Azaria Chamberlain would have celebrated her 46th birthday in June. And while her mum Lindy tries not to think “what if”, she can’t help but sometimes imagine what her daughter’s life – cut short at just nine weeks – would look like if she were alive today.
“Every now and then, I’ll see someone her age and I wonder what sort of life she would have,” admits Lindy, speaking exclusively to Woman’s Day.
“I don’t tend to look backwards all the time. I don’t visit graves. If you keep looking backwards, all you do is make yourself sad and miserable. What is the point of what ifs? People drive themselves crazy.”
Still, Whakatāne-born Lindy, now 78, can’t help but wonder what could have been if Azaria hadn’t vanished from the tent she was sleeping in with her then-four-year-old brother Reagan.
That terrible night on 17 August 1980 led to untold heartache and anguish for Lindy, her then-husband Michael Chamberlain, plus their two surviving kids, big brother Aidan, 53, and Reagan, now 50.
A family torn apart
The couple’s daughter Kahlia, 43, was born in Darwin Hospital 19 days after Lindy was wrongly convicted and jailed. She was given just one hour to spend with her baby, who was then raised by foster parents.
The trauma affected the entire family. Aidan and Reagan were savagely bullied at school, while Christchurch-born Michael, a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, was vilified after his conviction for being an accessory to the alleged crime.
“Not many people know that I served twice on a jury before all this happened to me,” reveals Lindy, who says in one of those cases, she and the other jurors acquitted a man she thought could have been guilty.
“We erred on the side of ‘better to keep an innocent person out of prison than put an innocent one in’ and we let him off.”
Finding forgiveness
The irony doesn’t escape Lindy, who was found guilty of murdering Azaria and jailed in 1982, before her conviction was overturned in 1986, only after Azaria’s bloody matinee jacket was found near a dingo’s lair at Uluru.
She has since become friends with one of the jurors who helped wrongly convict her, Yvonne Cain, who famously rang a radio station to confess that she thought the jury had made a mistake.
Lindy later found out that Yvonne was one of the “holdouts right to the end” who didn’t want to convict her and she found it easy to forgive her, “having been inside a jury and having seen the pressure that can be put on somebody who is holding out”.
It would be easy to be consumed with bitterness, but instead Lindy fought to clear her name. It took 32 years, a royal commission and four inquests before a coroner made a final ruling that a dingo took Azaria, with Lindy and Michael awarded a then-record $1.56 million in compensation for wrongful conviction.
The conspiracy theories continue
Lindy says research shows three in 10 Aussies still believe she’s guilty. Some even think Azaria’s still alive. Two years ago, a stranger contacted her claiming Azaria was kidnapped.
“You get weird ones like that,” Lindy says.
“But then you get nasty ones, which Rick mostly ignores. I still have people telling me they’re Azaria and they want to have DNA blood tests to prove it.”
Rick Creighton is the businessman Lindy found love with after she and Michael, who died of leukaemia in 2017, aged 72, divorced in 1991.
They live on the Sunshine Coast hinterland, where electrician Aidan and his wife Amber are raising their two girls, not far from where Reagan, a community care worker, also now lives. Kahlia lives in the Virgin Islands.
Making up for lost time
“People ask Kahlia what it’s like being a Chamberlain,” Lindy says.
Her daughter responds by pointing out that she’s “never known it any different”, whereas it was “different” for her brothers.
Lindy loves being a gran. She wishes she hadn’t missed so many of her own kids’ big milestones during her three years in jail.
“It’s good to see the littlies regularly,” she says.
“That’s nice.”
Laughter is a great medicine, but it’s her faith and the support from loved ones that have helped her heal.
“Why did God let it happen?” muses Lindy.
“We’re humans. He gave us choice. We let it happen. People cause the problems and evil causes the problem. God does not. He helps you get through it.”
