Lindy Chamberlain
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Crime & Punishment
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A ring of dust around Ayers Rock
Lindy and Michael Chamberlain and their three children were camping at Ayers Rock in central Australia in August 1980.[1] They were relaxing with other campers around a campfire when Lindy heard a disturbance near the tent where her infant daughter Azaria was sleeping. As she went to check on the baby she thought she saw a dingo running out of the tent. When she got to the tent, the child was gone.
Lindy raised the alarm at once. Azaria was never found.
Dingo attacks are rare, and the police believed Lindy was behaving strangely. Regarding the “dingo” explanation as absurd, quickly they concluded that Lindy had murdered and disposed of her baby. Their media management was such that before long, the public believed it, too.[2]
The police built their case from the little positive evidence they had: Lindy’s absence from the campfire, her strange religious beliefs (the Chamberlains were Seventh-Day Adventists), her odd behaviour when interviewed and critically what appeared to be spattered infant blood in the footwell of the Chamberlain’s car.
But many aspects of the police case were highly implausible: Lindy was absent for no more than five or ten minutes, so logistically, it would have been hard to murder Azaria in the way proposed — with blunt scissors — dispose of the body and all evidence before returning to the campsite to raise the alarm. Never mind how unlikely it was for a mother — let alone a devout Christian mother — to murder her own infant in cold blood.
Nevertheless, in 1982, Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of Azaria’s murder. She spent three and a half years in prison before Azaria’s matinee jacket was found, four kilometres from the campsite, at the entrance to a dingo lair. Lindy was quickly released and pardoned, but her conviction was not finally quashed until 1992.
The “blood spatter” in the footwell of the Chamberlains’ Holden Torana turned out, much later, to be a standard sound-deadening compound applied during the car’s manufacture. the Coroner’s report to the police on the forensic evidence is perhaps the most striking example of prosecutor’s tunnel vision in legal history.
See also
References
- ↑ A Perfect Storm: The True Story of the Chamberlains is a fabulous accout of the whole affair.
- ↑ A common schoolyard joke at the time: Q: What is the ring of dust rising around Ayers Rock? A: The dingoes doing a lap of honour.