![]() Lindy announced "It's time I put Bubby down" and retreated to the Chamberlain's tent to make a suitable bed for Azaria. Lindy remonstrated, "You shouldn't encourage them" about the same time as the dingo pounced on a mouse that young Aiden had been chasing. Minutes later, Michael entertained his son Aiden by tossing a crust of bread to a dingo that appeared near their barbecue bench. Around 8:00, as Sally Lowe walked to a rubbish bin to dispose of items left from the evening meal, she turned to see a dingo following four or five paces behind her. Lindy held her Azaria in her arms as she and Michael chatted with Greg and Sally Lowe, another young couple also vacationing with an infant. She would later tell a detective that she had the feeling that the wild dog was "casing the baby."Īfter sunset, the Chamberlain family gathered with other campers around the barbecues near their tent site. Just outside the cave, she looked up uneasily to see a dingo staring at her. Lindy, cradling Azaria in her arms, explored a formation called Fertility Cave. The next morning, Michael and the two boys climbed portions of the rock. The Chamberlains arrived late on the night of August 16 at the Ayers Rock campground. He and his wife of ten years, Lindy, looked forward to several days of tenting and exploring with their three children, Aidan (age 6), Reagan (age 4), and Azaria (ten weeks). At the time of their trip, Michael Chamberlain served as minister at Mount Isa's Seventh Day Adventist Church, a denomination much misunderstood Down Under. On August 13, 1980, the Chamberlain family left their home in the northern Queensland mining town of Mount Isa, heading west and then south to see central Australia's most famous natural feature. The monolith, called Uluru by natives, lures tourists drawn by its imposing shape and colors that migrate from gold to red in the changing sunlight. Improbably shaped Ayers Rock rises 348 meters out of the dry Aboriginal heart of Australia. Lindy and Azaria Chamberlain at Ayers Rock ![]() The trial of Lindy Chamberlain, and her husband Michael, is a cautionary tale that everyone who practices forensic science should carefully consider. ![]() What went wrong? Convictions of the innocent usually result from inaccurate eyewitness testimony (generally the least reliable evidence in a trial because of biases and the tricks of memory), but Lindy Chamberlain was convicted by flawed forensic evidence and by investigators and prosecutors unwilling to reconsider their assumptions in the face of contradictory evidence. "A Cry in the Dark," a movie starring Meryl Streep, carried the story of Lindy's wrongful conviction across oceans. Three years later, while Lindy dealt with daily life in a Darwin prison, police investigating the death of a fallen climber discovered Azaria's matinee jacket near a dingo den, and the Australian public confronted the reality that its justice system had failed. On August 17, 1980, at a campsite near Australia's famous Ayer's Rock, a mother's cry came out of the dark: "My God, my God, the dingo's got my baby!" Soon the people of an entire continent would be choosing sides in a debate over whether the cry heard that night marked an astonishing and rare human fatality caused by Australia's wild dogs or was, rather, in the words of the man who would eventually prosecute her for murder, "a calculated, fanciful lie." A jury of nine men and three women came to believe the latter story and convicted Lindy Chamberlain for the murder of her ten-week-old daughter, Azaria. Tony Jones, government pathologist in the Chamberlain trial I've never seen a case more governed by human frailties." "The scientist shouldn't become too adventurous, too competitive.
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