Wed, Aug 18, 2010 page5

• Mother in dingo case slams ‘lies’

  • AFP
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  Lindy Chamberlain yesterday remembered “beautiful little Azaria” and slammed Australia’s media 30 years after a dingo apparently snatched her baby at Uluru in a case that caused a worldwide sensation.

  Chamberlain said she had forgiven the press and authorities’ actions over the child’s disappearance, for which she spent three years in jail, but hit out at media errors and “lies” that led to her murder conviction, since quashed.

  “Our family will always remember today as the day truth was dragged in the dirt and trampled upon,” Chamberlain wrote in an open letter on her Web site. “But more than that, it is the day our family was torn apart forever because we lost our beautiful little Azaria. She will always ever be what this ongoing fight for justice has been all about.”

  

  A photo taken in August 1980 shows Lindy Chamberlain holding her daughter Azaria on Uluru in Australia.

  PHOTO: AFP

  Azaria was just nine weeks old when she went missing on Aug. 17, 1980, during a camping trip to Uluru, then known as Ayers Rock, the evocative red monolith in the heart of the Outback.

  Chamberlain was jailed for murder two years later, despite an initial inquest that backed her explanation the baby was snatched by a dingo, Australia’s native wild dog. The body was never found.

  The convictions of Chamberlain and then-husband Michael, who was given a suspended term for being an accessory, were overturned in 1988 after the chance find of a piece of Azaria’s clothing near a dingo lair.

  A third inquest in 1995 recorded an open finding, in a case that continues to fascinate the Australian public and still makes front-page headlines, three decades later.

  It inspired the 1988 hit film A Cry in the Dark, starring Meryl Streep and Sam Neill, along with books, TV mini-series and even an opera, and was followed closely by foreign media, making it a global cause celebre.

  Chamberlain, now 62, said she would not allow the events to “fester and ruin my life,” but said there were details of the case she was unable to reveal.

  “I have taken back control of my own life and head space and move forward. I am moving forward, not looking backward,” she said. “Unfortunately the way the law stands now I cannot tell you of any internal deals, deliberate lies, affairs or favors that I may know of that may make what happened in my case a lot clearer.”

  Key evidence included traces of blood in the family car, which supported the prosecution case that Chamberlain slit Azaria’s throat and hid her body in a camera bag before burying it in the desert.

  Meanwhile, media aired wild allegations that the Chamberlains, who were Seventh-Day Adventists, belonged to a strange cult that had killed babies and that Azaria’s name meant “sacrifice in the wilderness.”

  Chamberlain refuted a rumor that she “hit on” policemen involved in the case (“They wish!”) and said media had muddled details of the length and location of her imprisonment in recent reports.

  Others involved in the case, including an Aboriginal tracker who helped search for Azaria and Northern Territory Coroner Greg Cavanagh, who was part of Chamberlain’s defense team, continue to back her story.

  “It seemed quite possible that a half-tame dingo would wander into the camp site,” Cavanagh told AAP news agency, pointing out other dingo attacks on children including in 1998, when a 13-month-old was dragged 2m. “I remain convinced it was a dingo, but then I was convinced 30 years ago that it was a dingo.”

  Chamberlain, who is now married to American Rick Creighton and lives in the Hunter Valley north of Sydney, urged Australians to “give up the desire for gossip and sensationalism” and “grow a backbone.”

  “Come on Australia. Surely you cannot be proud of the fact that you can let yourself be duped again and again and come back for more of the same,” she wrote. “We used to be a proud nation who saw through corruption and were willing to give a fair go. How many times do you have to be hoodwinked and led along by the nose before you demand something better from our courts, police force, politicians and media?”
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