Lindy Chamberlain’s voice breaks and her brown eyes well with tears as she recalls the exact moment she knew a jury was going to jail her for murdering her nine-week-old daughter, Azaria.
Heavily pregnant with her fourth child, Kahlia, who would be born just 19 days later, Lindy recalls locking herself in a toilet and praying while the jury deliberated for seven hours.
WORST FEARS
“I went in there and I was praying about it because, obviously, I want to go home to my kids,” she says. “I felt we made a good case… but I just knew I was going to prison.”
Lindy, 78, who rarely gives interviews these days, opened up on SBS program Insight last week about the jury that wrongly found her guilty in 1982 of murdering her newborn daughter Azaria at Uluru.
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“You never want somebody else to go through what you have gone through,” explained Lindy, who became an advocate for criminal justice reform after her conviction was cleared three years and four months later.
She says she found some solace when she was praying after telling God that she would go to jail, “if you take care of my kids”. It brought her peace just before she re-entered court to see her worst fears realised.
Within days of Azaria going missing from the tent she was sleeping in with her brother Reagan, four, at Uluru, during a camping trip on August 17, 1980, Lindy became the most reviled women in Australia.
Despite a mountain of evidence that Azaria had been taken by a dingo, and an initial inquest that confirmed this, Lindy was accused of cutting her newborn baby’s throat.
She was found guilty of murder and sentence to life, but never gave up the fight to prove her innocence.
It was only after Azaria’s bloody matinee jacket was found at the base of Uluru in 1986 that she was finally released in Darwin – six years after her daughter’s death.
BROKE DOWN
Last week, Lindy was reunited with one of the 12 jurors who found her guilty, revealing that when she first met Yvonne Cain, she ended up comforting the juror, who broke down in tears and apologised.
“The judge said she was going to do hard labour and that got to me,” a teary Yvonne explained. “Those words stayed with me, and I couldn’t live with her being in jail. I was expecting her to swear at me, but she didn’t. She was lovely.”
Lindy also fought back tears when she recalled their first meeting after her release. “Her first words were, ‘What have we done to you?’” she says, explaining that Yvonne didn’t even recognise her because she had changed so much in jail.
The pain of losing Azaria, and being separated for years from her two boys, Aiden, who was six when Azaria died, and Reagan, and then having her daughter Kahlia taken away from her at birth, changed Lindy forever.
Her marriage to Michael broke down after her release and they were divorced in 1991, before Lindy found love again with American publisher Rick Creighton, and started building a new life together.
There have been books, TV shows and movies made about her case – most notably 1988’s Evil Angels starring Meryl Streep – but these days Lindy, who showed off a new electric blue and mauve hairstyle on the TV show, leads a relatively quiet and private life.
She does, however, remain passionate about reforming the justice system to prevent similar miscarriages of justice, by promoting a less adversarial trial system to make it easier for juries to reach the right decision.
Lindy says studies show 30 per cent of Australians still believe she’s guilty.
“I think there’s a lot that’s right about our justice system, but we are all human and we can be persuaded against our will. Trying to get it right and make it easier to get it right I think is important,” she says.
