Lynette Dawson murder: Shanelle Dawson opens up on conflicted feelings and final texts with killer dad Chris

The estranged daughter of convicted murderer Chris Dawson has recalled his last text message to her five years ago.

Shanelle Dawson grew up without knowing her mother Lynette, who was murdered in her home on Sydney’s Northern Beaches by her father in 1982 during an affair he had with a 16-year-old student.

Shanelle, then four, and her younger sister were told by Dawson that their mother had simply walked away because she no longer loved them.

Dawson will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars after a court last year found him guilty of murdering Lynette and disposing of her body four decades ago.

Now that she is a mother herself, Shanelle spoke to the Australian Women’s Weekly about her life, the conflicting feelings she has for her father and their last text exchanges in September 2018.

The Teacher’s Pet, a podcast about her mother’s then-unsolved disappearance, had launched several months earlier and made headlines across Australia.

Shanelle texted her father to tell him she loved him, but said, “I will not live a life based on lies nor will I continue to subject myself to emotional manipulation and control.

‘You have dishonored our mother so terribly.

“One day I will forgive you for so selfishly cutting her out of our lives.”

Dawson replied: ‘You are clearly very lonely and depressed in the life you have chosen… It is your adult life, now 41, with a child and no partner, that has clearly caused this terrible depression.’

A month later, Dawson sent what would be his last text to Shanelle.

“Hi Shanelle, I hope you and Kialah are doing well. I think of you all the time xx.”

Shanelle opened up candidly about Dawson in the wide-ranging interview, telling the magazine, “My inner world was in front of the masses. (I) couldn’t pretend anymore.’

Shanelle recalled the harrowing moment she had to explain to her nine-year-old daughter Kialah that her grandfather had killed her grandmother, whose body was never found.

Her daughter’s reaction was heartbreaking.

“She kept asking, ‘But why did he do that?’ The same question that has plagued me over and over again for years,” Shanelle recalled.

Shanelle also opened up about the fear of being “cut out” by her sister Sherryn and other members of Dawson’s family who remain loyal to the convicted killer.

“I feel like I’m the scapegoat,” she said.

‘Why am I the one being cut out? I didn’t do anything wrong. But there is also a real freedom in it that I can embrace.’

More than forty years later, Shanelle struggles with trusting people and suffers from PTSD after losing her mother so young.

“There’s a part of me that’s broken, I haven’t really fully trusted people anymore,” Shanelle said.

‘I can be a bit irritable; my defense mechanisms are fairly intact.”

Hearing the guilty verdict brought mixed feelings of despair and relief.

She described Dawson’s trial as the longest ten weeks of her life.

“I tried to be at peace with it however it went, and tried not to be too desperate and attached to a certain outcome, because you can only have so much emotional turmoil in one life,” Shanelle remembers.

‘There was no joy; It is heartbreaking for me to know that he will likely die behind bars.”

Her book My Mother’s Eyes will be available for purchase from October 11.

“I’m not just claiming my mother’s story and my story as our own,” Shanelle said.

“I’m moving these chapters to the past and writing new ones.”

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