It's a bleak afternoon at Clovelly Beach in Sydney's eastern suburbs, the sky is a screen of opaque grey, and the drizzling rain has become a steady downpour.
"I think the world is crying," says Merilyn Simms, standing close to her husband Greg.
Their emotion is palpable and the extent of it is difficult to comprehend.
Just 24 hours earlier, the Simms family were left stunned when Justice Ian Harrison SC confirmed what they had long suspected — that Greg's sister Lynette Dawson, who disappeared 40 years ago, had been murdered by her husband Chris Dawson.
In a marathon five-hour hearing, Justice Harrison laid out in painstaking detail the evidence persuading him that the 74-year-old former rugby league star and high school teacher had killed Lynette in January 1982 to have "unfettered" access to his teen lover, known to the court as JC.
"We didn't get much sleep, it's hard to try and process the verdict," Greg says. "I think having a murder verdict brings a conclusion to one part of the story but it's extremely hard to think of …" His voice trails off. "Why couldn't he just bloody walk away? We could have had our sister."
It was "possessive infatuation" that drove Dawson to murder Lyn, Justice Harrison said.
His relationship with JC, a teenage schoolgirl (who he first met in his PE class), and who subsequently became the couple's live-in babysitter, was an obsession that became "more and more intense", the judge said.
When JC tried to leave him, Dawson became so "distressed, frustrated and ultimately overwhelmed" that he resolved to kill his wife to get her out of the picture.
When Justice Harrison finally pronounced the "guilty" verdict in court last week, Greg couldn't quite believe it was all over.
"It just happened so quickly," he says. "The handcuffs going on. The judge saying, 'Mr Dawson, you have to go now'. And then they took him towards the doors at the back of the dock."
"That door closing was so final," adds Merilyn.
Although overwhelmed by the magnitude of what has just transpired, Greg and Merilyn's presence at Clovelly Beach still creates a bright splash against the otherwise muted landscape.
Clothed in pink, Lyn's favourite colour, they place a bouquet of pink flowers on a bench near the ocean, situated less than 100 metres from the Simms family home where Lyn, Greg and their siblings Pat and Philip spent their carefree childhood years.
To the untrained eye, it is just a regular wooden park bench, but to Lyn's family it has always been a very special place.
On it is a simple plaque, its inscription a touching tribute to Lyn and her parents, Helena and Len Simms, who both passed away in 2001 never knowing what had happened to their beloved daughter.
"We did it, Lyn," whispers Greg. "Nanna, Pa, we did it — we never gave up," echoes Merilyn. Greg remarks that he has goosebumps.
"Clovelly is part of the Simms family, it's in our blood," he explains. "So we wanted to come here to put these flowers on the memorial seat, to pay our respects to my sister.
"And to say we've done it, we got it."
From missing person to murder conviction
It is almost 20 years since ABC's Australian Story first spoke to the family and friends of former nurse and childcare worker Lyn Dawson, a much-loved mother-of-two who vanished from her home on Sydney's northern beaches in suspicious circumstances in January 1982.
Many were present in the courtroom last week for the dramatic finale to a case that has captivated the nation in recent years.
Greg admits there were times during Justice Harrison's rollercoaster five-hour judgement when he thought Dawson might be acquitted.
"Who can describe it? The ups and downs from Judge Harrison in his summation," he says. "One minute you got your hopes up, in the next minute, it's not going to happen."
Ups and downs have been a constant companion during the family's decades-long search for answers about what happened to Lyn. Initially, her disappearance was considered a "missing persons" matter. Dawson claimed she had walked out on their marriage and her children.
He told Lyn's mother that she had called several times saying she needed more time. Helena Simms was shocked as it seemed out of character for Lyn, but she had no reason to doubt her son-in-law.
"He was family," Greg says. "Maybe we were gullible, we wish we would have done more."
Just weeks after Lyn went missing, Dawson moved JC into the family home.
A few years later, he divorced Lyn in her absence and married JC.
Meanwhile Lyn's family and work friends were growing more anxious by the police dismissal of Lyn as a missing person.
"Whenever inquiries were made, the family was always told, she's an adult. She can leave whenever she likes," says her sister, Pat.
Barbara Cruise, the owner of the childcare centre where Lyn worked as a registered nurse, believes police were blinded by Dawson's "celebrity".
"He had been a first-grade footballer," Barbara says. "He was on television ads. He was a teacher in the local community. And because of his athletic ability or his football prowess, I feel that they believed him."
Nearly a decade later, Greg received information that made him "turn white".
JC contacted him out of the blue. Having left Chris Dawson, she was keen to reveal her suspicions that he was involved in Lyn's disappearance.
"I suppose you could say I was in shock at the information she'd told us," Greg said.
"And the suspicions I'd had in relation to not seeing my sister again had come to fruition really, and I knew then that I would never see my sister again."
Her siblings believe the police took Lyn's disappearance more seriously after that. But with no body or definitive proof of her death, the case was seen as something of a legal quandary.
Despite two coronial inquests in 2001 and 2003 finding that charges against a known person should be considered for her murder, on each occasion the DPP declined to prosecute on the grounds that there was not enough evidence.
When journalist Hedley Thomas — transfixed by the story since he'd first covered the coronial inquests — published the hit podcast The Teacher's Pet in 2018, public interest reached fever pitch.
"We were on the verge of just saying, look, we've been looking for answers for Lyn for so many years, maybe we should just let it lie now," Greg says.
"And Hedley came forward and saw my sister, Pat, and said he wanted to do a podcast. And I actually said to my daughter, 'What's a podcast?'"
Now downloaded more than 60 million times, Thomas's podcast would uncover new evidence while making Lyn Dawson a household name.
Having taken over the case in 2015, the NSW Police Unsolved Homicide Unit sent a new brief to the DPP in early 2018.
In December that year Dawson was sensationally arrested.
Even as it went to trial, there were doubts a murder conviction could be reached.
"Chris Dawson's case was, I think from the outset, quite a difficult one," says Anthony Whealy, QC, the former NSW Supreme Court judge, who presided over the 2010 jury trial of Keli Lane, which saw the mother convicted of her baby's murder in the absence of a body.
"What was lacking was good, hard evidence to try and build a strong circumstantial case and to prove that this woman [Lyn] had in fact died," he says.
"There was a big question over it … it obviously gave the prosecuting authority pause on a number of occasions."
Mr Whealy joined thousands of others to watch the verdict read out via a live stream of the court proceedings to provide comments to ABC's Australian Story.
He can understand why Lyn's supporters felt jitters as the judge struck out large swathes of the prosecution's argument, including witness evidence that Chris Dawson had been violent towards Lyn during their marriage.
"It was interesting to me to see how he pared down a very large case into something relatively simple," Mr Whealy says.
"Essentially it came down to the infatuation with the young girl, [a] deteriorating marriage and a sudden realisation on Chris Dawson's part that, in order to have this girl with him as he wanted for the rest of his life, he had to get rid of his wife."
And then there were Dawson's lies. Justice Harrison identified four deceptions in Dawson's defence which "demonstrated a guilty conscience", particularly Dawson's claims Lyn called him repeatedly after she went missing.
"The judge found this quite implausible," Mr Whealy says.
"Why would she ring the man who'd effectively driven her out of the house? That was the judge's reasoning. And I must say, there's a lot of common sense in that proposition."
'Mum never stopped searching for Lyn'
It is an enormous moment for a family who have spent the past four decades searching for answers, certain that Lyn would never have left the two young daughters she loved so dearly. It was a bond that was mirrored between Lyn and her own mother, Helena, whose 66th birthday Lyn was planning when she disappeared.
"I can never forgive Chris for the way he treated Lyn, but also for the cruel and callous way he treated our distressed and grieving mother," Lyn's sister, Pat, says.
"Mum never stopped searching for Lyn. She didn't drive, so she'd take the train up to the Central Coast because that's where Chris had said that Lyn had rung from."
It was all part of the web of deceit that would become Chris Dawson's eventual undoing in court, says Greg.
"His reliance on his lies — it was just expanding all the time. He was having Mum on, saying Lyn is going to ring on Wednesday, so Mum would sit by the phone all day Wednesday waiting for the phone call."
After her passing in 2001, Helena's ashes were scattered in the ocean at Clovelly where she had swum every day. It's where the family hope Lyn's eventual resting place will also be.
"If we ever find Lyn, I believe that she deserves to have her ashes scattered off here at Clovelly with Mum and Dad," Greg says.
While their quest for justice is finally over, the long path to peace is ongoing for the Simms family.
"I'm absolutely elated at the outcome but I'm still coming to terms with it," explains Pat, who watched the verdict at home with her daughter and twin sons, the four of them jumping up and down and hugging each other when Chris Dawson was pronounced guilty.
"I just feel terribly drained and fragile. There was always something ahead with Lyn's case but now there's nothing else to wait for. We just want to find her now and lay her to rest, but we're doubtful that will ever happen.
"We've always remembered Lyn with such love. Now this is all over, that's the main memory we're going to have of Lyn — her caring, loving nature."
Just a few years ago, the family were thrilled when they were sent a photograph from a former nursing colleague of Lyn's.
Prior to her days working in childcare, Lyn was a nurse at the Royal Alexandra Children's Hospital (now known as the Sydney Children's Hospital at Westmead).
The image, taken in 1966, depicts Lyn on her day off with a little girl that she had cared for at the time.
"The picture came from one of the nurses who was working on the ward," Pat explains.
"Lyn was very attached to a little girl who was sick. I think maybe she'd come from the country and didn't have her family around, so Lyn used to go down in her time off and sit with her, just to give her some comfort. And that was Lyn, she really cared and she loved children.
"That beautiful picture just showed what sort of person she was. You know, she didn't have to do that. But she just had such love for this little child, a real bond. So that picture really means so much to us."
Lyn's family and close friends are acutely aware of the legions of people who have followed the story for years, desperately hoping justice would prevail for the much-loved woman who was diminished and dismissed by her husband even before he killed her.
"It gave us comfort just knowing that her name was out there and a lot more people were actually hearing her story," Greg says.
"This story has gone worldwide and Lyn would be incredibly humbled by that," Merilyn says. "She was never one to want to stand out."
Watch the Australian Story series return Lyn Dawson: Vanished on iview and YouTube.
