Yvonne Cain remembers feeling almost overcome with fear and guilt when she finally came face to face with Lindy Chamberlain years after she sat on the jury that wrongly convicted Lindy.
“I remember that day so clearly,” Yvonne tells Woman’s Day in an exclusive interview.
“She’d just gotten out of jail, and she was skin and bone. I didn’t even recognise her at first, and when I did all, I could say was ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’. Lindy said she forgave me straight away.
“I did not know what to expect. I would not have minded if she gave me a barrage of abuse. I was expecting her to swear at me, but she didn’t. She was lovely. We’ve stayed friends ever since.”
That bizarre and beautiful reunion happened just weeks after Lindy, 78, walked free from Darwin Jail in 1986 when her murder conviction was finally overturned four long years after the jury Yvonne sat on found her guilty.
Yvonne, 77, became known in the media as the “teary juror” after breaking down into tears when Lindy, who was heavily pregnant with daughter Kahlia at the time, learned she was going to be jailed for life.
“Everyone was shocked when Lindy walked into court on the first day of the trial because she was pregnant, and we weren’t expecting that,” explains Yvonne, who says she was so scared she was shaking when she was chosen for the jury.
“I probably went in there thinking that she was guilty, and I remember waiting for that divine moment (to show her that Lindy was innocent). It didn’t seem to come. I will always regret saying she’s guilty.”
The role she played in convicting Lindy haunted Yvonne for years, and eventually her guilt and doubts boiled over, and she went public with her doubts over the conviction before Lindy was freed in 1986.
Just weeks before Lindy was freed, Yvonne rang a radio station in Perth to share her doubts about the conviction. She was initially dismissed as a crank caller, before being taken seriously.
Lindy says she now knows that Yvonne was one of the “holdouts right to the end”, and that having served on two juries herself, she understands the immense pressure on a juror who holds a different view to the majority.
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“People have given her a hell of a time because she spoke up,” Lindy tells Woman’s Day, adding that she never personally blamed Yvonne or the other jurors who were presented with what turned out to be compromised forensic evidence.
“People make choices. Yvonne made one of them that that caused some of these things that my family has gone through. But they were doing the best they knew how to at the time, or at least Yvonne was …”
Lindy says with the benefit of hindsight and a much more extensive knowledge of the law, she is baffled as to how Yvonne even made it onto the jury given she had her own personal experience of a dingo attack.
“Yvonne’s neighbour’s dingo attacked her dog before she got on that jury. How come they didn’t exclude her? One thing with juries, that you should never forget, everyone has different perspectives.”
With two sons roughly the same age as Lindy’s sons, Yvonne, who is now a grandmother and a great grandmother, says she found the trial, and some of the disturbing and now debunked blood evidence, incredibly distressing.
“It was so sad and upsetting,” she says.
Sixty Minutes organised that first meeting between Lindy and Yvonne as part of a TV special after she was freed from jail, but the two women have met numerous times over the years, forging a close, albeit unusual, friendship.
“We are good friends,” she says.
“Lindy’s been to my house to have tea when she was still with Michael, and we’ve caught up and talked over the years. It’s part of my life and it will never go away. If only I’d hung out and said she was innocent.”
Lindy says she had no hesitation in forgiving Yvonne, and in fact, was moved to comfort Yvonne who was clearly distressed and nervous at that first meeting almost 40 years ago, hugging her and calming.
“Her first words were, ‘what have we done to you?’” remembers Lindy, who has never stopped campaigning for reform of the judicial system to try and prevent other miscarriages of justice.
The bond between the juror and the woman she convicted is clear with Yvonne still cherishing her copy of Lindy’s 1991 autobiography, Through My Eyes, which she lovingly inscribed, telling “Yvonne, despite what you think you’re a brave lady whom I love and appreciate”.
