Mothers Who Murder (3 page)

So if Lindy did not fit the profile of mothers who murder their children for psychological reasons, does the story of a dingo taking the baby seem likely? First, let’s look at the eyewitness testimony in relation to the likelihood that a dingo took Azaria. A number of people reported seeing dingoes in the area around the time Azaria went missing. One of these was Michael Chamberlain, who fed a crust of bread to one of the wild dogs. Another was fellow camper Sally Lowe, who reported to police that dingoes had been loitering around the rubbish when she had been disposing of food scraps. Other witnesses, William (Bill) and Judith
West, testified that they had heard a dog’s low, throaty growl coming from the direction of the Chamberlains’ tent. Judith stated that it was a noise she associated with the sounds dogs make when they are slaughtering animals – familiar to her as she had heard her husband’s dogs killing sheep. Critically, Mrs West also testified that earlier she had shooed a dingo away from their twelve-year-old daughter, after it grabbed her by the arm and pulled. Mrs West also testified that during the evening of the 17th, she asked six-year-old Aidan if the dingo had taken Azaria and he said yes.

Dog hairs were also found on Azaria’s clothing as well as inside the tent, although the Chamberlains had not owned a dog for a number of years. Add to this that there had been a number of (non-fatal) dingo attacks on children and adults in the park in the weeks immediately preceding Azaria’s disappearance, and that the chief ranger for the Ayers Rock area, Derek Roff, had written to the government, imploring them to sanction a dingo cull after a dingo had dragged three-year-old Amanda Cranwell from the family car and proceeded to make off with her, just weeks preceding Azaria’s attack and disappearance. Roff had been warning of an imminent human tragedy, due to the fact that the dingoes were becoming bolder, and were increasingly confident in approaching and sometimes even attacking people.

THE ALTERNATIVE WHO: THE DINGO

The dingo (
Canis lupus dingo
) is an iconic Australian species. For non-Australians, including myself, the dingo seems to represent everything Australian – the wild, the outback, survival. Everything we love Australia for. A free-roaming
wild dog, the dingo is found only in Australia, although it is skeletally identical to the white wolf of Asia. The relative of the Asian wolf arrived in Australia between 4000 and 18,000 years ago. As the largest terrestrial predator in Australia, the dingo is currently recognised as a sub-species of the grey wolf (
Canis lupus
), and is an apex predator – meaning it is a predator at the top of its food chain, with few or no predators of its own. The dingo is protected in Australia and is considered at risk of extinction, as some sub-species are almost extinct, while other varieties flourish. In conflict with this view is the fact that the dingo is the only native species to be labelled as a pest throughout most of the country and is only protected in certain areas, such as national parks. Dingoes regularly attack farm livestock – particularly sheep and cattle – as well as rabbits and kangaroos. They are equivalent in size to a large domestic dog, with an average dingo weighing around 17 kilograms, and large ones weighing in at over 20 kilograms.

As a result of hybridisation with introduced domestic dogs, cross-bred dingoes are getting bigger. It is thought that in a significant number of populations, less than 25 per cent of Australian dingoes are purebreds and that in parallel with the gene flow of additional alleles between sub-groups, the genetic ‘enhancement’ of the dingoes’ gene pool has provided a stimulus for the evolution in some areas of larger wild dogs. As a result, there has been a 20 per cent increase in average body weight over the last four decades, with 40 per cent of adult dingoes in some areas weighing more than 17 kilograms. The increase in size leads to a coinciding increase in the efficiency with which wild dogs kill prey, as well as their capability to kill larger prey.

We must also consider the dingo’s teeth as they are a key piece of evidence in this case. The prosecution’s expert witness claimed that the tear in the neck of Azaria’s jumpsuit was likely caused by a sharp implement, such as a pair of scissors, rather than a dingo’s teeth. However, if we look closely at the dingo’s dentition, we will see that the front teeth – in particular the canines – are long, sharp and serrated. And they are strong, their primary function being to grip and tear. The lower canines specifically have evolved to tear meat, but anything that comes into contact with them – including cloth – could easily be ripped. I would hate to be the expert giving evidence that canine teeth could not create a clean slice, similar to that produced by a knife; the sand in the diet of the desert dingoes keeps their teeth filed to razor sharpness.

In terms of their behaviour, my aim was to determine if a dingo would take a baby. That would of course depend on a number of factors, including for example how easy the prey (in this case a human baby) was to access, whether the tent was within the dingo’s hunting range, and whether the dingo was confident enough to enter human territory to access food. Recent research has taught us a lot about dingoes’ behaviour and indicates that many of us are now living in close proximity to urban dingoes, which have been found to be wary of humans but unperturbed by human presence. In an area such as a campsite, this wariness can be further diminished through repeated positive experiences – for example, being fed by humans. Known as ‘habituation’, which is the reduction in response to a stimulus after repeated exposure, in terms of dingo attacks on humans, frequent episodes of feeding (both intentional and scavenging) of an intelligent, dominant species such as wild dogs
can make them react more aggressively towards humans when their food source is restricted or they feel challenged. Known as shameless thieves, wild dogs will scavenge any chance they get. In the wild, you will see dingoes watching fishermen, waiting for a free meal. Sometimes dingoes will keep campers company, sitting just out of the range of the fire. But they are not pets; they are wild dogs – and they can certainly be unpredictable.

The question in the Chamberlain case rested on whether a dingo was: 1) capable of taking a nine-and-a-half-week-old baby, weighing approximately 4.5 kilograms; and 2) behaviourally likely to take the risk of entering human territory in search of food. And, if it could carry the weight, could it have the jaw span to physically lift the child in its mouth? Anyone who owns a large domestic dog, such as a Rottweiler, mastiff or German shepherd for example, will have seen firsthand what these dogs can do with their mouths; the power of their jaws is incredible. As a dog owner, I have no doubt a large dingo (weighing around 20 kilograms) could take a baby. As a forensic scientist, I would need to test the possibility that a dingo was physically capable of taking a baby. To do that I would morphometrically
⁷
assess the dingoes available for study, and consider the fact a dingo’s jaw is not like that of a standard dog – in that it can dislocate in the manner of a snake – and review their physical characteristics in light of what we know about the behaviour of these predators.

So the question is – could a dingo physically take a child of Azaria’s size? The defence said yes, the prosecution said no. I’m coming down on the side of the defence. Importantly, Lindy described seeing the dingo ‘shaking’ something in the entrance of the tent. This is consistent with the evidence
the rangers found with the front tent pole knocked out of alignment, with blood splashes on it. Later the trackers found indications of drag marks and indentations in the dirt, possibly suggestive that an animal had put its burden down, resting. To me, it’s clear: dingoes have the capability, and can be incentivised, to attack and kill children.

THE HOW

There is a recognised problem of potential bias within the criminal justice system where the police undertake the selection of evidence to be analysed, and then often perform the forensic analysis themselves. The police’s role, after all, is to collect evidence for potential presentation in court. But by and large they want a verdict of guilty returned, so how can we ensure that the evidence they collect is representative and not predisposed towards proving guilt – thereby harming the defence’s case – sometimes before an arrest is even made? It has been argued that all forensic examiners and labs undertaking analyses should be entirely independent of the police, to ensure the objectivity of the criminal justice system from beginning to end. Unfortunately, although many forensic examiners are now civilians and not sworn police officers, the links to the police still make it difficult to ensure the collection and evaluation of the evidence is always objective and impartial. Certainly, the evidence in the Lindy Chamberlain case was not analysed in a fair and unbiased manner. Worse, key results – which appeared to call into question Lindy’s account of a dingo taking her baby – were leaked to the media, feeding the media frenzy and reducing Lindy’s chance of receiving a fair trial.

The prosecution’s theory was based on Lindy killing Azaria; the why was, apparently, unimportant. The Crown
case was that in the few minutes Lindy was away from the other campers at the barbeques and putting Azaria to bed, she returned to her own tent, changed into tracksuit bottoms, collected Azaria and took her to the car. Then she climbed into the front passenger seat (important for the evidence used against Lindy later) and used scissors to cut Azaria’s throat, then waited for the child to die. Lindy was then accused of hiding Azaria’s body in a camera case already in the car, cleaning up all of the blood (including that on the outside of the camera case), and removing her now bloodstained trousers which she had changed into to carry out the murder. She then, according to the prosecutors, collected some baked beans for her eldest son from the car and – leaving Azaria’s body there to collect and bury later (with Michael’s help) – calmly returned to the tent. She then faked the blood spatter and headed back to the other families at the campfire – all in the company of her son, Aidan, who was with her, but without attracting his attention or the attention of anyone at the campsite. There was the added problem for the prosecution that camper Greg Lowe testified that he had watched Lindy at all times as he was curious as to where the Chamberlains were camping.

What evidence was there that Lindy had achieved this incredibly difficult task without raising any suspicion? There were no eyewitnesses claiming to have seen anything strange, there was no motive or pre- or post-incident behaviour that caused alarm bells to sound. No one saw any blood on Lindy that night. If she had slit her daughter’s throat, as hypothesised by the Crown – leaving arterial spray in the car – surely it would have been impossible that there was no sign of blood on her. Also, there had been very little opportunity for either of the Chamberlain adults
to clean up the blood before the risk of it being seen by one of the hundreds of searchers. Maybe her tracksuit bottoms had blood on them, but they had been in the tent, and in any case were drycleaned and no blood was found on them afterwards. And no one saw either Lindy or Michael at any point carrying anything with which to clean up or to dig Azaria’s grave. Lindy was not really out of sight long enough to have snuck away and buried the baby.

However, Michael’s movements are more difficult to pin down. That’s why the Crown had to also implicate him, as Lindy simply could not have killed Azaria and disposed of her body without help. But with so many people around, on high alert and probably jumping at every shadow thinking a dingo might snatch another child, it would still have been incredibly hard for him to sneak away that night to bury her. Perhaps Azaria had been left overnight in the camera bag in the car. However, that would have been extremely risky. To do this Michael would have had to have possessed incredible self-control, as he later invited Mrs Elston, a trained nurse stationed at Uluru and sent to the scene by police to administer first aid should anyone need it, to accompany him in the car when he left the campsite to go to the motel for the night. Mrs Elston travelled in the front passenger seat, where the Crown insisted that Lindy had cut Azaria’s throat, and then helped unload the Chamberlains’ belongings from the car when they reached the motel. She did not notice any blood.

The eyewitness evidence at the trial did little to prove Lindy’s guilt. Quite the opposite. There was simply the absence of Azaria, and Lindy’s claim that she had seen a dingo exiting the tent. But the tide of opinion began to turn against
the Chamberlains when the prosecution’s expert witnesses took the stand. The forensic evidence used against Lindy consisted primarily of blood spatter patterns on Azaria’s jumpsuit, ultraviolet photographs of which were analysed by James Cameron, a professor of forensic medicine from London Hospital Medical College, as well as purported blood from inside the Chamberlains’ car. Cameron stated that the cut mark on the neck of the jumpsuit was consistent with a sharp implement rather than a slit caused by a dingo’s tooth. However, as described earlier, dingoes, like all carnivores, have very long, sharp teeth, evolved specifically for cutting and gripping meat. And a carnivore the size and weight of a large dingo – anywhere up to 25 kilograms – would have large canines, capable of inflicting significant damage on a human adult, let alone a defenceless nine-and-a-half-week-old baby. As noted by the appeal court judges in the High Court of Australia in 1984, it was ‘a matter of opinion rather than scientific demonstration, the blood that soaked the baby’s jumpsuit around the neckline had probably flowed from a wound or wounds inflicted to the baby’s neck by a sharp instrument’. Cross-examination consisted primarily of discussion of previous cases in which Cameron had given pro-prosecution expert testimony that had helped incriminate what later transpired to be innocent suspects. Cameron also gave crucial expert testimony in another trial in England, which was later overturned when his expert opinion proved incorrect, and subsequently his cases worldwide were reopened.