Lindy Chamberlain cops cruel taunt over baby's dingo death
Lindy Chamberlain has revealed the cruel taunt she still cops from strangers 40 years after a dingo tragically took her nine-week-old baby.
Ms Chamberlain was camping with her husband and family at Uluru when her daughter, Azaria, was taken on August 17, 1980.
Two years later, Ms Chamberlain was convicted of her daughter’s murder while her then-husband, Michael, was convicted of being an accessory after the fact.
Ms Chamberlain was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Michael was given an 18-month suspended sentence. Lindy was released in 1986 after new evidence emerged. The couple were exonerated by a royal commission in 1987.
The case became one of the most high-profile in Australian history, with Ms Chamberlain revealing she still suffers the effects of the wrongful conviction and losing her baby daughter.
Speaking to the Sunday Project ahead of the 40th anniversary, Ms Chamberlain said people still doubted her innocence and continued to taunt her.
“Obviously they do [doubt my innocence]. They tell me so at times,” she said.
“[It’s] about three weeks... since I got my last dingo howls.
“[I] pretty much ignore it. What's the point? They've got the problem, not me.”
Lindy reveals question she’s rarely asked
Speaking to the Sunday Project about a new documentary mini-series surrounding the case, Ms Chamberlain said she had always been asked the same questions and up until the mini-series, had never really been asked about her time behind bars after losing her daughter.
“I often think, ‘Wow, there’s three years of my life’, and people want to know everything but are they scared of that topic or what?” she said.
“That amazes me.
“And they often tend not to ask you, ‘Have you learnt anything? Have your opinions changed?”
Ms Chamberlain said in some ways her daughter’s untimely death felt like 100 decades ago, but in other ways felt like yesterday.
“But telling my story again, it’s a little bit different this time. It’s not so much going through what happened and all that sort of thing, it’s more the personal stories of the people that have been involved, the behind-the-scenes,” she told the program.
Lindy’s biggest lesson from ordeal
After being wrongfully convicted of Azaria’s murder despite information from witnesses and photos of large paw prints near their campsite, Ms Chamberlain said she had learnt not to judge so quickly.
“The other thing that I learnt through this is you’re going to be judged regardless of what you do. So you may as well be true to yourself and just take your own path,” she told the Sunday Project.
In 1986 Ms Chamberlain was released from prison when her young daughter’s matinee jacket was discovered close to a dingo lair in a remote spot near Uluru.
She divorced her then-husband, Michael, in 1991 and he later died in 2017 aged 72 after a battle with complications from acute leukemia.
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