29

Were the Chamberlains believable?

As the apparently damning edifice of expert evidence collapsed, the Crown renewed its assault on the Chamberlains’ veracity, and both Lindy and Michael were cross-examined at length.

It was suggested that Lindy must have lied about seeing the dingo emerge from the tent. If the dingo ‘emerged from the tent in full view of her gaze’ then, as Barker had asked the jury, ‘How could she possibly have been unable to see, in the mouth of that animal, her child, Azaria?’ In fact, she had constantly maintained that she saw the dingo shaking its head, but had been unable to see anything in its mouth. It was suggested that this could not be reconciled with her ability to describe the head and ears of the dingo in detail. Her explanation that her view of the baby might have been obscured by the log rail or a low shrub had previously been attacked by reference to Harris’s opinion that dingoes are likely to carry their prey with their heads erect. But it now seemed that no one really knew how a particular dingo might emerge from the flaps of a tent with a baby in its jaws, or even if she had seen the right dingo. It was all speculative.

It was also suggested that she could not have believed that the dingo had the baby, and yet ‘dived straight for the tent’. In fact, she had said that as she approached the tent she saw that the bassinet was empty and cried out, but ‘dived’ into the tent to check. This struck me as a perfectly normal, human reaction. Some things are too horrific to be easily assimilated; one does not want to believe the evidence of one’s own eyes. Even when the harsh reality is inescapable, one hopes against hope that one might be wrong. As Lindy explained at the trial, ‘To know something is true and to accept it are two different things.’ When pressed about the issue, she said, ‘My mind refused to accept that it had her in its mouth — although sort of — it must be ...’ She had earlier told Charlwood that she had felt in the carry cot to make sure the baby was not there, ‘even though I could see she wasn’t’. Things that subsequently seem clear in the calm detachment of a courtroom are not always obvious to the participants during an emergency, and neither Morris nor Roff had been willing to discount the possibility that the child might have been tipped out of the bassinet and concealed in the blankets strewn nearby. Each had taken the precaution of checking for himself.

At the trial, Barker had been able to exploit a chink in the defence case. Lindy had not only claimed that there were paw marks on the space blanket, but that several members of her family had also seen them. Yet none had been called to give evidence in her support. How could the jury believe her if even her mother would not support her story? Before the royal commission, the position was different. Not only her mother, but also her brother and sister-in-law had all given evidence of seeing the prints, and none of these apparently impressive witnesses had been discredited in cross-examination. Yet another source of suspicion had been shown to be without foundation.

The Crown had been also been able to rely on evidence that the damage to the purple blanket had not been caused by the claws or teeth of a dingo, but by insects. The implication was obvious; the insect damage had been there all along, and the Chamberlains had sought to take advantage of it by passing it off as tears or rips caused by the dingo. But, again, new evidence had emerged. Mrs Hansell, the dry cleaner, confirmed that there had been no damage to the blankets when the Chamberlains left for Uluru; another witness, Hilary Tabrett, had seen ‘cuts’ in them within a few days of Azaria’s disappearance; and Dr Pelton found that insects could not have accounted for the whole of the damage. This line of attack had also been based upon a misconception.

It had even been suggested that there was something sinister about the production of two Army ‘giggle’ hats which Mrs Chamberlain produced for the police during the course of their search in 1981. The Chamberlains had apparently taken the hats with them to Uluru, and Lindy handed them over when asked to produce anything that might have blood on it. Scientific testing ascertained that the stains on the hats were not blood, but a substance similar to gum arabic. The Crown suggested that this could not have been an honest mistake; she must have been trying to deceive the police or ‘taunt’ them with evidence that she knew would prove useless. This was a strange proposition. Gum arabic and similar substances are found in a number of food additives and in varnishes and other household liquids. The hats had simply been thrown into a large cupboard, and there was no evidence to suggest that the stains had not come into existence innocently — perhaps through some childhood project. Not only Charlwood, but even the forensic biologist, Mrs Kuhl, had thought that they looked like blood, and there was no reason to suppose that Lindy had not been similarly misled.

They had both been criticised for their limited participation in the searches, though Michael had run frantically into the scrub to look for his little baby daughter and had returned only to find a torch before renewing his search. He had broken it off because Greg Lowe’s comment had made him realise that she was almost certainly dead and that he should be with Lindy and the boys. A major search party had quickly been organised, and the Chamberlains had been asked to wait near the tent for any news. In any event, they had two young sons. One was distraught, and the other — a four-year-old — was fast asleep. It was not a good time to abandon them or leave them with strangers. Two more searchers would have made little difference when about three hundred people were already combing the adjacent areas. Their reluctant decision to comply with the police direction and remain with their children had not been unreasonable.

He was again criticised for failing to inquire about the progress of the search on the following day. Morling was to find little weight in this criticism. Michael had been in the midst of a very small community, and had been told that the police would contact him immediately if they had anything to report. Furthermore, he had resigned himself to the fact that Azaria was dead, a resignation confirmed by Morris when he asked him to complete a ‘Notification of Death’ form for the coroner.

Michael was also attacked for his varying descriptions of the baby’s cry. He had referred to it variously as a ‘faint cry’, ‘an insignificant short cry’, ‘an urgent cry, not loud’, ‘cut off’, ‘as if the baby was being squeezed’, ‘a short sharp cry’, ‘a cry of someone being squeezed, almost out of breath’, and ‘a significant cry’. How would a father describe a faint cry that probably occupied no more than a second or two and seemed innocuous at the time, though it subsequently proved to have signalled the end of his daughter’s life? The cry itself might have been indelibly imprinted in his memory, but he would inevitably have brooded over it and perhaps, as time passed, come to redescribe it in terms that made sense to him in the light of what he had learned. During the course of his evidence before the first inquest, he made it plain that he was finding it difficult to describe the cry with precision. ‘That is a very hard question to ask me,’ he explained, ‘but I will do my best. It seemed to me a cry of someone being squeezed almost out of breath, as if it were a cry — or it sounded to me as a pretty important cry. Mothers have instincts and, I guess, fathers have instincts too.’ Morling was to conclude that there were ‘some slight differences in these descriptions, but they are of no great consequence’.

Then there was the suggestion that Michael had failed to display obvious grief on the evening of Azaria’s disappearance and the following day. He explained that by reference to the comfort which he had obtained from his faith and by his desire to demonstrate the reality of that faith to others. Several witnesses had referred to him as a man who was obviously undergoing a considerable struggle to maintain self-control and, all in all, there seemed little doubt that he had been distraught at the death of his child. A solicitor in the public gallery was to confide that she had behaved in a very similar fashion when her son had been killed in a car accident. She had gone back to work on the same day. At the time, she had been unable to explain this reaction even to herself, but in retrospect realised that the pain had been too much to bear and that she had tried to deny its reality and seek refuge in distractions.

When my own young daughter died suddenly after a short illness, I also maintained rigid self control in public. It was the only way that I could cope. People react to grief in diverse ways. To suggest that a stoical exterior was evidence of complicity in murder seemed preposterous. And on any view of the evidence, Michael had lost his baby daughter. Why should he have been expected to have experienced less grief if she had been murdered by his wife?

Morling was to suggest that the most suspicious aspect of Michael’s conduct was his statement to Roff, about half an hour after Azaria’s disappearance, to the effect that he did not expect Azaria to be found alive. But, as he pointed out, Michael had been told by Greg Lowe that ‘there’s not going to be any joy for you, mate’. That had clearly made him realise the apparent hopelessness of the situation and return to the tent, where the grim reality had been confirmed by the bloodstains.

Morling was also to note Michael’s bent for ‘theatrical language’, and said that this lent some of his evidence ‘a ring of unreality’. He described Michael’s description of the quantity of blood in the tent as ‘patently ridiculous’, but pointed out that it could not have deceived anyone who had been inside the tent to see for himself, and concluded that it did no more than ‘reflect his proclivity for hyperbole’. Perhaps it also reflected the depth of his emotional reaction; this was the blood of his baby.

There was an obvious need for caution in considering these criticisms. Many of the earlier statements said to have been lies had been shown to be true. To take but one example, the jury had been invited to doubt the existence of the matinee jacket. Furthermore, both Lindy and Michael had been through an appalling experience. Their minds must have been full of the horror of it all. Many people would have become incoherent or hysterical in such circumstances, and even the most level-headed and stoical could have been forgiven for becoming confused about details.

One obvious problem with this seemingly relentless attempt to paint the Chamberlains as dishonest was that other evidence in the case not only suggested that they were decent people with no reason to behave in the manner the Crown alleged, but also provided significant corroboration for their accounts.

As Porter had said at the beginning of the proceedings, there was ample evidence that the Chamberlains were people of impeccable character,. There had been no motive for Lindy to have killed her baby, and it was unlikely that a woman with the ‘new mum glow’ still about her would have done so when she had displayed no symptoms of post-natal depression or any other psychological disturbance.

It was difficult to imagine that she could have had time to accomplish everything the Crown attributed to her within the limited time she was away from the barbecue area, that she could have done so without alerting Aidan, or that she could have had the presence of mind to pick up the conversation where she left off when she returned. Michael’s evidence of hearing the baby cry at a time when, on the Crown case, it must have been dead, was corroborated by Aidan, Mrs Lowe, and possibly another camper, Mrs Dawson, who had heard the baby cry at about that time, but could not be certain it had been on the Sunday night rather than the night before. Lindy would not have had the opportunity to tell Michael what she had allegedly done by then, and he would have had no reason to lie. It seemed fanciful to suggest that all of them had simultaneously made the same mistake. It was also hard to understand why, if she had just committed murder and needed an alibi, Lindy would not have ‘hopped on the bandwagon’ and claimed that she, too, had heard the cry. And the Lowes were convinced that the distress she displayed after giving the alarm was genuine.

The very fact that she had not claimed to have seen the baby in the dingo’s mouth also suggested candour. If she had been making up the whole story, why would she have passed up the opportunity to say that she had seen the baby in the dingo’s jaws? The direction which she indicated had been taken by the dingo proved to correspond to the direction of the tracks found by Roff, yet he had picked them out some 17 to 18 metres from the tent, on the side away from the barbecue light, and it seemed unlikely that she would have been able to see them in the dark.

The questions that Morling had asked during Porter’s opening address were also of great significance. It seemed fanciful to suggest that Michael would have left his surviving children with Lindy in the morning if he knew that she had murdered Azaria the night before. It seemed even more implausible that he would have permitted her to continue raising them without taking steps to ensure that she received adequate psychiatric treatment.

Lindy had blithely shown her tracksuit pants to Mrs Ransom and had asked her to take them to the drycleaners. It seemed an extraordinary step to take if the pants had borne the telltale marks of a murder. It seemed equally unlikely that she would have volunteered the suggestion that there had been blood on her tracksuit and shoes, especially when no one else had claimed to have seen it. The Chamberlains had also produced the correct camera bag and other items taken to Uluru when no one would have known the difference.

Further examples of candour were to be found in Lindy’s evidence. When asked about ‘a water bottle’, she volunteered, ‘There were big two or four gallon containers and we had four of them. Three of them were right back in the boot area with the petrol — two of them in the boot and one on the roof or one on the roof and two in the boot and the juice container was down at my feet.’ She was equally candid in her concession that a bloodstained towel could have been hidden in a green garbage bag. She also told the commission that there had been an esky in the boot, though there had been no hint of that in any of the police evidence, and readily agreed that it would have been big enough to have hidden the body of a baby. When asked about Sergeant Cocks’ experiments to reproduce the damage in Azaria’s jumpsuit with a pair of scissors, she volunteered the fact that she was a dressmaker, and said that she could have done a better job of it than he had done.

Michael seemed to display an equal degree of candour. He frequently went to considerable lengths to make it plain that he was not sure about evidence that would have been in his favour.

There was also the obvious problem that, if Lindy’s story of having seen the dingo was a lie formulated on the spur of the moment, she must have been extraordinarily fortunate to have had an array of supporting details emerge spontaneously to back up her story. First, Sally Lowe and Michael thought that they heard the dead baby cry, and then tracks were found of a dingo that had stopped at the rear of the tent adjacent to the bassinet, had come around to the front, entered the tent, re-emerged with an object that proved to be wrapped in coarse cloth, and departed in the direction that Lindy indicated had been taken by the very dingo she was said to have invented.

Yes, there had been some minor inconsistencies in the various accounts the Chamberlains had given over the years, and Lindy might not have recalled some details accurately. But this had been a shattering experience and, as Amy Whittaker observed, she showed every sign of being in shock. Some confusion was inevitable. Then there was the emotionally devastating saga that unfolded over the following years. We like to imagine that our memories are like computer files that always provide precisely the same information that was originally recorded; in reality, however, they not only fade with time but are subtly distorted as the mind assimilates and deals with other experiences and other information. In a later life, as a judge, I heard a case in which a senior medical specialist provided successive reports on the same patient over a period of several years: each had included a description of the same meeting of clinical staff concerning the patient’s initial admission, and one could chart the progressive change in his memory over the course of the reports. It was clear from the balance of his evidence that he was an honest witness, but he was obviously startled when the discrepancies were pointed out in cross-examination. Problems of this kind may be exacerbated by factors such as stress and defensiveness, and the Chamberlains had been emotionally shell-shocked.

The Crown had never challenged the overwhelming evidence of Lindy’s distress on this terrible night, but in the court of public opinion there was a pervasive belief that she had been at least callously indifferent to Azaria’s disappearance. This impression may have been entrenched by the stoical, even defiant, manner she came to adopt in the face of the emerging climate of accusation and hostility, but it seemed to have its genesis in a particular televised interview. As I watched a videotape of the program in a Darwin courthouse, I could well understand the adverse impression that it apparently created. But Porter had been able to obtain all of the rushes, not merely the footage that survived the editing process and went to air, and he then screened all of the takes in sequence. That was a revelation. Lindy had begun to answer questions about Azaria, but her face had crumpled and she had broken down in tears. Another voice said ‘Cut! Take one!’, and Lindy was given time to regain her composure before the interviewer tried again. She got a little further this time before her face crumpled again and the voice said, ‘Cut! Take two!’ This process continued, with successive pleas for her to try to control her emotions and get her message across. The version that went to air was, I think, ‘Take seven’.

So what did I make of them? In truth, I was initially in two minds when first approached to act for Michael Chamberlain. He seemed honest, and there was something disturbing about the manner in which the evidence of apparently crucial eyewitnesses seemed to have been ignored in favour of theories by experts. And I had long believed that one of the fundamental bulwarks of a free and democratic society was the principle that everyone should be presumed innocent until their guilt had been proven beyond reasonable doubt at a fair trial before an impartial and properly constituted court. But this belief did not require the barristers who played an indispensable role in that process to approach their cases with a naive expectation that their clients would prove to be innocent — and in this instance, the Chamberlains had already been convicted by jury, after a trial at which they had been defended by eminent counsel. Furthermore, two subsequent appeals had failed, and the only fresh evidence of which I was initially aware was the discovery of the matinee jacket, which seemed unlikely to exonerate them.

Yet, as I came to know Lindy and Michael, my ambivalence quickly evaporated. They proved to be warm and transparently honest people who were obviously anxious to overturn their convictions and clear their names, but never baulked at suggested tests or investigations that would have frightened anyone with something to hide. I was to spend a great deal of time with them over the ensuing months and see them endure the most emotionally harrowing evidence, watching helplessly on one occasion as Lindy fled the courtroom during a graphic description of how easily a dingo would have torn open her daughter’s skull. I had been with them for many long weeks as they listened to unremitting attempts to persuade Justice Morling that there was no doubt of their guilt and to effectively extinguish their last hope of exoneration. And I had seen them subjected to such hostility, even hatred, that no restaurant in Darwin would accept a reservation in their name for fear of a violent incident. You get to know people well when they are under adversity, and I came to have considerable respect for both Lindy and Michael.

I was, of course, conscious of the strength of the case that had previously been brought against them, but serious errors had already been discovered in the tangled skein of scientific opinion, assumption, and conjecture upon which much of the case against them had been based. On the other hand, I was immediately impressed with the obvious integrity of people like Sally Lowe, Amy Whittaker, and Derek Roff, all of whom seemed entirely reliable witnesses. All this confirmed what I had found obvious: a dingo had taken the child, and the Chamberlains were innocent.