The Dingo “Did” Eat The Baby!

Thirty-two years ago, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton and Michael Chamberlain were camping in the Australian desert, when their 9-week-old daughter Azaria Chamberlain, disappeared from her parents’ tent. Her parents have maintained that this is what happened that night so long ago in the desert, and a coroner has finally concluded on Tuesday, that a dingo, or wild dog, had taken the infant. Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton stated that in 1980 that “she put baby Azaria down for the night in the tent, and went back to the bar-b-que area, when the family heard a ‘growling noise’ and the baby cry. When she ran back to the tent, she saw a dingo dragging her baby off.” In 1981, at the first inquest, the story of the dingo dragging off the baby, was entered as the cause of the missing infant. But in a second inquest in 1982, Lindy was charged with murder and her husband with being an accessory after the fact. She was convicted and served more than three years in prison before that decision was overturned. A third inquest in 1995 left the cause of death open.

The case became famous internationally through the 1988 movie “A Cry in the Dark,” in which Meryl Streep played the mother. At the time, there had been no similar documented dingo attacks, but in recent years the wild dogs (native to Australia)  have been blamed for three fatal attacks on children, and after a children’s jacket was found in a dingo den, few doubt the couple’s story today.  The latest inquest-which the family fought to get- made it official that Azaria was killed in a dingo attack. The new Coroner Elizabeth Morris said she was “satisfied that the evidence is sufficiently adequate, clear, cogent, and exact and that the evidence excludes all other reasonable possibilities.” Michael Chamberlain told reporters, “This has been a terrifying battle, bitter at times, but now some healing and a chance to put our daughter’s spirit to rest.”