The Baby Girl Taken by a Dingo: The tragic saga of Azaria Chamberlain | 60 Minutes Australia

Summary

This episode of 60 Minutes Australia revisits the infamous case of Azaria Chamberlain, the baby girl whose tragic disappearance in 1980 shocked the nation and the world. The disbelief and controversy surrounding her mother, Lindy Chamberlain, who was wrongly convicted of murder, took center stage, dividing public opinion. The segment explores the complex aftermath of the incident, covering Lindy's enduring fight for justice and the personal toll it took on her family. With unique insights from family members, the episode reflects on the tragic event, human courage, and the quest for truth.

Highlights

• Lindy Chamberlain's life was torn apart by the wrongful accusation of murdering her daughter, Azaria. 🌪️
• Public opinion heavily influenced the course of justice, with many believing Lindy guilty before evidence proved otherwise. 🕵️‍♂️
• The Chamberlains' personal lives were deeply affected, leading to divorce and new paths. 💔
• Lindy found love again, marrying Rick Creighton, and continues to find strength in family and faith. 💑
• The family members each have their own perspective and trauma regarding the events, highlighting its lasting impact. 🕊️

Key Takeaways

• Lindy Chamberlain, initially convicted for her daughter's murder, was a victim of a miscarriage of justice. 😢
• The case was marred by media frenzy and public bias, showcasing the power and pitfalls of public opinion. 📣
• After years of struggle, the Chamberlain family still seeks closure and an official apology from the Northern Territory. 🌍
• Lindy's resilience and determination are a testament to her character, inspiring many who face injustice. 💪
• The case highlights the complexity and frustrations of the legal system, especially when entwined with media influence. ⚖️

Overview

The story of Azaria Chamberlain remains one of Australia's most infamous legal tragedies. This 60 Minutes Australia episode highlights the struggles and perseverance of Lindy Chamberlain, a mother wrongfully accused of her daughter's murder when in fact, a dingo had taken the child during a family camping trip. Her story became a national and international sensation, with the phrase "The dingo’s got my baby!" entering popular culture. Through interviews and personal reflections, Lindy's journey for justice unfolds, shedding light on the intense media scrutiny she and her family endured as well as the lasting impact on Australian society.

Despite the gravity of the allegations and the deep-seated public prejudice, Lindy Chamberlain emerged as a figure of resilience. After serving a prison sentence based on flawed evidence and assumptions, Lindy continued to fight to clear her name. This episode doesn't just recount her harrowing experience but also reveals the broader implications of media influence and the need for systemic change in how justice is pursued amid public fervor. Lindy's life post-trial showcases her strength; she remarried, re-established family connections, and remained steadfast in her faith and pursuit of an official apology from the Northern Territory.

The Chamberlain family's personal journey is interwoven with the story of national introspection. Michael, Lindy's ex-husband, and their children each cope differently with the tragedy and media onslaught. The documentary emphasizes the emotional scars left by the ordeal. Even decades later, the quest for truth and reconciliation continues as the family seeks a formal acknowledgement of the tragedy's handling. As they try to move forward, this case reflects on the relentless pursuit of justice and the power of belief and endurance in the face of overwhelming challenges.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: The Dingoes Got My Baby The chapter titled 'The Dingoes Got My Baby' reflects on the infamous case that started with the chilling cry 'the dingoes got my baby' 20 years ago. It became a compelling story that initially shocked and divided Australia, later bringing shame upon reflection. The narrator recounts an encounter with Lindy and Michael Chamberlain 14 years prior, noting Lindy's return after serving a three-year jail term. Since that time, there have been significant changes, including their painful divorce and the start of new lives.
• 00:30 - 02:30: Lindy's Homecoming and New Beginnings The chapter titled 'Lindy's Homecoming and New Beginnings' explores the ongoing personal and legal struggles faced by Lindy and Michael after the incident involving Azaria. Despite new developments in their lives such as newfound partnerships and even a new baby, Lindy and Michael remain isolated from each other. They continue to deal with their pursuit of justice individually rather than as a team, highlighting a significant shift from previous united efforts. The chapter delves into the persistent tensions and questions surrounding the case, with a focus on Lindy's personal stance as she emphatically denies any involvement in Azaria's death, expressing her love for the little girl.
• 02:30 - 03:30: A Fight for Justice This chapter describes the narrator's feelings of shame regarding the Australian public's past treatment of Lindy Chamberlain, a woman who was famously convicted and later acquitted of murdering her baby girl. The narrator recalls meeting Lindy 14 years ago, shortly after her release from prison, and notes her small stature but remarkable toughness and determination to seek justice.
• 03:30 - 04:30: Life Changes and Challenges The chapter, titled 'Life Changes and Challenges,' highlights the ongoing struggle for justice from a speech, emphasizing it's just beginning even after 14 years. Lindy, a central figure, is still strong and determined despite the years. Despite new challenges, like a thyroid condition requiring daily medication, she embraces her life changes with humor, speaking of a new life, new love, and as she amusingly states, a 'new body.'
• 04:30 - 06:00: Blind Justice and Apology Sought The chapter discusses the speaker's experiences and challenges related to having a low thyroid condition. They express a preference for being slim and active, despite the limitations their health condition imposes on their daily activities. The speaker highlights feelings of frustration over tasks that were once easy but have become difficult, such as navigating tight spaces. However, they emphasize the importance of adapting and moving forward in life.
• 06:00 - 09:00: Recollecting the Tragic Night In the chapter titled 'Recollecting the Tragic Night', the narrative presents a scene where the jury members are all masked, visually contributing to an atmosphere of somber reflection. Music plays in the background, enhancing the emotional weight of the moment. A significant piece of art titled 'Blind Justice', created by Lindy's friend Pro Hart, hangs in her lounge room. This artwork stands as a persistent emblem encouraging Lindy to persevere in her fight. The chapter captures Lindy's feeling of being overshadowed by the gravity of the legal proceedings, embodied by her reflection where Michael's presence is felt as an influential shadow.
• 09:00 - 10:30: Family Reflections and Regan's Memory The chapter titled 'Family Reflections and Regan's Memory' revolves around the Chamberlain family's journey for justice following a tragic event. It highlights the family's desire for an apology from the Northern Territory and a need for the inquest to recognize 'death by dingo' as the cause. This chapter marks 20 years since the family visited the rock for a camping holiday. On that day, the family fed their two younger children: Regan, who was four years old at the time, and Azaria, who was just nine weeks old.
• 10:30 - 14:30: The Chamberlain Family's Journey The chapter titled 'The Chamberlain Family's Journey' opens with a scene at a campsite as night falls. The Chamberlain family, consisting of young children and their parents, are settling in. Several people reportedly notice dingos wandering near their tents. Around 8:00 PM, the darkness and cold of the desert takes over the campsite. Suddenly, the peace is shattered by the cry of a baby named Azaria. Lindy, the mother, and Aiden, her six-year-old son, run to the tent to check on her, only to face a terrifying situation—a dingo is inside the tent, and the baby might be in grave danger. The chapter highlights the panic and urgency of the moment as the safety of little Azaria is threatened.
• 14:30 - 18:30: Seeking Justice and Uncovering Truth The chapter titled 'Seeking Justice and Uncovering Truth' delves into the intense plea of an individual facing injustice. It describes an encounter where authoritative figures, referred to as 'the northern territory powers,' unofficially approach the individual. They offer freedom in exchange for a confession to a crime they didn't commit, as evidenced by the plea 'god no please don't.' This chapter underscores the moral dilemma and the nation's judgment on coerced confessions and miscarriages of justice.
• 18:30 - 20:00: Reconciling with the Past The chapter titled 'Reconciling with the Past' seems to delve into a case involving the chamberlain, potentially referencing a legal case or an incident. The narrative discusses a Melbourne lawyer, John Bryson, who authored the book that inspired the movie 'Evil Angels'. The discussion includes vivid imagery of dingoes consuming a carcass, which serves to illustrate that a dingo attack is not beyond belief. However, the chapter highlights the lingering doubt and unresolved question in the northern territory about whether a dingo indeed committed the act in question, emphasizing that there has never been an official acknowledgment of such an occurrence.

The Baby Girl Taken by a Dingo: The tragic saga of Azaria Chamberlain | 60 Minutes Australia Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 it's 20 years since we first heard those chilling words the dingoes got my baby what followed of course was one of those compelling stories that come along only once in a lifetime a story that at first shocked and divided australia and eventually left us shamed i first met lindy and michael chamberlain 14 years ago it was lindy's homecoming her reunion with michael and the family after three years in jail since then a fair bit has changed a painful divorce new lives with new
• 00:30 - 01:00 partners even a new baby it's still them against the world still lindy and michael fighting for justice but they no longer fight together in fact for this story we couldn't even get them together in the same room well let me ask you face-to-face what every australian would ask you did you kill azaria no way i love that little girl it's the younger generation uh that is continually saying look i'm
• 01:00 - 01:30 so ashamed of my parents and the rest of australia i want to apologize for them and they're doing it and then yes it was 14 years ago that i first met lindy chamber i met a woman just out of jail convicted of murdering her baby girl and suddenly set free lindy was tiny and she was tough determined to fight for justice
• 01:30 - 02:00 [Applause] the real fight for justice is only just starting you might think it's nearly finished but believe me it's only just beginning 14 years later lindy is still a fighter she's still tough but today she has a new life a new love and she says with a laugh a new body much as i hate it it looks like i've got to put up with it so it's a thyroid problem the thyroid problem what are you doing here i swallow thyroid tablets every day
• 02:00 - 02:30 because i'm very low on thyroid i'd still rather be slim and more active because it does cut down on a lot of activities that i would like to do and i get really frustrated where i get a crawler in a small space that wouldn't have made me think twice before and get stuck now and that sort of thing but you know that's life you you get used to new things and keep going [Music]
• 02:30 - 03:00 the jury all have masks on [Music] blind justice hangs in lindy's lounge room it's a constant reminder from friend and artist pro heart why she must keep the fight going and then you have um me here bowed by the weight of the court let's hear it michael in my shadow
• 03:00 - 03:30 lindy 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 it's 20 years almost of the day since the chamberlain family came here to the rock on a camping holiday as the sun says they fed the two younger children regan who was four years old and azari who was nine weeks and they put them to
• 03:30 - 04:00 bed in their tent now several people that night saw dingos prowling around the campsite about two hours later just after eight o'clock it was getting cold and the desert out there was pitch black they heard azaria cry out so lindy and six-year-old aiden ran back to the tent to see what was wrong that's when the nightmare really began yo get out there's dingo in the tent did you go to i university i've got the baby
• 04:00 - 04:30 god no please don't help me that thing goes from my baby what ah the northern territory powers that be i won't give you any names because they came to me unofficially and said look you can go free if you will only sign and say you did it we will let you out you know just just take it i think that the nation began to judge
• 04:30 - 05:00 the chamberlain's own uh personalities as if we were watching a telly movie and pull back the skin as they go on melbourne lawyer john bryson wrote the book that became the movie evil angels well if you've ever seen a dingo eat there's no difficulty at all if you've seen them eat the carcass of a cow something like that but there's still this question mark john isn't there that no one in the northern territory has ever officially said the dingo did it
• 05:00 - 05:30 no who can say that i can say that the dingo did it there's no doubt that that none of the chamberlains did before we were married we took a trip from washington down to california lindy and her american husband rick have come back to australia to live to be close to their church and bring the kids back together aiden lives nearby with michael chamberlain and his new family lindy and michael no longer communicate easily
• 05:30 - 06:00 but lindy if you look over the last 20 years of your life you've been to prison you've lost a daughter you've been accused of murdering a daughter you've had a daughter taken away from you in prison you've been divorced you've remarried what's been the most difficult experience of the lot the pain behind the scenes that the public didn't know about obviously the divorce and what went with it and the reasons for it
• 06:00 - 06:30 it was a really difficult decision for me to have to make and one i didn't want to make but you've made the point in your book you said that you thought the whole tragedy had probably held you and michael together rather than forced you apart yeah it did kept us together longer than it would have otherwise i think that we ought to put another dam over there in 1991 on a lecture tour in america for the seventh-day adventist church that's where lindy met rick creighton
• 06:30 - 07:00 rick was a successful businessman and like lindy he was quite happy being single all in all it's a great place to live i knew four days four days later from seeing him walk around that corner i suddenly realized i don't believe this i am totally head over heels in love and i've had no say in this i didn't it i didn't see it happening it just crept up and i thought well boy you know you challenge god he uh he knows what to do but i kept
• 07:00 - 07:30 thinking he's nine years younger than me he's from a different country you're going home in a week you know what are you thinking of oh you needed the extra nine years of energy for me to be able to keep up with you and the family didn't you dear is she a hard-faced it's the phrase you use all the time lindy no way well that's what people tell me um some of those that have been close to me tell me that i can be if you're trying to walk all
• 07:30 - 08:00 over me she won't take any guff and some people call that hard-faced if lindy wasn't tough she wouldn't have survived i spent an hour and a half almost at one stage ask did i kill my daughter it's friendly isn't she you you're so angry you're so frustrated that you get almost uh an uncaring monotone but one thing has never changed a moment or a memory after so many years
• 08:00 - 08:30 will still trigger so many tears it's birthdays that i commemorate they're a happy time so it's azaria's birthday rather than the day that she disappeared yeah this year's was hard [Music]
• 08:30 - 09:00 until you've actually seen the rock you don't understand but there's something so awesome about that place [Music] lindy doesn't blame the rock for her family's tragedy but she still believes there was some strange funny business out there
• 09:00 - 09:30 [Music] but when you talk about a conspiracy you see it more as an attempt by the authorities not let the truth get out yes that's the only conspiracy i have ever seen is that someone desperately did not want the truth out and they
• 09:30 - 10:00 perpetuated lies and twisted the truth and and that's what's caused the problems [Music] by full moonlight and crackling firelight the chamberlain kids chose to talk separately so nobody could accuse them of taking sides
• 10:00 - 10:30 i think everyone sort of suffers through life in one way or another and um don't feel like i've had any more emotional stress than a lot of other people perhaps it's been a bit prolonged and bit more public than i'd like it from time to time aidan is an electrician by train regan is studying to be a science teacher carlia is now a maths wizard in her final year of high school remember
• 10:30 - 11:00 carlia was born in the darwin jail i'm adverse to being called lindy chamberlain or michael chamberlain's daughter so i suppose when i sign things i've always i've signed them with my first and middle name for a while which is just kind of silly it's just so people don't go oh yeah i know that name it doesn't it's not really something people need to know i don't hide it i just don't see any need to advertise it i suppose yeah i'd prefer just the kalia
• 11:00 - 11:30 someday aidan would like to be a ship right now though he's in training for the national enduro bike championship aiden was with his mother that night when azari was taken and he's still deeply troubled by what he saw at 26 he still can't talk about it the movie for example the evil angel could you could you did you see that yeah i've watched it a couple times is can you be comfortable watching it or
• 11:30 - 12:00 is it too close to the bone your dad says he thinks it's it's almost true it's a bit much yeah for you carly or is about another family another time another life it's definitely surreal but no no it takes things like that to make it more real to me and then i go up into my little dreamland of no that didn't really happen amazingly regan now says that he remembers that night in the tent when he was only four when azari was taken one of the things that i remember
• 12:00 - 12:30 um was the dingo walking across my chest and i was a bit petrified about that and uh oh not a bit petrified very petrified so much so that when mom came into the tent and stuff like that i wasn't necessarily thinking clearly and i wasn't sure whether it had come back or what now that's a story that you never told all those years ago because nobody asked mostly because nobody asked yeah and uh
• 12:30 - 13:00 um i was fairly much of a quiet nature there and uh and i don't know i'd get asked a lot of stupid questions by by the cops originally um asking repetitive questions or whatever being as a kid i really couldn't see the point have you been back to the rock yeah kelly you've been to the rock do you remember how you felt um i suppose yeah actually things hit me with a reality then that's the first
• 13:00 - 13:30 time i went oh guess what i actually had a sister that died here before i was born considering it's 20 years ago tomorrow and i'm not even 18 yet here is the resting place of azaria
• 13:30 - 14:00 my nine week and four-day-old daughter somewhere near this giant monolith in a way it's her tombstone i guess michael chamberlain has kept a diary since his daughter disappeared day by day for the past 20 years but for me there is still an eerie foreboding about this place i'm very fortunate to have with me my beautiful wife ingrid and my daughter zara
• 14:00 - 14:30 she didn't take the place of azaria but she's she's done wonders for me as a most unexpected thrill of a little girl zara is michael's bright little princess that's what zara means princess so what have you told
• 14:30 - 15:00 well i've told her as much as one can tell a little girl who's i've actually told her when she was three so she knew already then um just before she went to preschool and she knows that what do you know do you want to tell us what you know about it what happened to you it is wrong my baby's up here died yeah that was very sad wasn't it [Music]
• 15:00 - 15:30 but michael you said in this book this year that your divorce from lindy was almost as difficult as the death of azaria yeah but she says that the azaria case actually kept the marriage together yes it did in the sense we were fighting for a common cause but lindy and i i think always knew that
• 15:30 - 16:00 that we were like chalk and cheese in our relationship and we always had to work on it very hard and probably there were some times when one of us didn't work on it as hard as the other one did you mean you um yeah sometimes i think i'm to blame for sure because again you said the truth is we did not have an ideal marriage no but in a religious context one has to try and show that they do have an ideal marriage and that's the facade and that's the problem
• 16:00 - 16:30 to think of a child being taken by an animal like the one we when you took it i mean you'd think that through and that's about the most horrible death you could ever experience michael chamberlain now wants some answers to this desert mystery you get the feeling he's back on the attack until now one has to ask the question why did it take so long to get justice why did it take seven years and a woman in jail for three years
• 16:30 - 17:00 what actually happened to the total picture what actually happened to the real evidence the evidence that was either prima facie or close to prima facie cover up there's an agenda right from day one why did one of the best northern charity detective sergeants who has now spoken up recently in one of the newspapers in a weekend newspaper why did he get put off the case almost immediately he had come why was he told
• 17:00 - 17:30 not to go any further those police did not want to report on anything relating to innocence in our situation are you suggesting the northern territory government at the time and the northern territory police were determined to find you guilty i believe they were and the press of course were being fed all the time from the northern territory and from the new south wales forensics and so these little tidbits were coming out just continually heaping and loading more and more guilt on us as as as a nefarious pair of people and
• 17:30 - 18:00 by the time we got to the second inquest you know it was it was all over we were gone 95 of australia was it yeah they did it but it was false forensic evidence that had done it i think that the jury like the rest of us knew that she was guilty quite wrong but that was the fact we couldn't shake off that feeling lawyer john bryson sat through all the chamberlain inquests and the murder trial
• 18:00 - 18:30 he was writing his best-selling book but like everyone else he got caught up in what he now calls the azaria syndrome there was certainly a conspiracy of the entire nation i'd go that far i think it was one that that came to us as if it were second nature that's what hurts me uh there we are essentially a fair people and suddenly
• 18:30 - 19:00 with this phenomenon not at all i mean we knew didn't we that we were dealing with the uh the most notorious little murderers in the history of the country who wanted to fail in that task aboriginal people around here regard this as a sorry place for the chamberlain family and it is a sorry place michael and lindy have some unfinished business here at the rock they need the northern territory government to reconcile the past to apologise for what they did to the chamberlain family so they can move on
• 19:00 - 19:30 the fact is michael and lindy have picked up the pieces and gone their separate ways but 20 years after azaria they still cry much too easily so i will come back to this rock again i still have a memorial to put here michael what would you say on that memorial i wrote it down about 10 years ago in essence in essence somewhere in this area uh four kilometers east of this rock
• 19:30 - 20:00 um lies my daughter taken by the hand of nature that's all i want on it awaiting the resurrection hello i'm tara brown thanks for watching 60 minutes australia subscribe to our
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