[imagesource: Supplied to NewsAU]

It has been more than 40 years since Lynette Dawson went missing from her home on Sydney’s northern beaches.

As one of Australia’s longest-running cold cases, her body has still never been found.

However, her husband has recently been found guilty of murdering her, as well as manipulating, lying, and distracting attention away from the fact for four decades.

Chris Dawson is currently in jail after being convicted by Supreme Court Justice Ian Harrison for killing his wife and disposing of her body in 1982.

The couple is pictured up top during happier times.

The verdict came after decades of police investigations, two coronial inquests, and a two-month-long trial, as well as being “thrust to the centre of the Australian consciousness” in 2018.

That was due to the popular true-crime podcast, Teacher’s Pet, per VICE.

The Walkley Award-winning podcast, led by Hedley Thomas, presented listeners with claims of new evidence that police failed to get their hands on, and lent much of its focus to the ways both police and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions were thought to have mishandled the case.

Most notably, the podcast examined the relationship that Chris, then a physical education teacher, was having with one of his students, known as JC.

The student was 16 at the time Lynette disappeared:

The court heard that by the time JC left school, she and Chris were in an “energetic sexual relationship” and he had become infatuated with her. Harrison said this was motive enough for Chris to kill his wife so as to continue the illicit affair.

JC had also apparently come from a broken home, with abuse and alcohol in the mix, and had likely seen an escape via Chris.

They married but were divorced in 1991, which Chris used to dispute the testimony that JC gave to the court, saying that some of her evidence was the words of an aggrieved ex-wife, per CNN.

At the age of 33, Lynette vanished without ever speaking to her family, friends, and colleagues again, supposedly walking out on her husband and their two young children when they were just two and four years old, a narrative that Chris proposed to the court.

Chris, however, claimed he had received several phone calls from her in the days and weeks after she went missing, per NewsAU:

But Justice Ian Harrison described Dawson’s descriptions of the phone calls as “lacking in context” and “pregnant with cliche”.

He also said it was doubtful that a woman who had decided to flee her home would only contact the man who was responsible for her departure.

Chris was found guilty on Tuesday.

It’s still unclear what happened to Lynette:

Harrison said evidence did not reveal how Dawson killed her, whether he did it with the assistance others or by himself…

Yet, he said he found the evidence presented by the Crown to be “persuasive and compelling”.

On top of a bunch of other evidence, the fact that Lynette didn’t so much as pack a pair of underwear and had a strong bond with her children was “completely at odds with the proposition” that she voluntarily left her home.

Harrison found that Chris displayed a “consciousness of guilt” by making several false statements about the circumstances around his wife’s disappearance.

[sources:vice&newsau&cnn]