Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton
Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton was born Alice Lynne Murchinson in New Zealand. When she was twenty months old her family moved to Australia.
On 17 August 1980, while on a family holiday, Lindy’s daughter, nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain, was taken by a dingo from a camping ground near Ayers Rock (now Uluru). After two inquests and a police raid on her house, Lindy Chamberlain was tried and convicted of the murder of her baby daughter. She was sentenced to life in prison with hard labour. While inside and outside the prison, Lindy and thousands of others fought to clear her name. Lindy’s fourth child Kahlia was born on 17 November 1982 in Darwin Hospital while Lindy was in the custody of Darwin Prison.
In 1986 new evidence was uncovered and Lindy was released from jail. The 1987 Royal Commission into the affair found Lindy innocent and revealed that a jury would not have convicted if the new evidence had been available. In 1988, after forcing a new law through Parliament, Lindy Chamberlain returned to court and this time the criminal convictions were finally quashed by the NT Court of Criminal Appeal.
Lindy and Michael Chamberlain were divorced in June 1991. In February 1992 she met Rick Creighton while on a speaking tour in the USA; they were married later that year. Now happily married, and residing in Australia’s Hunter Valley, Lindy is an entertaining, articulate person who does seminars, lectures and keynote addresses on a variety of topics including how to deal with stress; grief and forgiveness; privacy and the media’s responsibilities in news reporting; lawyers’ responsibilities to seek the truth and be impartial; and prison life what it is really like inside and how it differs from the the public’s perception; finding faith and perspective beyond religion; and divorce, marriage, and step-parenting.
