tracks and strange dingo tracks, as these busy marauding creatures ran about, resting from time to time with their suitcases and portmanteaus, washing and assorted articles of underwear, stolen from tourists. Well, that’s the evidence. One wonders where all this material finishes up, but the point I make is that the evidence of tracks is totally at variance with that of Mr Harris. That is that a dingo can carry — according to him — a twenty-five-pound wallaby three-quarters of a mile without putting it down. Why, you may wonder, would it drag a nine-pound baby?

He was also scathing in dealing with the scientific evidence:

I am sorry, ladies and gentlemen. I can do no more than give you the world’s leading forensic biologist. I am not asking you to genuflect at the shrine of Mr Culliford, as Mr Phillips suggested. The rather disdainful, with respect to him, Professor Nairn can deprecate all he likes the backward methods employed by scientists who daily work in an environment quite alien to Professor Nairn’s elegant ivory tower. The fact is you’ve heard from a man who commands international respect in the field of forensic biology, who you will remember was neither assertive nor dogmatic nor disdainful of the opinions of others …

Mrs Kuhl says it is foetal blood, and I suggest to you that she ought to know, and Dr Baxter ought to know what it is he is dealing with, because you know really, if the suggestions made about their work in this court have any substance, people in New South Wales are in constant danger of being wrongly convicted whenever there’s some blood involved. And it’s really, I suggest, rather too ridiculous to contemplate that she would come into this, in the course of her daily work, as a professional forensic biologist, and muck it all up, not knowing whether she was dealing with adult blood or the blood of a child under three months of age. What we ask you to do is to respect her opinion. She didn’t come here for her greater glory; she came here because she got into the case as an employee of the New South Wales Health Commission.

Well, as with some other issues in this case, the defence side found experts to disagree and Professor Boettcher came along and criticised Mrs Kuhl and criticised the quality of the antiserum without ever asking her if he could test the actual antiserum which she used. Professor Boettcher, whose academic university life was preceded by life as a school teacher, and who has never been actively engaged in the day-to-day routine work of testing bloodstains, whose qualification to enter the arena seemed to be based in part upon a lofty concept of what he was pleased to call the ‘scientific method,’ who teaches and engages in pleasant research and writes for learned journals about learned articles, never about forensic biology. Never about the dirty side of the profession: the sex crimes and the murders, the old bloodstains. He’s never been confronted with the difficulties which the poor old practical hardworking forensic biologist is confronted with — a biologist who, we say, does an honest and competent day’s work and goes to court to offer her honest opinion and finds herself confronted with the criticisms of academics who have probably never in their lives entered a forensic science laboratory. Because such things do not exist in the quiet halls of institutes of academic learning.

And I say this with very great respect, but perhaps when Professor Boettcher has tested a few thousand trace samples of blood, and when Professor Nairn has scratched around in a car for a few days, testing it for blood, and when Professor Nairn takes time off from research and manages to test more than one blood sample a week, then each may be qualified to criticise Joy Kuhl. Until then, you might think, they should recognise that there are scientists who work at teaching and there are scientists that work at testing blood, and they should leave the field to the professionals.

As a matter of logic, all this offered little answer to the defence criticisms. Nairn had worked in the laboratory that produced the antiserum and knew, perhaps better than anyone else, the potential for such antisera to react with other things. Both Nairn and Boettcher had relied upon an apparent incongruity evident upon Kuhl’s own work notes and evidence, and both had been critical of her methodology. In fact, both Kuhl and Baxter had admitted to having very little experience in testing denatured blood samples for the presence of foetal haemoglobin in sufficient quantities to indicate that the blood came from an infant. The suggested disparity in experience was largely irrelevant. Furthermore, much of what Nairn and Boettcher were saying was based upon their knowledge of the composition of blood and the manner in which its molecules were likely to behave in given circumstances. The characteristics of blood do not change from one laboratory to another, and an inadequate procedure does not become adequate merely because the biologist who carries it out is entitled to put the adjective ‘forensic’ before her title.

Yet, as rhetoric, it was devastating. Both Nairn and Boettcher were put into the category of people least likely to find favour in the eyes of Darwin locals. They were outside experts, armchair theorists, and disdainful ones at that. In contrast, the Crown experts were painted as practical, hardworking types, the sort who would roll up their sleeves and get stuck into whatever needed to be done. It was people of that sort who had rebuilt Darwin after Cyclone Tracy and who, even now, made the place work.

The reference to people in New South Wales in constant danger of being wrongly convicted was also clever. It drew upon faith in the system. It suggested that if Kuhl and Baxter were wrong, perhaps all sorts of people could be wrongly convicted. Clearly, such a thing could never be tolerated by the authorities. It was simply absurd. Nairn and Boettcher had to be wrong. In reality, of course, the circumstances of this case were quite unique. There had never been a case in New South Wales which depended upon the identification of foetal haemoglobin in aged blood samples, and the opinions of Nairn and Boettcher did not challenge the general reliability of the tests normally carried out by forensic scientists. Phillips was to protest about this statement, and the judge was to deal with it in his summing up, but by then it had contributed to the overall effect of Barker’s withering attack.

The significance of the other plate bearing a similar spray pattern to the one found under the dashboard of the Chamberlains’ car was also swept aside:

We say at the very least it’s irrelevant. At the most it’s another red herring. See, what’s it all about? We know it was produced from the car of a clergyman at East Maitland. We were not favoured with an explanation of how the spray got there. We were not favoured with an explanation of how long it’s been there. We were not favoured with an explanation of what it is … It’s not suggested that the spray on the real plate may be paint or vice versa, or whether they are both blood or both paint. I don’t know that you are asked to find that all Toranas are sprayed under the dash with the blood of an infant as some sort of benediction or ceremonial rite when the cars are sold … A possibility is that it is blood and that a man on the assembly line suffers from thalassemia, or maybe he’s one of the six or eight people in the world with this rare genetic disorder which overloads him with foetal haemoglobin. Look, you know, in a way I am talking nonsense. With great respect, what’s the plate there for? We know that on the real plate there is blood. We know the blood is part of the pattern. It’s been dug out of the pattern. It’s not incidental to or somehow covering up what’s there. We know there was blood on the leading edge and all we say to you is that that plate is irrelevant.

His conclusion was emphatic and definite:

The blood in the car came from Azaria. The blood in the camera bag came from Azaria. All these things we put to you, you are entitled to find as facts. If there was no dingo, the child was murdered. The question who did it is brutally answered. You can leave out Michael Chamberlain, and you can leave out the two boys, and no one else was there. It is not consistent with reason to suggest that it was anyone but the accused, Alice Lynne Chamberlain.

You are entitled to find that she invented the dingo lie. She had blood on her pants and her shoes. She had the opportunity. She’s lied about the animal, its appearance, what it did, where it went, what she did. She’s lied about the blood in the car, the tracksuit pants, the dress, the giggle hats, the space blanket and the baby’s blankets. We submit to you, with respect, you are entitled to find that she’s lied constantly and persistently and so has her husband. Well, what does all this mean? In our submission, this case has strength, it has cohesion and it has volume, and each bit supports the others, but the whole case does not depend on every part. It’s not a chain in which each link depends upon another. It’s the proverbial bundle of sticks: if you put them all together they can’t be broken. And if you put only part of them together, you can’t break the bundle. There’s only one conclusion, we say, there’s only one verdict open to you, and that is that each accused should be found guilty!

Mr Justice Muirhead’s summing up began on the morning of 28 October 1982 and concluded at 2.21 p.m. the following day. He explained the relevant law, and went through the evidence in considerable detail. Towards the end of his summing up, he embarked upon a precis of the case:

If the Crown assertions are accurate, we start off on the evidence with a slightly tired, but apparently happy mother nursing her baby to sleep. Other people, strangers, to whom she and her husband are talking, are in the vicinity, including Aidan. She leaves, apparently to put the child to bed in the bassinet which has been made up. There is some illumination from the light you have seen in the area, on the tent. She doesn’t put the child to bed, as the Crown says; she enters the front of the car, which, of course, we know faces the barbecue light. She cuts Azaria’s throat with small scissors, perhaps, or with something, and causes injuries resulting in death. It would have been a pretty bloody event.

She conceals the body somewhere in the car and she returns to the tent which she disarranges the contents of, leaving traces of blood and some drops of blood on its contents. Those drops must have dropped from somewhere; on the Crown case, they must have dropped from her.

The Crown suggests, then, that she may have washed her hands in the teat bath, which she leaves in the tent, and which she later empties pretty close to Mrs Elston. Be that as it may, Aidan, who is and was always around the place, is hungry. She goes to the car and gets out beans and a tin opener. She returns to the barbecue area with Aidan and the beans.

You’ll recall a witness cleaned up those beans later. The problem, ladies and gentlemen, of concealing this killing lies ahead of her. Providentially, her husband says he hears the baby crying. She doesn’t, but at her husband’s request she starts to walk the short distance to the tent and then, as she nears the tent, she is heard to cry out: ‘My God, my God, a dog has taken my baby,’ or words to that effect.

If it was a plan to conceal murder, it was very quick thinking. Her husband and people come from here or there and later, to their credit, from far and wide and there, during the earlier parts of the evening, she and her husband remain, he searching from time to time until, at the suggestion of others, they go to the motel. Until they went there, ladies and gentlemen, there was a light erected by the police so close to the car, illuminating the scene, the car with the body and blood still in it.

They were in a very dangerous situation: people and police and rangers coming and going. So, some time that evening, in that situation, with caring women around her, talking to her and you may think watching her, she and her husband take the body from the car and they go and bury it in the dunes and, as I understand the Crown case, some time later they go out and locate the burial spot, dig up the body, cut off the singlet, possibly rebury the body. A horrible concept.

It is suggested by the Crown that the car is cleaned, or partially so, that the blood is mopped up, or partially so and, at some time, someone puts the bloodstained clothing — or perhaps the body or something bloody — in the camera case and, of course, we know later that night her husband invites Mrs Elston to travel in the car, and she is asked to remain in it next morning in daylight with the children.

At some stage the Crown asserts that they place the clothing at the base of the Rock. Despite extensive searching that night and for a long time afterwards, the body is never discovered and, if she had buried it, it could not have been that very far from the tent.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you are to convict her, this is the Crown case as it has been led. This is the situation, or much of the situation of which you must be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt.

But there’s an important factor that I omitted in that summary. It was not only Mr Chamberlain who heard the baby’s cry; it was not only Mr Lowe who said he heard someone mention a cry before she left the car. Mrs Lowe, the first witness in this case, told you on oath she heard a baby’s cry which definitely came from the tent. She says she is positive of that and she was there, and she is an apparently independent person.

You are here to determine whether you are satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Alice Chamberlain murdered Azaria, and whether her husband is proved to the same degree of proof to have been an accessory after the fact to that murder. If upon that evidence you are so satisfied beyond reasonable doubt, your duty of course is to convict. If you are not so satisfied your duty is to acquit, simply because by law they are entitled to the benefit of any reasonable doubt that the evidence may leave in your mind.

The jury retired, and the awful, nerve-wracking wait began. It was to be sustained for little more than six hours.

At 8.33 p.m., the parties were given notice to reassemble in court. The jury had reached a verdict. Michael and Lindy had spent most of the trial sitting behind their counsel, where they could discuss the case and give instructions. Now they were asked to take their places in the dock. They made their way into it and sat quietly; Lindy wearing a pale-blue dress with white trim, and Michael in grey slacks and a white shirt with a red tie. The court rose while the judge entered and took his seat. He directed a sheriff’s officer to bring in the jury. The first chill of apprehension was felt by journalists who had covered numerous jury trials. It is not a good sign when the jury keep their eyes averted from the accused. The foreman stood and was asked whether the jury had reached unanimous verdicts in the cases before them.

‘We have, Your Honour,’ he replied.

‘Do you find the accused Alice Lynne Chamberlain guilty or not guilty of the charge of murder?’

‘Guilty.’

There was not a sound in the courtroom. The foreman looked confused, and repeated the word more loudly. A similar verdict was pronounced in respect of the charges against Michael. Two female jurors wept quietly.

In the Northern Territory, life imprisonment was mandatory for murder, and there was no point in delaying the sentencing for further argument. Muirhead said simply, ‘Alice Lynne Chamberlain, you have been found guilty of murder by this jury. There is only one sentence open to me under the law. You will be imprisoned for life with hard labour.’

Muirhead was subsequently reported to have told a barrister, ‘Don’t blame me, I summed up for an acquittal.’ He also sought to have the law changed so that judges would be free to impose lesser sentences in cases where that was warranted. But so far as the Chamberlains were concerned, the trial was over, and his only remaining duty was to sentence Michael. That task was adjourned.