It began in August 1980, when baby Azaria disappeared from an Ayer’s Rock campsite
never to be found.
Her parents blamed a dingo, the police charged her parents, and Australia stood divided.
Publicly, all over the world, we’ve been acclaimed as murderers
and had that thrust in our face.
Next week the film version will be released to the world.
The film is a savage attack on the Australian media
Everything I did to research the part only confirmed my initial feeling of injustice.
The dingo’s got my baby!
But the line became a joke almost as soon as the movie came out.
Hey, I think I hear a dingo eating your baby.
And what we have left then is a very outrageous line
that’s taken the place of a woman’s story of the truth.
A full scale search in the Ayers Rock area today
failed to find any trace of a 9 week old baby girl
The family from Mt. Isa in Queensland were on a camping holiday in Central Australia.
The baby’s mother had earlier noticed a dog at the entrance to the tent,
with what she believed to be a bundle in its mouth.
It now appears that bundle was in fact her 9 weeks old baby girl.
That moment was the moment, really, of greatest clarity in the history of the case.
At that moment, everyone knew exactly what had happened to that baby.
There wasn’t time to go and tell people I just yelled out,
has anybody got a torch,
a dingo’s got my baby.
As cases go and I’ve covered a lot of them it had everything:
handsome couple, the mythic Ayers Rock, baby...
But city folk with little understanding of the outback
were having trouble with some basic elements of the story.
The fact of the matter was nobody had ever heard of a dingo taking a baby.
People struggled to reconcile this brutal act with a wild but reportedly timid dog.
And when Azaria’s clothing was found a week later, almost intact,
Lindy’s reaction did more than raise questions.
Were you surprised Azaria’s clothing was found hardly torn?
No, not really, not having watched wild dingoes feed on cattle and things like that
They use their feet like hands and pull back the skin as they go
and they just peel it like an orange.
Lindy turned the public completely against her, as though any mother could talk like that
in such a seemingly unfeeling way about her child.
That turned — that did more damage than anything in the world.
Word soon got out that the police forensic team
had found no evidence of a canine attack on the clothing.
And tests for dingo saliva were showing up negative.
She unshakably said from the very beginning,
‘’the reason you can't find any dogs or dingo saliva on that jumpsuit
is that she was wearing a matinee jacket over it.”
But with no trace of any jacket
and amidst wild rumors about their religious practices as 7th Day Adventists,
Lindy was put on the defensive.
People are saying that she was a spastic baby or a cretin,
others are saying that she was a sickly baby and this was a good way to get rid of her…
Why do you think people have jumped to these conclusions?
Perhaps they have nothing else to do.
To stem the tide of rumor, the Coroner took the decision to announce his findings on live television,
instructing the nation that the Chamberlains were not responsible for their daughter’s death.
What are your plans now for the future?
To try and live normal lives
But the coroner had publicly criticized the police forensic teams.
Refusing to accept his findings, they set about seeking a second opinion.
After examining the baby’s bloodstained clothing,
Professor Cameron concluded the child’s throat had been cut.
And said special ultra-violet fluorescent photography had revealed
a small handprint in blood on the baby’s jumpsuit.
The findings of the first inquest were overturned, and a second inquest was called.
But Lindy would face more than just new evidence.
There was a lot of commentary about how attractive she was.
And the contradictions between what had happened
and her youthful, vigorous appearance people found difficult to process.
The second inquest took only about 10 days and boom
When the trial goes to court, the world might find out just why Lindy Chamberlain
cut the throat of her tiny daughter.’
Lindy and Michael Chamberlain arrive for the first day of their trial.
Mrs. Chamberlain, on the charge of murder, and her husband, with being accessory after the fact...
Lindy 7 months pregnant wearing a pink maternity dress.
During her appearances she showed neither anger, grief, or distress
as she came and went from the courthouse each day.
The prosecution would claim that instead of putting Azaria to bed in the tent, Lindy had
sat in the front seat of her car and slit her baby’s throat with a bladed instrument.
They claimed to have positively identified fetal blood in several spots throughout the car.
The deficiencies in the Crown case:
no motive, no confession, no weapon, no body, no witness,
just the disappearance of a child.
I was reasonably confident that we would win.
The verdict came shortly before twenty to nine.
The foreman of the jury standing said, guilty.
When the whole nation knows that she’s guilty
who wants to be a juror who thinks that this isn’t proven?
Nobody, the pressures are all one way.
The cheering that went on that night was just unbelievable.
It was like being in a Roman gladiatorial stadium.
Screaming, and yelling, and marching up and down.
You know, “We got the bitch!”
For Lindy Chamberlain there would have been joy and sadness with today’s birth –
it’s believed she was separated from the baby within an hour of the birth.
In a majority decision the High Court in Canberra has rejected an appeal by Mrs. Lindy Chamberlain
against her conviction for the murder of her daughter Azaria.
But after Lindy spent more than three years in prison
a startling discovery was made at Ayers Rock.
It was there only 200 meters from where Azaria’s bloodstained clothing was discovered
that a baby’s matinee jacket was found.
It was just so dramatic.
In 24 hours you’ve got in effect proof positive that Mrs. Chamberlain was telling the truth
on a really significant aspect
Lindy Chamberlain has been released from Darwin jail and she won’t be going back.
At the same time the Northern Territory government has announced
there’ll be a new inquiry into the Chamberlain case.
That inquiry found that the damage to the jumpsuit was consistent with a dingo attack,
and that the handprint on the jumpsuit was nothing more than red desert sand.
The blood spatter on the underside of the dashboard turned out to be sound deadening compound,
other spots were most likely sweetened milk or a fruit drink.
Consequently the territory’s administrator today signed papers officially pardoning them.
Well it’s great to be pardoned for something you haven’t done.
As it is the convictions stand.
Their convictions were overturned the following year,
but that still didn’t clear public doubts.
The battle now is to wipe away the years of hate and suspicion against a mother who cried,
‘a dingo’s got the baby.’
And the centre-piece of this battle would be a movie released that same year.
I think the filmmakers wanted to do good.
They wanted to make a political point and they wanted to make a feminist point.
That this is a woman who was a victim.
The kid was always dressed in black.
So was the bloody mother.
Well I heard that the kid was really blood cracked and she couldn’t handle it.
I think the lesson for everybody who sees the film might be
that we have to look deeper into things than we necessarily do.
But Australia wasn’t buying it.
People did not want their minds changed.
Did the film change your opinion at all?
No.
You believe she’s guilty?
Yeah.
It hasn’t changed my opinion.
And if you held them as vehemently as they were held
you sort of don’t want to be proven wrong.
The film leaves Lindy on a high, out of prison and reunited with her family.
But in reality her battle was far from over.
Do you have justice yet?
Almost.
What do you need?
The Northern Territory needs to apologize, for starters,
and put death by dingo on the inquest.
After three inquests, a trial, two appeals, and a Royal Commission,
the most the Crown would deliver
was an open verdict on what happened to Azaria that night.
The crown had always said it’s Lindy or a dingo.
But they wouldn’t say it was a dingo.
And so, always in people’s minds it was like, well, we heard all this stuff,
something’s smoky so, you know, maybe she had good lawyers, maybe there was something –
and dingoes, who knows that they’re dangerous.
The horrific story is, that a woman is not believed because she doesn't look like the anguished mother,
or what we think the anguished mother should look like.
If I smiled, I was belittling my daughter’s death.
If I cried, I was acting.
The point is, until you go through something, you have no idea how you yourself will react.
And I had no idea how I would react until it happened to me.
And people say to you, "would you change the way you came across on television?"
Well given what I knew then and what I was going through, no I wouldn’t.
I did the best I could with what I had.
If you ask people today about that film and about the case,
most Americans have very little idea of what actually happened.
Far from revealing Lindy as the victim the film backfired into making her a joke.
The dingo’s got my baby!
Part of it was that Americans don’t know what a dingo is.
So the word is a funny word.
What they did know was that this was once again Meryl Streep taking on a part of
foreign ladies with funny accents.
When it appeared on Seinfeld as a punchline that took it to the national level.
Tell my fiancé I’m looking for him.
I have lost my fiancé, the poor baby…
Maybe the dingo ate your baby.
Seinfeld was very mainstream in a way that this movie was not.
The dingo ate your baby.
That dingo’s got your baby.
A dingo ate my baby!
The more the joke took on a line of its own,
the less it was that the American public knew anything.
I’m sorry a dingo ate your baby.
You know that’s a true story?
A lady lost her kid.
You about to cross some f*****g lines…
Lindy Chamberlain’s story went on for decades after the movie.
But her story of continued struggle wasn’t the kind of story
that pop culture likes to dwell on.
In Australia, Lindy’s battle centered around the initial sticking point.
It was more believable to a lot of people that a mother would kill her child
than that a dingo would.
There seemed to be some kind of forgetting that humans don’t control the natural world
and that things can happen that are immediately disruptive and completely random.
Since Azaria’s disappearance there have been hundreds of reports of dingo attacks,
several fatal.
Park rangers erected a warning sign this morning at the spot
where a three year-old girl was attacked by 2 dingoes.
For the very first time it struck home to the nation
that it was dealing with a wolf like beast and not a dog like beast.
A case most of us will absolutely never forget
but today there can finally be closure in the Azaria Chamberlain mystery.
In 2012, 32 years after Azaria disappeared,
the Chamberlains, now both remarried,
got what they’d been fighting for when a new coroner found
that a dingo was indeed the cause of death.
We all heaved a sigh of relief.
It was just like all the strings got cut.
Azaria Chamberlain’s death certificate has now been officially changed
to reflect the findings, and perhaps put to bed once and for all
a case which has intrigued the country for more than three decades.
It will be interesting to see what it is that carries into the common memory –
whether it will be the façade of rumor that brought it all about it,
or whether it’s a human tragedy and the terrible injustices that followed in its wake.