it sounds like something out of a horror movie a wild dog sneaks into a tent snatches a nine week old baby and disappears into the inky desert night impossible some said dingos don't interact with humans but Witnesses reported otherwise a dingo had approached a few campers moments before the incident in question it even took a few scraps of food so case closed right hardly if a dingo was the culprit how do you explain the 22 fetal blood splatter stains in the family's nearby car that question was at the center of a case that fiercely divided
Australia and gave new meaning to the phrase rush to judgment [Music] I'm Chris thanks for watching True Crime Recaps the dingo ate my baby is a statement so memorable and wild it's become baked into our popular culture from Seinfeld to The Simpsons the Absurd and terrifying premise has become a punch line but the true life events behind the unforgettable tagline are anything but funny for the Chamberlain family that sentence kicked off a nightmare with no end in sight on August 17 1980 the Chamberlain family was camping near the famous Ayers Rock in Australia's Outback the
family consisted of Father Michael mother Lindy and their three children nine week old Azaria and her brothers six-year-old Aiden and four-year-old Reagan the night started as a typical outing under the stars the chamberlains and a few other families gathered to enjoy a bonfire and a cookout and Lindy put her two youngest to bed in the tent that evening shortly before eight then minutes later appears scream rang out Lindy ran to check on the kids that's when she swore she caught a glimpse of a wild dingo running out of their tent she Dove inside and frantically
searched for baby Azaria turning over pillows sleeping bags and blankets but the little girl was gone when she emerged she was horribly shaken she yelled the dingo's got my baby and with that one of her fellow campers raced into the Black Knight with a flashlight the camper in question was Murray hayby and he wasn't just a concerned bystander he also happened to be an amateur animal tracker years later he remembered finding heavy dingo tracks in the dirt the tracks LED away from the Chamberlain's tent and into the black foreboding night to his eye the Deep
set tracks meant one of two things the dingo was either very large or he was carrying something heavy in its mouth as he followed the tracks he came across a spot where the dirt was even more Disturbed it looked like something had been dropped the Market Left Behind looked like some kind of material pattern in the dirt like a piece of knitted or woven clothing had been there he also spotted something wet something he thought looked a lot like blood eventually the tracks met the pavement and the dingo's trail went cold and that wasn't the
only sign that Lindy's Claim about a dingo taking her baby might be true less than hours before his area disappeared Murray took pictures of a hungry dingo sniffing around his campsite but when he tried to tell the local authorities what he discovered they didn't seem to want to hear it and they didn't want to see his pictures back at Camp it was pandemonium Lindy and her husband Michael couldn't wrap their minds around what had just happened one shrill scream pierced the night then their baby was gone although articles of her bloodied clothing were eventually found
her body never was and the Chamberlain family's ordeal was just beginning from the start the northern territory's police seemed to have it out for Lindy when news leaked that animal hairs were found in the Chamberlain's tent a hair expert volunteered to help police ID them but said nope we don't need your help it didn't matter what he might find because they already knew the mother was guilty which was strange because the first inquest supported Lindy's version of events a dingo really did take her baby out of the tent at night but it sounded too wild
to believe in fact it sounded like a crazed mother murdered her own child and concocted a story about a wild dog to get herself off the hook there was just the tiny matter of evidence namely that there wasn't any no body no Witnesses no DNA but there was a piece of her clothing about a week after her disappearance azaria's bloody jumpsuit was found a little less than three miles away from the tent most of the blood and tearing was around the neck area at first they figured it was caused by the Animal's teeth but when
authorities sent the jumpsuit to a British forensics expert he described a different scenario he didn't think an animal caused the damage scissors did also there was no dingo saliva on the outfit but Lindy had an explanation for that she claimed the baby was wearing another piece of clothing over it something called a matinee jacket which is basically a button-up cardigan but they claimed she was lying a case was being built against Lindy Chamberlain but the Northern Territories police were missing their Smoking Gun it arrived in spectacular fashion When They seized the Chamberlain family car a
forensics examiner with only three months experience found 22 instances of fetal hemoglobin in the Chamberlain's banana yellow Holden Tarana almost all of it was splattered on the driver's side seat and dash what is fetal hemoglobin I'm glad you asked in layman's terms it's the protein that carries oxygen from the mother to the baby in the womb even after birth it sticks around in the baby's red blood cells for about six months and Azaria was only nine weeks old finding blood that was specific to the babies painted a picture of a brutal murder in the family
car while the other campers were frantically searching for the baby the police claimed Lindy hid the body and came up with a story to cover it up like a bloody Twist on the dog ate my homework excuse and the jury ate it up in 1982 Lindy was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison with hard labor she was pregnant at the time and gave birth to a baby girl in prison Michael Chamberlain was charged as an accessory after the fact and sentenced to 18 months probation and he got off easy Lindy Chamberlain's
trial was one of the most publicized in Australian history the public was divided dingo or murder team dingo people believed Lindy was innocent in suffering a massive Injustice her fervent supporters included the people who were at the campground on the night in question after all Murray habe had seen the dingo tracks with his own eyes he had noted the indentation of the object placed in the dirt and then picked up again he'd seen the fresh blood Left Behind Witnesses had stood next to Lindy Chamberlain when they heard her bone-chilling screams they refused to believe it
was all an act and then there were those who decided straight away long before the trial that the chamberlains were Monsters the family may have been devout Seventh-Day Adventists and Michael himself may have been a pastor but beneath the pious exterior lay a terrible Unthinkable Secret they had sacrificed their own child out there in the wilderness and made the desert her grave regardless of what the public believed the courts had spoken Lindy Chamberlain was guilty of killing her infant daughter in Cold Blood and that might have been the end of the story were it not
for an unfortunate hiker and the Teeny article of clothing found 90 meters from his corpse in 1986 English hiker David Brett lost his footing climbing over of all things a network of dingo layers and fell to his death but it would take a team of rescue workers eight days of searching the rough terrain before his body was found and during the search they were shocked to come across a baby's matinee coat and this was huge and as it turned out they knew exactly what they'd found the team leader had also joined the search for baby
Azaria in the days following her disappearance he knew the tattered article in front of him was an essential part of Lindy's story and its absence had been weaponized to discredit her defense he carefully collected the jacket and the rest as they say is history Lindy hadn't lied about the infant's clothing more importantly dingo saliva was found on the matinee jacket just as she had said all along but what about the fetal hemoglobin found in the family car wasn't that proof of a brutal murder well no and you're not going to believe the reason why it
was eventually discovered that the forensics tests the ones performed by The Examiner with only three months experience were faulty the false read was caused by copper oxide dust a type of dust that was common in mining towns like Mount Isa where the chamberlains lived what do you want to bet that Lindy would never have believed that she would owe her freedom to that dust and her baby's matinee jacket now that they had new evidence supporting an animal attack she was released from jail and her and Michael's convictions were overturned Lindy was paid 1.3 million dollars
for false imprisonment and in 2012 32 years after her daughter's disappearance an amended death certificate was released the formal cause of death attack by dingo if you're wondering where their apology was so were they in 2017 the Australian government declared that it was considered during giving an apology to Lindy and Michael Chamberlain unfortunately Michael died from complications of acute leukemia before receiving any such apology so why were investigators so hell-bent on finding Lindy guilty of murdering her infant daughter after all none of the campers Witnesses searches or animal trackers seem to have any doubt that
a dingo really did take baby Azaria what was it that set certain members of the northern territory's police on a mission to incriminate a young mother of three well tourism is a big business maybe homicidal and gruesome were messages Australia didn't want to send to vacationing families with full Pockets or maybe Michael and Lindy were judged out of the gate for their relatively calm demeanors when a parent doesn't react as we expect with sufficient emotion or outrage or hysteria we assume the very worst whatever the reason for the rush to judgment it's clear the Chamberlain
family endured not one tragedy but countless tragedies the loss of a child the public outrage the false imprisonment of a mother the destruction of a marriage and an infant death turned punchline K is so tragic that even the best parts are overshadowed by loss the discovery of azaria's matinee jacket with the evidence that exonerated her parents sadly it came at the cost of David Brett's life one final brutal reminder that the red domes of Ayers Rock beautiful as they may be are indifferent to even our most desperate cries in the dark or otherwise and that's
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