
“It haunted her until the day she died,” Lindy Chamberlain, now 71, told Anh Do on Wednesday night’s episode of Anh’s Brush with Fame.
She was talking about something that happened in 1982 – two years after her two month old daughter, Azaria, disappeared.
“Mum had to tell them (Aidan and Reagan) that they’d sent me to prison which haunted her until the day she died,” Chamberlain said through tears on the ABC program.
“She said it was the worst thing she ever had to do was tell them when they woke up in the morning.
“She’d never heard a noise come out of a kid like that in her life before and never wanted to hear it again.”
Chamberlain spent three years in prison, serving what was intended to be a life sentence.
“Thankfully she didn’t tell me that until after I came out of prison. That’s not the sort of thing you want to remember….” she said to Do, crying as he listened to her story.
Chamberlain knew she was innocent – yet was dragged through the press as harshly as she was dragged through the courts. Commentators at the time didn’t believe she was a mother ‘properly’ mourning the loss of a newborn, reading her expression as unemotional and cold.
An early report on Lindy Chamberlain. Post continues below.
As history would later prove, the story Chamberlain told, right from the beginning, was true.
In 1980, Lindy and her husband Michael Chamberlain took their three children on a camping trip to Uluru.