Long-running Chamberlain case drawing to close

Nearly 32 years after Lindy Chamberlain ran from a tent screaming "The dingo's got my baby", the final act in Australia's most protracted and gripping legal drama is to play out.

At an inquest opening in Darwin tomorrow, the now Lindy Creighton-Chamberlain and her former husband, Michael, will ask the coroner to set the record straight by making a finding that their 9-week-old daughter, Azaria, was killed by a dingo in August 1980.

Creighton-Chamberlain was convicted of murdering her baby at Ayers Rock (Uluru), and spent three years in prison before being released after Azaria's matinee jacket was found. But while a royal commission exonerated both her and her Christchurch-born husband, whose convictions were then quashed, the cause of Azaria's death has never been officially established.

The Northern Territory coroner, Elizabeth Morris, agreed to hold a new inquest - the fourth since 1981 - after receiving a file of evidence from the Chamberlains about dingo attacks on children. There have been 12 such attacks, three of them fatal, since the last inquest in 1995 recorded an open verdict, according to the couple's solicitor, Stuart Tipple.

He said yesterday that their main motive was to save other parents from the agony they had endured after Azaria vanished. "They believe it's very important to get that warning out there. They believe that if the appropriate finding had been made in 1995, some of these [subsequent] tragedies might not have happened."

The Chamberlains have moved on since clearing their names. After they divorced in 1991, Lindy married Rick Creighton, an American publisher; the couple live in the Hunter Valley. Michael, who received a suspended sentence for helping her conceal the murder, also re-married, and lives in northern New South Wales. A retired teacher, he now writes books.

The new file contains details of the fatal mauling of 9-year-old Clinton Gage by two dingoes on Fraser Island in 2001. It also features the cases of two toddlers who died after being bitten by pet dingo cross-breeds, one in southern NSW in 2005 and the other at Bunyip, Victoria, in 2006.

In 1980, says Anthea Gunn, curator of a Chamberlain collection at the National Museum in Canberra, Australians in rural and Aboriginal communities knew dingoes could kill people. "But for most people, it was unheard-of. We ... didn't think these adorable furry creatures would attack humans."

Few Australians believed Lindy's story that a dingo was responsible for Azaria's death, and public suspicion was heightened by her demeanour - she did not grieve openly - and by the couple's association with the Seventh Day Adventist church, viewed as a fundamentalist sect.

For John Bryson, author of a book about the saga, Evil Angels , the new inquest will serve to remind a younger generation of the facts of the case. "It's also important because, in a sense, it's a 'sorry statement'. It's saying [to the

Chamberlains]: 'We are sorry."'