Stepping forward and addressing the broken family, a tearful Elizabeth Morris of the Northern Territory Coroner’s Office yesterday declared: “The cause of her death was the result of being taken by a dingo.”
Thirty-two years and four coroner’s inquests after the incident occurred, the death of Azaria Chamberlain in the Australian Outback has finally been assigned a definite cause. When news broke of the infant’s disappearance in 1980, the Australian public was outraged, calling foul on the couple’s claims that a dingo had snatched their then 9-week-old daughter from a camp site near Ayer’s Rock, and Lindy Chamberlain (now Chamberlain-Creighton) was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her child. She was released three years later, when police searching for a fallen climber discovered Azaria’s shredded jacket outside a dingo den.