When coroner Elizabeth Morris ruled that a dingo had taken baby Azaria Chamberlain from her cot in the Australian outback 32 years ago, there were smiles, tears of relief and loud applause from the packed gallery at Darwin magistrates court. But there were no surprises.
There had always been a sense of unreality in the conviction of Lindy Chamberlain, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor’s wife and respected member of the community, for cutting the throat of her nine-week-old baby. To this day, nobody has ever advanced a plausible motive.
After Chamberlain’s conviction, there were other instances of dingo attacks on children including the fatal mauling of nine-year-old Clinton Gage on Queensland’s Bribie Island in 2001 and they provided the critical circumstantial evidence needed to end the Azaria mystery.
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How different it was in November 1982, when a supreme court jury in Darwin found that Chamberlain was guilty of murder and her husband was guilty of being an accessory after the fact. For the six weeks of the trial, the atmosphere had been at fever pitch. Young people were parading in front of the court with T-shirts reading: “The dingo is innocent!”
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When the verdicts were handed down, there was seemingly universal approval. Lindy got mandatory life imprisonment, consigned for what was to be three years in Berrimah prison. Michael feared he would be jailed too, but Justice James Muirhead, who clearly disagreed with the verdict, gave him a suspended sentence and put him on a bond. Michael, for the first time in the trial, cried.
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The Chamberlains were tried and convicted. But afterwards it emerged there was no blood in their car or on their possessions. Ms Kuhl had done a presumptive test and been misled by a positive reaction to the presence of copper oxide, a material prevalent where the Chamberlains lived in Mt Isa, Queensland.
Cameron conceded in the royal commission that was eventually ordered that he had only assumed the handprint was blood he had not tested it.
The Chamberlains, exonerated by the royal commission in 1987, were pardoned and compensated. They then fought long and hard against an intransigent Northern Territory administration, which only quashed their convictions several years after the coroner’s verdict changed. A third inquest seven years ago succeeded only in returning an open verdict. On Tuesday, the tortuous saga ended, with Michael Chamberlain, standing on the courtroom steps in Darwin, declaring: “I am here to tell you that you can get justice even when you think that all is lost!”
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