and had lectured in pathology at the London Hospital Medical College, which was to become the base for James Cameron. However, he became dogmatic and inflexible, conveying the impression that he was infallible, and causing concern within the judiciary. Doubts were being expressed publicly by 1925, and later these doubts were emphasized and the opinion was expressed in some of the major cases in which he was involved that his unwillingness to engage in academic research or peer review, might mean there was sufficient doubt as to produce an acquittal. His domination of the courtroom threw doubts on the jury system.
Further material was to come to light that Cameron himself had had a significant failure. In October 1975, the Appeal Court in Britain quashed the convictions of a youth and two boys for the murder of a homosexual prostitute, Maxwell Confait. Confait’s body had been found after a fire in a house in Catford, in south-east London, in April 1972. The three were gaoled, the youth for life, one of the boys for four years and the other detained under the Mental Health Act. But it became clear in later inquiries there were large discrepancies in the evidence that convicted them. The three had allegedly confessed to the crime, never a good look for someone claiming to have been wrongly convicted. In the light of the facts that became known, it did not appear possible for them to have carried out the killings at the time alleged. Cameron, it turned out, had not taken a rectal temperature which would have put Confait’s death two days earlier than stated. It also transpired that Cameron had failed to notice discolouration of the abdomen, which should have indicated to him that the victim had been dead for some days. There was a degree of rigor mortis at the time Cameron examined the body. He had said the fire had sped up the onset of rigor mortis. But in fact, there had been rigor mortis for some time, and it was just starting to wear off.
At the very time of the renewed investigation into the disappearance of Azaria, attention had been focused in Britain on the case of one John Preece, convicted in 1973 of rape and murder of an Aberdeen housewife, Helen Will. Evidence against Preece had been given by a forensic pathologist, Dr Alan Clift. Preece had examined blood and semen, hair and fibres. There was no evidence that Preece had ever met the victim. But science, it was thought, had the answer. Clift had analysed a semen stain on Helen Will’s underwear and concluded that the killer had been a blood group A secretor. A secretor was someone who secretes detectable levels of their blood in their bodily fluids such as saliva and semen, which allows their blood group to be analysed from such stains. But what Dr Clift did not mention was that the victim had the same blood group, and with that to work on – DNA technology then being in the future – it was not possible to say that the blood, and for that matter the semen, came from Preece. When this came out at Preece’s appeal in March 1981, Preece, who had spent eight years in gaol, was exonerated and Clift condemned. Three hundred and thirty cases where his evidence had sent people to gaol were then reviewed and Clift hustled off into early retirement.
Cameron’s report, in which he advanced a theory that Azaria had been murdered, would turn out to be another in this stream of disastrous forensic investigations. It destroyed the safeguard of the coroner’s finding and had it held would have stopped the looming disaster in its tracks. For the Chamberlains, some of the pieces that would condemn them were locking into place. But there were still safeguards to go.
The announcement of the reinvestigation of the baby’s death unlocked the feelings of the mob. When the reinvestigation of Azaria’s death was announced, many Australians were already skeptical about the dingo story. Some were not ready to give them any benefit of the doubt. There was belligerence provoked to a large extent by perceptions of the Chamberlains and their religious faith. There were those who, seeing a couple at a disadvantage, were ready to leap upon them. This might be called the “yobbo mentality”, which is a worldwide phenomenon, the outlook of loutish, uncultivated people, who sneer at and ridicule things beyond their comprehension. They join in a mob mentality and seek out a publicly available target. This is present in varying degrees in many people. It can be seen in any school yard in the country, where a pupil who is a little “different”, and uncompetitive, is singled out for abuse and bullying. It can be seen in attitudes towards migrants. The Seventh-day Adventist Church was not widely understood. There was a widespread feeling that it was just a cult and it was often confused with Jehovah‘s Witnesses. “There was survey done about attitudes towards religion,” Tipple said. “I was shocked to find that some people thought Adventists wore special underpants.” More ominous suggestions had it that the SDAs practised black magic, even child sacrifice. None of that was true, but it was difficult to dispel.
When Lindy Chamberlain cried out in the central Australian desert on 17th December 1980, that “a dingo’s got my baby”, then appeared on television with Michael seeming strange and distant, even cold, that was enough to set tongues wagging. Their faith was not readily understood, nothing about them, not even the name they had chosen for their daughter, added up. Denis Barritt was aware of that, and took pains to telecast his finding, itself unprecedented, in order to quell such rumour and innuendo forever. The televised finding had the opposite effect. It appears to have humiliated the NT Police, the NT Government, individuals such as Kenneth Brown, and the Northern Territory as a whole. It appears to have filled the NT Government and police, northern Territory Government and police with a determination to continue the investigation. When the renewed inquiry was publicly announced, the mob applauded.
When Stuart Tipple, a New Zealand boy who had settled to life as a provincial Australian solicitor, took this case on, he looked immediately, as any lawyer would, to the safeguards still in place. The police reinvestigating the case might have found the original explanation was correct after all. Or they could have found insufficient evidence of foul play. The forensic scientists engaged by the Crown similarly might not have come up with seemingly incriminating evidence. If there were to be another inquest, the view the new coroner might take was potentially another safeguard. There were many safeguards still ahead, including a possible jury and appeals courts. If the Chamberlains were innocent – and Tipple was sure they were – then that had to come out somewhere along the line. Tipple was entitled to have some confidence and optimism.
Tipple’s experience was relatively limited as might be expected of any young professional only six years out from training. Although hardly a babe in the wilderness, he had no idea that all the safeguards in place ahead of him were going to fail, one by one, and that Lindy was going to be rushed headlong into a life sentence for murder and Michael convicted of a related crime. To unravel this mess was going to take much of his remaining professional life. Where, in the normal course of things, he would have led a successful practice in Gosford New South Wales and enjoyed a peaceful life, he was to be plunged into the national, even international battleground and be forced onto the ropes where he would have to contend, not only with flawed operations which put his clients at such disadvantage but also with sustained attacks on himself from his clients’ supporters for supposedly failing them. Many tears were to be shed, including some of his own.
Chapter Two
FROM PROVINCIAL NEW ZEALAND
When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.
― Patrick Rothfuss
Stuart Tipple and Michael and Lindy Chamberlain were all innocents: New Zealand-born, Seventh-day Adventists and churchgoers. They were to encounter each other, and that experience, which would take up the prime of life for all of them and leave them badly affected by a world that had taken away that innocence and left them wounded. Nothing that any of them had ever done had brought upon them what was going to happen. They might each have thought as the crisis deepened, how good it would have been to have returned to their lives in provincial New Zealand and start again. However, the harshness of life was set to descend on them before they ever left New Zealand.
It might be said, if we were to probe a little deeper, that there were other, more
