Embattled family seeks privacy

Press, 11 February 1986, Page 1

Embattled family seeks privacy

NZPA-AAP Newcastle

Lindy and Michael Chamberlain yesterday pleaded to be left alone with their family. An unidentified friend speaking on Mr Chamberlain’s behalf told AAP, “We are just, here on our own ... only the people who need to be are here with us.”

Mr Chamberlain stood at the door of his home beside the friend but refused to speak.

The Chamberlains are with their three children surrounded by tight security at their neat brick home on the Seventh-day Adventist College campus at Cooranbong, near Newcastle.

Mrs Chamberlain was released from prison in Darwin on Friday after the Northern Territory Government cut short the life sentence she was serving after a guilty verdict on a charge of murdering her nine-week-old daughter, Azaria. She has maintained she did not kill her baby, at

Ayers Rock in August, 1980, saying a dingo was responsible. The couple returned to Cooranbong by car early yesterday morning and dodged waiting reporters.

When Mr Chamberlain answered the door to an AAP reporter the delighted squeals of children could be clearly heard inside the house.

Looking tired and dressed casually, he refused to answer questions but he spoke through a friend.

Speaking from her Ellesmere home last evening, Lindy Chamberlain’s mother-in-law, Mrs Greta Chamberlain, said the family had received “hundreds” of telephone calls, mostly from the news media. “It has been a full-time job,” she said. “My husband, my daughter-in-law and myself have been taking turns to answer the phone.” Mrs Chamberlain said that a report by an Australian newspaper, the

Sydney “Daily Mirror,” that Lindy Chamberlain wanted to live in New Zealand, was false. “Lindy loves Australia, she loves the heat and does not like the cold weather in New Zealand.” But she said Lindy and Michael Chamberlain would visit New Zealand once the inquiry was over. No date had been set for the visit.

“They will come over once legal matters are fixed up and provided they can afford it,” she said. “Lindy did say it would be several months.”

She said she had spoken to her daughter-in-law on Saturday, the day after she was released. “She said she was feeling well.

“I asked her how she slept and she said she had slept for an hour but she had packed so quickly when she left the jail that she got up at 4 a.m. and repacked. “She is a person who packs tidily and it was quite foreign for her to do it so quickly.”