SECRET jury notes buried in police files have revealed why Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of murdering her baby Azaria 30 years ago.

The notes reveal female jurors were tougher on Lindy than the men.

“Doesn’t believe dingo,” one of the women is recorded as declaring.

See the exclusive slideshow here

The notes are a missing part of a puzzle that 30 years on still perplexes Australia.

Two weeks ago, Northern Territory police gave the Herald Sun exclusive access to the Azaria Files, 145 boxes of documents and exhibits, destined for the National Archives.

The notes reveal what the jury was thinking when it rejected Lindy’s story that a dingo took her baby, and convicted her of killing Azaria at Ayers Rock on August 17, 1980, and her husband, Michael, of being an accessory.

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Thirty years on, do you believe a dingo killed Azaria Chamberlain?

• Yes 54.21% (3307 votes)
• No 45.79% (2793 votes)

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It was to be six years before Lindy was released from jail. The couple were later exonerated.

WORLD EXCLUSIVE: READ ON AS WE REVEAL THE SECRETS OF THE JURY ROOM

IT’S October 29, 1982, a typical day in the suffocating heat of Darwin’s build-up to the wet season.

Storm clouds threaten rain, but the skies just won’t break. Something has to give.

A jury has retired to consider its verdict in a trial that has split the nation.

Soon, the pubs of Darwin will be filled with cheering punters, crashing glasses as they celebrate what they see as a great result.

Why did they even bother with a jury? Every Australian has already decided who, or what, had carried baby Azaria Chamberlain away into the freezing night at the Uluru campsite. And killed her.

There are only two choices: the dingo, or the baby’s mother, Lindy.

The dingo, a breed resident in this continent for 5000 years, is known for its stealth and wile.

Lindy is petite and stoic, but rubs her fellow Australians up the wrong way.

Police have built an entirely circumstantial case that Lindy slashed her baby’s throat with a pair of scissors in the front seat of the family car and then, somehow, made the body disappear.

No one saw her do it. But the police think her husband, the Seventh-Day Adventist pastor Michael Chamberlain, helped her get rid of the baby, probably by burying her in a sand dune at the base of the Rock.

Three women and nine men are sitting around an oblong wooden table in a windowless room deep in the Darwin courthouse – the jurors whose job it is to decide the unknowable.

For almost 30 years, what happened in this room has remained equally unknowable, locked away by the laws that prevent outsiders knowing a jury’s mind.

Handwritten notes by jurors, on 14 sheets of blue paper, take the Australian public inside this jury room for the first time.

How these notes came to make their way into the one of 145 boxes of police exhibits and documents held by NT police is itself a mystery.

The Azaria files – a huge store of police notes and unexpected ephemera, such as dingo skulls and dolls dressed in matinee jackets – are destined for the National Archives, such is their historical importance. The Herald Sun has been granted exclusive access to them.

They tell a story hidden for 30 years.

Trial of the century

There were 105 people who answered their jury summons to Darwin’s courthouse on September 13, 1982. They weren’t told which trial they would be sitting on.

But they all knew this was the big one: R v Chamberlain and Chamberlain – the trial of the century.

Darwin in 1982 is really just a small town. As they wait to find whether their names will be called for duty, some find they know one another, and greet each other with surprise and anticipation.

Suddenly, an electrical charge runs through the packed courtroom. All heads turn towards the door.

The potential jurors have seen her so many times on TV and in the papers that it is like seeing a celebrity. She’s the most famous – or infamous – person in Australia.

Lindy Chamberlain walks in with her husband Michael, pastor with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church at Mt Isa.

She is charged with murder, he with being an accessory.

“Look at her face,” someone whispers.

Another whispers: “Fancy getting pregnant, almost seven months gone. She did that on purpose to make us feel sorry for her. What a cheek.”

It’s not a good start.

Lindy looks straight ahead and holds onto tall, blond Michael’s hand, her pregnant belly covered by a flowery maternity dress.

There’s a view that Lindy’s pregnancy is a sympathy tactic. If so, it is not working.

The Chamberlains sit in the dock. There are three knocks. The court stands. Justice James Muirhead, a kindly man, strides onto the bench.

The pews are hard and unyielding. The names of all potential jurors are in a barrel and are picked at random by the judge’s associate.

The first man to take his seat in the jury box is a public servant who becomes the foreman. The others include a mechanic, a clerk, a builder, a plumber, a cleaner and a brace of public servants. The three women are a teacher and two housewives.

The prosecutor is Ian Barker, QC, aged 47. He’s almost a local, having moved from Sydney to Alice Springs in 1961, then to Darwin. He has that common touch that carries juries along with him.

Barker outlines the case that has held the nation in its thrall since Azaria was killed at Ayers Rock between 8pm and 9pm on Sunday, August 17, 1980. She was only nine and a half weeks old.

“The body was never found,” says Barker.

“But having heard the evidence concerning the baby’s disappearance you will have no difficulty in determining that she is dead and that she died on the night she disappeared.”

The precise manner and cause of death would never been known.

“However what will be proved, largely from scientific examination of the baby’s clothes, is that the child lost a great deal of blood, in all probability from injury to the major vessels of her neck,” he says. “She died very quickly, because somebody had cut her throat.”

The Crown has no motive for why the mother of Aidan, six, and Reagan, four, would kill her only daughter. Notes from the Azaria Files show how desperately police had searched for a motive.

But Barker tells the jury not to worry about motive: “We simply say that the evidence to be put before you will prove beyond reasonable doubt that, for whatever reason, the baby was murdered by her mother.”

‘A dingo has got my baby’

The Chamberlains had arrived at the Rock from their Mt Isa home late the previous day, Saturday August 16. Packed into their yellow Torana hatchback, they were on holiday.

They pitched their tent next to their car in the top camping area to the east of Ayers Rock, at a deliberately quiet spot next to Sunrise Hill. There were only four other families there.

John Phillips, QC, aged 49, a Melbourne barrister and experienced trial lawyer, presents the defence case that on the Sunday evening, Reagan was asleep in the tent when Lindy wrapped Azaria in her blankets and tucked her into the old-fashioned white wicker bassinet at the rear of the tent. She then returned to the barbecue area.

When one of the other women heard the cry of a baby, and two other campers heard a dog growl, Lindy went to check on Azaria.

About five yards from the tent, she saw a dog at the entrance. Moments later, she uttered her now famous cry: “My God. My God. A dingo has got my baby.”

Tracks and drag marks made by dingoes or dogs were found, but the baby was not.

The head ranger, Derek Roff, had become so concerned about the local dingoes losing their fear of humans he had not long before warned his superiors that children and babies could be considered possible prey.

Barker dismisses the Chamberlains’ account.

“The Crown says the dingo story was a fanciful lie calculated to conceal the truth, which is that the child Azaria died by her mother’s hand,” he says.

The Crown case was that Lindy had lied about putting Azaria to sleep and had killed her, slicing her throat in the passenger seat of the Torana and hiding the body before returning to the barbecue.

When the baby’s clothes were found seven days later, by a tourist 4km from the campsite, it was not far from two dingo dens.

The top four press studs of the jumpsuit were open, the two booties were still inside the feet of the jumpsuit, and her white cotton singlet was inside out — opposite to the way Lindy said it had been put on. The jumpsuit collar and singlet top were heavily bloodstained.

Her white knitted matinee jacket was missing.

The relentless effort of both sides to persuade the jurors begins. The evidence veers from the boring to the dramatic: what was said to be fetal blood, found in the Torana by NSW forensic biologist Joy Kuhl. Scissor marks and not teeth marks on Azaria’s jumpsuit, according to Professor Malcolm Chaikin, a textile expert from the University of NSW.

The jurors gradually get to know each other. They get used to each other’s idiosyncrasies. They brew up tea and coffee at recess. The jury room walls are painted manila-folder bland; a carpet dampens their voices so they can’t be heard outside. They have their own bathroom so they don’t mix with witnesses and the public, but no telephone to the outside world.

It becomes their sanctuary from the media circus that surrounds the trial.

When they fly to Ayers Rock to visit the scene, they celebrate one juror’s birthday with a cake and a few beers.

All 12 climb the rock. It was what you did in those days.

Now it’s October 29. Time to complete their duty.

The jury room

A nation has lived and breathed the case for over seven weeks, and across Australia, radios and TV sets are tuned in. All waiting for the verdict.

On the court steps, on the surrounding lawns, reporters wait as TV lights flood the scene. Ghouls from the public, here for the kill, eat their takeaway meals, sink their cooling beers. Some even parade in T-shirts proclaiming that Lindy killed her baby.

In the jury room, at the head of the table, is the foreman; to his left are the three women and two of the public servants; to his right sit another public servant, the builder, the plumber, the mechanic and the cleaner. Opposite him at the other end is the clerk.

They appear to start by going around the table, one by one, to see who thinks what.

After the trial, it is reported that a sheriff’s officer found the first voting slips of the jurors in the rubbish basket: four for guilty, four to acquit, four unsure.

There are no names on the slips of paper, nothing to identify them.

But the notes on blue paper in the police archives mean that for the first time, we know what they thought of the evidence, how they interpreted what the judge said in his summing-up, and what swayed them.

The notes are all in the same long, looping, forward-sloping handwriting, believed to be the foreman’s. The notes beneath his name are longer and in more detail than those beneath the other names.

He writes that all three female jurors are for convicting Lindy.

“Look at totality must say guilty,” says the teacher, who is also swayed by the prosecution expert who said the jumpsuit had been cut with scissors, not torn by dingo teeth.

“Doesn’t believe dingo,” is written beneath the initial of one of the two housewives.

She notes the fetal blood, which Joy Kuhl said had been found in the car, and is also suspicious of the cutting of the jumpsuit.

But she has doubts: “Find it hard to accept Mrs C did it.”

Though jurors must be sure of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, she votes to convict.

The other housewife is quoted as saying simply: “Gas tanks would have blocked view.”

The two tanks, which fuelled the barbecues, were about 150cm high and surrounded by a wooden fence. She believes they would have blocked the view to the tent.

Between sessions, the jurors have free rein in the courtroom to look at the exhibits.

They are caught in high spirits by none other than Michael Chamberlain, who’s come back to the courtroom and found them clowning around, sitting up on the bench in the judge’s chair.

One of the public servants is all for an acquittal. In the notes, he is quoted as saying simply: “Can’t believe Mrs C did it.” Another public servant joins him. “Probability dingo could do it,” he remarks.

He is persuaded by ranger Roff’s warning that a child or baby could get eaten. And he believes evidence that the damage to Azaria’s clothes was done by scissors is not so clear-cut.

“Clothes damage cannot be accounted for?” he asks.

He believes that the blood in the car is not fetal, as Mrs Kuhl states. He prefers the evidence of defence witnesses Prof Barry Boettcher and Prof Richard Nairn.

The evidence of Boettcher, a professor of biological science from the University of Newcastle, was convoluted, but boiled down to challenging the correctness of Kuhl’s results, based on the anti-serum she had used in her tests.

The defence had not been able to examine the Torana for themselves.

His findings were backed by Nairn, professor of pathology and immunology at Monash University.

“Blood in car not fetal – Boettcher and Nairn”, the juror states.

He also notes “car lights”, which could refer to a couple of points raised in the trial.

It might mean that if Lindy had killed her daughter in their car, someone would have seen the lights go on.

It might also be referring to Michael Chamberlain not being able to find the car keys to plug in his spotlight and look for Azaria that night, because his wife had put them under a pillow in the tent. She said she had no pockets in her clothes.

The mechanic is quoted as saying he agrees with this public servant juror. He adds his voice to the chorus for an acquittal.

The clerk opposite the foreman also favours an acquittal. The notes beneath his name are harder to decipher, but he is quoted saying: “Mrs Chamberlain . . . innocent.”

He appears to question Kuhl’s evidence about the fetal blood and notes that the light would have gone on in the car if Lindy had committed murder in the way the prosecution alleged.

The third public servant is undecided: “Positive not dingo but cannot believe Mrs C (did it).”

This juror has a list of evidence “against Mrs C,” including changing her story, and getting Michael to change his.

Lindy had variously said she did not see anything in the dingo’s mouth; then said it appeared to have something in its mouth; and during the trial, that she did not see anything in its mouth.

The Chamberlains’ behaviour is also questioned: “Hard to accept such loving parents did not search.”

While up to 300 weary and dusty people searched the sand dunes around the tent until 3am, the couple had waited close to their tent and the barbecue area.

Two jurors mention the handprint – one wants to acquit. The other is not sure.

Professor James Cameron, a pathologist drafted in from London, has discovered what he said was a small adult handprint on the back of the jumpsuit, caused by someone – presumably Lindy – holding the baby upright with bloodstained hands.

In the basement of the courthouse is the Chamberlains’ Torana. Their tent has been pitched in dim lighting meant to recreate conditions in the campsite on that night.

Lindy has said that as she approached the tent, she could see Azaria was not in the bassinet. The jurors want to see if that is so.

The plumber goes for a guilty verdict, but notes that it is not without “some reservations”.

There is no “beyond reasonable doubt” in this room, at least, not at this stage. They’re swinging wildly.

Only two choices

The foreman is all for a conviction, dismissing all defence evidence as purely a smokescreen.

He says they have been given only two choices: “Dingo story – Chamberlain story!”

“Can accept Mrs Kuhl . . . evidence (jumpsuit) cut by sharp scissors not teeth . . . no saliva on jumpsuit . . . Boettcher deliberately set out to create smoke screen . . . defence evidence purely smoke screen.”

That makes five for a conviction, four for an acquittal, one unsure and two unknowns. (Only the notes of 10 jurors are retained. Those relating to the builder and the cleaner are missing.)

It is unclear at what stage these notes are taken.

About 8pm, the door opens as one of the court orderlies collects something from the courtroom. She tells the jurors about the mobs outside waiting for their verdict. The pressure is increased.

They have been at it for six hours. Most of the jurors want to get it over and get home. They don’t want to be locked up in a hotel for the night to return the next morning.

At 8.33pm, Justice Muirhead directs the sheriff’s office to bring in the jury.

The foreman stands. He’s asked whether the jury has reached a unanimous verdict.

“We have, Your Honour.”

“Do you find the accused, Lynne Alice Chamberlain, guilty or not guilty of the charge of murder?”

He returns the same verdict for Michael Chamberlain.

The Azaria files don’t reveal what changed the minds of the jurors who had been convinced the couple were not guilty.

Somehow, in the last few hours, everything changed.

A court orderly who looked after the jury told us: “After the verdict had been given, after the trial was over, I can remember one of the jurors mentioning something about it finally coming down to two (for acquittal) and 10 (for murder).

“And the thing that swayed them at the last minute was to do with the lighting that fell across the front of the tent.

“I thought at the time, how can the light in a garage possibly be the same as the light at the campsite?”

Indeed, it couldn’t. On August 17, 1980, the Ayers Rock barbecue area, about 25m west of the tent, was illuminated by a 100-watt yellow portable floodlight attached to a post. The evidence was that some of the light reached the tent, which opened towards the light, but there was a dispute about how bright it would have been.

Lindy said she could see when she returned to the tent that the baby was not in the bassinet.

In the courthouse basement, one juror puts a baby doll, meant to represent Azaria, into the bassinet in the tent. The jurors believed that, in that light, there was no way they could see that a baby was not in there.

They did not take into account that Lindy’s eyes, like those of the other campers, had become accustomed to the dark, and dim lighting.

Says the court orderly: “I don’t think there was pressure from one juror to another. I think it was just a process of elimination, and the last people to be convinced were those two.

“The jurors all got on really well: they were friendly and happy, and everything. I can’t remember anyone being under stress. But I believe a couple of the jurors had emotional problems after the trial finished.”

<a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/secrets-from-chamberlain-jury/story-e6frf7l6-1225902734788tag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/secrets-from-chamberlain-jury/story-e6frf7l6-1225902734788Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:02:05 GMT 00:00″>Secrets from Chamberlain jury

Marketing executive-turned-landscape designer Astrid Gaiser has plenty of experience catering to client needs, but nothing prepared her for the challenge she would face in her own backyard.

Two years ago, her husband, a systems engineer, became paraplegic after suffering a spinal-cord injury. He was an avid gardener, and — once immediate concerns were settled — she set out to make their Mountain-View garden accessible to her husband, now a wheelchair-user. The solutions she devised have made their way into her designs for three other wheelchair-friendly gardens in the Bay Area.

“In principle, it’s the same every time,” Gaiser said. “Give more flat space.”

That was the first step she took on her own plot, a whimsical, tropical-inspired garden with plenty of open space. She gave the front yard a full makeover, widening paths to 4 feet, removing stepping stones and gravel and flattening uneven mounds. To return a relaxed ambiance to the triangular yard, she superimposed a half-circle on the ground and added a recirculating ceramic fountain in the center, with two comfortable chairs along the wall.

“This is combining accessibility with good design,” she said.

In place of gravel, which swallows wheels, Gaiser installed decomposed granite, or “fines,” to create a smooth ride. She used a blonde hue that resembles gravel, but the material also comes in a compacted form and shades such as dessert rose and charcoal grey. For groundcover, Gaiser also recommends standard bark mulch and drivable grass, which consists of a grass grid lining a lattice of concrete squares.

To help her husband resume gardening, Gaiser planted everything from New Zealand flax to Chinese windmill palms in over-sized ceramic pots. He can rest tools on one of several lightweight metal side tables and tend to the plants on his own.

“Helping to get independence back is really a super-important thing,” she said. “We had to go through a whole learning process. … It’s more in your brain than a real limitation.”

When a pot breaks (“It’s mainly a function of too happy a plant,” Gaiser said), she uses remnants to cleverly mask sprinklers.

A variety of low-maintenance succulents fill the pots and nestle among larger plants bordering the garden’s expansive lawn.

“It doesn’t need a lot of care but gives you a ton of color,” Gaiser said. One agave plant had not had water for two-and-a-half months.

Form and function also combine in the garden’s abundant furnishings, most of which are lightweight “faux wicker” and easily transportable. Wider than a standard lawn chair, a low-rise double chaise allows Gaiser’s husband — who has limited control of his trunk — to transfer safely from his wheelchair and recline in the shade of an Atlas cedar.

He can also easily wheel up to join friends in a living room-like outdoor patio or around a fire pit, which are arranged on flat pavement and can be moved around.

“It’s a cool party garden,” Gaiser said. “It’s just made for hanging out. I’m happy that he doesn’t need to miss that.”

The fire pit, sun-shading umbrellas and a handy stack of blankets also help her husband warm up or cool off — the spinal-cord injury has affected his ability to regulate body temperature.

Gaiser has found that minor adjustments like these, not necessarily sweeping overhauls, can make a garden accessible. “With small changes in your house, your garden … you can actually do everything again you could do before,” she said. “It makes you feel good about yourself.”

Specific modifications should depend on a client’s needs and abilities, she said. For a wheelchair-user who could stand for limited periods, Gaiser crafted a raised garden bed with a knee-rest and strap that helped her stay upright.

Five raised beds were also the central feature of a native-plant and vegetable garden that Gaiser designed last year for special-education students at Mountain View High School, where her daughter was a student. Three-feet high and 4-feet deep, the beds had a cavity that allowed students to roll into them and reach for strawberries, kale and other harvests as part of a horticultural therapy program.

Gaiser left a career in product management and consumer marketing five years ago to pursue landscape design full time. She gardened copiously while growing up in Germany and intentionally avoided it until Palo Alto’s 10-month growing season tempted her back into the craft 10 years ago.

“I’m not big on cubicles, to be honest,” she said.

Now, there is only one place in the garden that her husband cannot reach: a canopied couch secluded atop a stepped mound, once a favorite place for Sunday-morning coffee. She will get to it one day, she said.

“There’s always a good way to get a ramp in.”Palo-Alto based landscape designer Fran Adams would agree. Adams, who teaches at local colleges and has designed accessible gardens during 20 years in practice, insists that accessible yards need not feel clinical.

“A lot of people think of an accessible garden with this ugly, straight wooden ramp leading up to the front door, and it doesn’t have to look like that,” she said. “You can create something really pretty, and nobody would notice.”

She suggests camouflaging ramps with a perennial flower border or mounds that incorporate a slow incline into a landscape.

Accessibility does not spell boring, Adams said. She designed an intentionally intricate space for a disabled client who was frequently outdoors. “He wanted … a beautiful, complex environment, not just one that was easy to access, but one with a complex system of paths where you don’t see everything at once.”

Adams recommends that everyone consider ease of access when planning a garden.”It’s a good idea when planning a garden to make it accessible as possible for all ages and people who might come to it or live in the house in the future,” she said.

It can also be a smart pre-emptive move. Adams was glad that her own garden had wide paths and lacked steps when she was in a wheelchair for six weeks after a surgery last year.

The same design elements make it easier to age in place, Adams said. Raised beds eliminate bending, while wide paths and solid paving accommodate people who have poor vision or walk with a cane. In the meantime, these features keep pests out of vegetable gardens and make room for wheelbarrows and compost bins.

Advance planning makes it easier to design a garden that is both accessible and artful, she said. With the exception of steps, “good design does turn out to be accessible.”

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<a href="http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=17796tag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=17796Wed, 04 Aug 2010 20:49:57 GMT 00:00″>Opening up the garden

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