The recent conviction of Chris Dawson for the murder of his wife Lynette Dawson resoundingly displays the power of circumstantial evidence in reasoning towards verdicts beyond reasonable doubt.  The fact that the trial was by judge alone and not a verdict returned by a jury permits a relatively rare view into the process of deduction on the path to a conviction; as the judge, Justice Ian Harrison was required to publish his reasoning in public and did so in a spoken judgment lasting five hours.

In the case, the victim was last seen more than forty years ago and no dead body had ever been recovered and no eye witnesses have ever come forward to testify that they saw Chris Dawson either murder his wife or dispose of her dead body.

The defence case at trial was quite simply that Lynette Dawson had left the family home containing her husband and children voluntarily one day and somewhere unknown commenced a new life away from the unhappy circumstances of her marriage and life with Dawson.  The defence even called evidence of sightings of Lynette Dawson alive and well on various occasions since her disappearance.

The judge as he was required to do, utilised the totality of the evidence to reason, through findings of fact and inferences flowing from such facts, whether or not he could be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that Chris Dawson had murdered his wife or whether, in fact, she had possibly left the family home and lived subsequently anonymously under a new identity.

The Supreme Court justice found that in combination, Dawson’s sexual and emotional infatuation with a woman other than his wife at the time of Mrs Dawson’s disappearance; the shear improbability that Mrs Dawson would voluntarily leave her children and all possessions and simply walk away from them without a word; the offender’s multiple lies concerning contact from Lynette Dawson after her disappearance and multiple lies by the offender about his life with his wife and the circumstances of her continued absence from the family home provided the circumstantial framework enabling a finding that not only did Lynette Dawson not voluntarily choose to leave her family and old life behind but further, that her disappearance was due to the actions of her husband.

Once a tribunal, whether a judge sitting alone or more typically a jury, finds as a fact that an Accused person has lied about substantial facts or circumstances, such lies can themselves be permissibly used as strands of circumstantial evidence as demonstrative of a consciousness of guilt: that such lies are necessarily told as the truth might in the mind of the Accused and objectively be consistent with guilt.  Plainly Dawson felt that he had to create a web of lies supporting the possibility of his estranged wife’s continued existence to deflect and explain the startling improbability that she would simply have chosen to walk away and start again leaving her beloved children behind.