Michael Chamberlain

Michael Leigh Chamberlain (27 February 1944 – 9 January 2017) was a New Zealand-Australian writer, teacher and pastor falsely implicated in the August 1980 death of his missing daughter Azaria, which was later demonstrated to be the result of a dingo attack while the family was camping near Uluru (then usually called Ayers Rock) in the Northern Territory, Australia. Chamberlain's then-wife Lindy was falsely convicted of the baby's murder in 1982 and he was convicted of being an accessory after the fact. The findings of a 1987 royal commission ultimately exonerated the couple, but not before they were subjected to sensationalist reporting and intense public scrutiny.

Death of Azaria

In August 1980, the Chamberlain family holidayed in Darwin, Northern Territory, where Michael intended to fish for barramundi. On 15 September 1988, the Northern Territory Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously overturned all convictions against Lindy and Michael Chamberlain. The exoneration was based on a rejection of the two key points of the prosecution's case—particularly the alleged fetal haemoglobin evidence—and of bias and invalid assumptions made during the initial trial. Three years later, Chamberlain married Ingrid Bergner and in 1996 they had a daughter named Zahra. That same year he graduated from Avondale College with a Bachelor of Teaching degree, a fully documented book based on his doctoral thesis at the University of Newcastle. In 2012, New Holland Publishers published his fourth book, Heart of Stone, on the eve of the fourth and final inquest into the disappearance of his daughter at Uluru. The coroner declared that a dingo had indeed killed Azaria and apologised to the family for the tragedy and for it taking 32 years to get to the truth. In 2014 the National Museum of Australia acquired Chamberlain's V8 Hatchback Holden Torana. In 2016, Chamberlain was appointed a conjoint professor at the University of Newcastle. He was a conjoint research fellow in the School of Education, Faculty of Humanities, and Social Sciences. and had a farewell service held at the Avondale College's Seventh-day Adventist Church one week later. In popular culture Chamberlain is portrayed by Sam Neill in the 1988 film Evil Angels (released as A Cry in the Dark outside Australia and New Zealand).