stood.
Two police officers who arrived from Alice Springs, Inspector Michael Gilroy and Sergeant John Lincoln found paw prints immediately behind the tent together with a wet patch in the sand which they thought might have been saliva. They took photographs and a sample of the wet sand but the photos did not turn out and the wet sand was never properly tested. Gilroy looked carefully at the baby’s bassinet and found animal hairs which he thought might be dingo hairs. A camper, Murray Haby, found an impression in a sand dune near the camping area which appeared to him to have been made when a dingo put something down. He showed it to Derek Roff. The imprint on the sand reminded Roff of crepe bandage or, as he said later in evidence, “very consistent with elastic band sort of material". It was a perfect description of the material of the jumpsuit Azaria was wearing.
That, surely, should have been enough. A dingo had been there. As in all police investigations, the first thing to look for is what the perpetrator has left behind. In this case it was tracks, the drag mark and the imprint of fabric on the sand. That in combination with, the dingo growl, the baby’s cry and Lindy’s report of seeing a dingo, should have been enough. Of course, in the initial period, it was. The principal objective now was to find the baby – or more probably its remains – and, if possible, the dingo.
Word was now well and truly out. Lindy’s parents, Cliff and Avis Murchison, were retired and living in Nowra on the NSW south coast. Alex Murchison was working for Shoalhaven Shire Council, as it then was, laying sewerage pipes, when his foreman approached and told him the news.
At Ayers Rock, the searching continued all Monday, during which Michael was at pains to get black-and-white photographic film so he could take pictures for a newspaper that had contacted him. His actions were, he said later, to warn people what might happen, but some people even in those early stages were mystified by his actions, wondering about his priorities. On the Tuesday, Aboriginal trackers followed dingo tracks for six kilometres from the campsite into sand hill country but found it doubled back and then the tracks became lost near the reservoir at the township. That day, Michael and Lindy Chamberlain, left for Mt Isa. There were still people searching and their decision to leave raised eyebrows. Michael and Lindy had decided there was no hope of finding the baby alive. Michael Chamberlain, having a traumatised family, decided his priority now was to look after them.
In the meantime, police packaged up the Chamberlains’ tent and its contents and put them in a cardboard box to be taken to Darwin for scientific examination. It was, in retrospect, a clumsy way of handling evidence, some of which, like any blood spray on the tent wall, was fragile, hard to see and easily destroyed. It must also be taken into account that all this had happened in a remote area. Distance was difficult. Communications were difficult. The radio telephone cut out for several hours each day. At that stage there was only the vaguest thought that one of the family might have been responsible for the child’s death, but the second safeguard, the expertise and professionalism of investigating police, was starting to fail.
The Chamberlain family arrived at Mt Isa and was now the centre of attention. Lindy’s parents, Cliff and Avis Murchison, and Lindy’s brother, Alex Murchison, went to Mt Isa. Alex said: “I remember mum held up the space blanket and there were muddy paw-prints on it. I could see the tiny pin-holes of light shining through where the dingo’s claws had gone through the space blanket. There was mud on the paw prints, the soil was still caked on.”
At Mt Isa, the gossip and rumour-mongering had begun. Members of the local SDA Church rallied around the Chamberlains. Lindy was also consoled by a close friend, Jennifer Ransom, and told her that she would be reunited with her baby in Eternity. According to Mrs Ransom, Lindy said: “I know that if I am true to the Lord for the rest of my life, she will be back in my arms as pure and beautiful as when I put her down to sleep”. A dry-cleaner at Mt Isa, Jennifer Prell, said Michael Chamberlain had brought in a sleeping bag which had “seven or eight” stains on it and had said he wanted it cleaned. The stains, potentially, constituted more evidence that blood had been spilled in the tent.
The Chamberlains’ tent arrived in Darwin at the bottom of a cardboard box on Thursday 21st August. The box was handed to Myra Fogarty, a police officer who had had three months’ experience in forensic work but no formal training. Her superior, Sergeant Bruce Sandry, told her to look for hair and blood. Fogarty unpacked the box and examined it. She was not told about any blood spray on the tent wall and did not see it. She assumed she was looking for human hairs and plucked some of her hair out to use as a control. She did not do any “lifting”, using adhesive tape to pick up what particles there might have been on surfaces in and on the tent. What she did say when she made her report was that there was less blood than she would have expected had there been a dingo attack. That was a careless comment on her part. It carried a number of assumptions, principally that the dingo would have torn the baby’s flesh and tossed it around in its jaws, spilling blood. If a dingo had snatched a baby in the way it apparently did, it would more likely to have been quick, a second or two. The baby would then have been whisked away by the dingo. Its teeth would all probability have occluded the blood in the wounds, preventing much of it from spilling. Her comment about expecting more blood was to rebound on her.
The next development came on Sunday, 24th August, when a tourist, Wallace Victor Goodwin, found Azaria’s jumpsuit, singlet and nappy at the base of Ayers Rock, 3.5 kilometres from the campsite. It was 20 metres from a dingo lair, though at the time not even the rangers knew the lair was there. There was no sign of the body. Goodwin reported the find to Constable Frank Morris. Morris, moved the clothing before photographing it to see whether there was anything inside it. In hindsight, a lot of controversy would have been avoided if the area had been sealed off and everything photographed before it was touched or moved. Morris must surely have wished he had done that. To be fair to him, the suggestion there had been a murder was a long way off. After examining the clothing, Morris laid it out in the way he thought he had found it. Goodwin did not agree with the way Morris did it. He said the description of the clothing, “neatly folded”, was not accurate. Morris claimed the jumpsuit was basically open except for a couple of studs at the bottom which he undid. Goodwin heard Morris ask Roff whether there were other dingo lairs in the area and Roff had said there were three. The second safeguard, preserving scientific evidence of a dingo attack, was failing.
Back in Mt Isa, Michael and Lindy Chamberlain started to hear the first poisonous talk about them, which was to rise to a crescendo. There were stories floating around that the SDA church practised black magic, or child sacrifice. The national mood itself became darker when on 29th August, Dr Eric Milne, brother of Lindy Chamberlain’s doctor, Dr Irene Mile, rang the police and told them that “Azaria” meant “Sacrifice in the Wilderness”. It was enough for the NT Police to send Constable Jim Metcalf, to the Mitchell Library in Sydney to research the meaning of the name. He came up with nothing but the rumour persisted.
The stories kept coming – that Azaria had been kidnapped by Aboriginals, or for that matter aliens. One extraordinary story was that Lindy had spear-tackled Azaria in the Mt Isa Supermarket, that a blood transfusion had been ordered on the baby and the Chamberlains had refused because the SDA church did not believe in blood transfusions, and that the baby had died and the dingo attack at Ayers Rock had been a charade, with SDA accomplices at Ayers Rock to back up her story. There was not a scrap of truth in this, though Azaria had had a tumble from a shopping trolley. The Chamberlains were at a disadvantage because of their religion. When questioned on television about the supposedly neat state of the baby’s clothing, Lindy said: “If you’ve ever seen a dingo eat, there’s no difficulty at all. They never eat the skin. They use their feet like feet like hands and pull back the skin as they go – just like peeling an orange.”
If only she had not said that! It caused audiences across the nation to recoil, at the supposedly clinical way in which she spoke about her lost baby. What Lindy said was accurate enough. Anyone who has ever owned a dog would know that dogs do not eat like pigs. They are quite delicate, even fastidious, eaters. But such was the developing hysteria that Lindy’s remarks did not go down well. There were other suggestions being put about, that the mother had done away with the baby, that it had been buried in the sand, dug up and reburied, and the jumpsuit placed near where dingoes were known to be. The Chamberlains were not helped by the findings of David