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'A dingo has got my baby' dad dies: Father of Azaria Chamberlain passes away in Australia aged 72
Michael Chamberlain, whose baby was snatched by a dingo in outback Australia in 1980 – sparking a murder trial that divided the nation – has died, aged 72.
Chamberlain’s then wife Lindy, who famously screamed “a dingo has got my baby” after their nine-week-old daughter Azaria went missing at a campsite near Uluru, or Ayers Rock, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in jail.
He was found guilty of being an accessory and was given an 18-month suspended sentence.
The pair spent years fighting to overturn their convictions and were eventually pardoned by the Northern Territory government in 1987.
Their ordeal divided the nation and was turned into the film A Cry in the Dark, in which they were played by Meryl Streep and Sam Neill.
It was not until 2012 that the pair finally cleared their names after a coroner in the Northern Territory ended decades of speculation and ruled that a dingo took their baby.
The finding followed evidence about other unprovoked dingo attacks on children at sites across the country.
Mr Chamberlain, a Seventh Day Adventist pastor who later became a teacher and academic, died in a hospital north of Sydney on Monday after suffering complications from leukaemia.
He and Ms Chamberlain-Creighton, who remarried, had three children aside from Azaria.
They were on the second night of a family holiday in August 1980 when Ms Chamberlain-Creighton heard a cry from Azaria, who was in bed.
Ms Chamberlain-Creighton went to check on her but the baby had disappeared.
Hundreds of people, including Aboriginal trackers, searched for Azaria but her remains were never found.
During the ensuing investigations, inquests and legal battle, the nation was split: some sympathised with the couple’s tragedy, others found them cold and refused to believe that a dingo would snatch a baby.
In 1986, the baby’s jacket was found during a search for the remains of a fallen climber. The discovery helped the couple to have their convictions overturned by a court in 1988.
The couple divorced three years later.
Mr Chamberlain later remarried and had another daughter, named Zahra.
In 2014, he told a reporter that the case was “one of the worst perversions of justice and forensic science in Australian history”.
“We had lived by the credo that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear,” he said. “It was dead wrong.”