The dingo did do it!
THIS Monday ought to have been Azaria Chamberlain’s 32nd birthday. As it turned out she never even celebrated her first one. She was just nine weeks old when she died at a campsite near the natural feature that Australians used to call Ayers Rock but now refer to by its aboriginal name Uluru.
Despite the shortness of her life, Azaria has had a huge impact on modern Australian culture. Her death and the subsequent conviction of her mother Lindy for her murder spawned two films, a mini-series, an opera, a fictional rock band and screeds of bad-taste jokes. Now Azaria has been granted an amended death certificate confirming what her mother’s supporters say should have been obvious all along: a dingo – a free-roaming Aussie wild dog – got into an unzipped tent and carried her off.
Lindy Chamberlain always said she had seen the animal emerge, while another witness heard it growl and there were dingo footprints leading into the tent. Yet Lindy herself was accused of killing the baby, with her husband Michael an accessory after the fact, and baying crowds cheered when she was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour, even though the prosecution had failed to produce a body, a weapon or a motive.
It was winter in the Northern Territory when the Chamberlains – both Seventh Day Adventists, he a pastor, she the daughter of one – arrived at Uluru for a camping trip in August 1980. With them were their sons Aidan, six, and Reagan, four, plus tiny Azaria.
Lindy Chamberlain, once Australia’s most hated woman after her baby vanished 30 years ago, has finally been vindicated
On their second night Lindy put the baby to bed next to the sleeping Reagan and then returned to the campsite barbecue because Aidan said he was still hungry. But a baby’s cry from the direction of the tent sent her racing back. She was just in time to see a canine shadow emerging through the front flap. As her frantic search inside the tent confirmed her worst fears she uttered the immortal cry: “A dingo’s got my baby!”
Initially her account was accepted without question. Nearly 300 campers formed a human chain to search for tracks or pieces of clothing. Although some paw prints were found the trail went cold and it was not until a week later that a walker discovered a blood-stained babygrow in a gully two-and-a-half miles from the campsite. That was when the Chamberlains’ problems began. Although the garment was torn it was hard to see how an animal could have removed it from the baby’s body. And dissenters started to say that no dingo had ever killed a baby.
An initial inquest took the Chamberlains’ side, concluding that an animal had indeed taken Azaria – although it noted that there were oddities about the clothing and someone else might have taken the body from the dingo and disposed of it. The coroner criticised the police for their sloppy forensic work, including removing the babygrow without photographing it.
The police fought back. Spurred on by media suggestions that Azaria had been killed in a bizarre religious rite (it was falsely claimed that her name meant “sacrifice in the wilderness”) they raided the Chamberlains’ home in North Queensland and returned to forensic experts in a bid to disprove the dingo account.
When a biologist testified that she had found foetal blood in the Chamberlains’ car the inquest findings were overturned by a second coroner and Lindy was charged with murder. In September 1982, pregnant with her second daughter Kahlia, she and Michael went on trial. Six weeks later they were found guilty, even though the prosecution failed to supply any motive.
L indy had been in prison for three years when searchers looking for the remains of a hiker who had fallen from Ayers Rock found the matinee jacket the Chamberlains insisted Azaria was wearing on the fateful night. It was half-buried next to a dingo lair.
Lindy was immediately released from prison and a judicial inquiry was opened. It found that the forensic evidence was utterly unreliable: a “bloodied handprint” on the babygrow was actually red dust, while the “foetal blood” turned out to be sound-deadener sprayed on by the manufacturer. All convictions against the Chamberlains were quashed and in 1992 Lindy was awarded compensation of $1.3million (£830,000) for wrongful imprisonment.
Her story was made into an Australian TV film in 1983 and a mini-series in 2004 but the best-known version remains the 1988 film A Cry In the Dark starring Meryl Streep, who was nominated for an Oscar. The case is the subject of an opera, Lindy, while the band in the TV series Buffy The Vampire Slayer was called Dingoes Ate My Baby. But as the tale entered the culture it also became the butt of easy humour. This week Australian comic Wendy Harmer apologised to the Chamberlains for her Eighties musical parody Everyone Knows It’s Lindy.
The couple have been praised for their dignity under fire and for not giving way to bitterness. Asked in a recent TV interview if she thinks about how her life would have turned out if Azaria had lived Lindy replied: “I wonder what life with her would have been like. But life in general? No, I tend as much as possible to take off the rear-view mirrors and go to the front.”
The Chamberlains divorced in 1991 and Lindy, now 63, married American Rick Creighton. Michael has also remarried. Their sons grew up amid groundless rumours that one or other of them had killed their sister and their mother had covered up for them. But they have refused to be daunted by the tragedy and the bad-mouthing.
When Aidan married in 2006 his bride arrived at church in the same yellow Holden Torana the family had used for their tragic camping trip, now bearing the ironic number-plate 4ENSIC. And at Kahlia’s wedding she was given away by her father, stepfather and the two foster fathers who cared for her while her mother was in jail.
A third inquest in 1995 said that the cause of Azaria’s death could not be determined. The family’s request for a fourth and final inquest was accepted after they presented new evidence of at least 12 dingo attacks on humans.
