(Image Source: Wikimedia Commons)

BY HARUMENDHAH HELMY

ANCHOR LAUREN ZIMA
 

It’s the case that has fascinated Australia for three decades. A fourth inquest has been announced to finally discover what happened the night 9-week-old Azaria Chamberlain disappeared.

Here’s a recap from TVNZ.

“Azaria ... disappeared from her parents' tent ... in August 1980, sparking court cases that saw her mother Lindy Chamberlain sentenced to life in jail in 1982. … The couple were both exonerated by a royal commission in 1987 and subsequently had their convictions quashed.”

Lindy Chamberlain insisted she saw a dingo leaving the tent the night her baby went missing in the Australian outback --a claim many found questionable. The case was so notorious that it inspired the 1988 film, “A Cry in the Dark” starring Meryl Streep, and lent itself to the infamous 90s catchphrase-- “A dingo ate my baby!” (Video: Cannon Films)

The couple was exonerated after Azaria’s jacket was found near a dingo den, but have long worked to clear their names because the baby’s death records still list the cause of death is ‘unknown.’ The Telegraph reports the case is now being reopened as the Chamberlains’ legal team points to more recent attacks.

“The information reportedly includes an account of attacks by dingoes on children at Fraser Island in Queensland, including an incident in 2001 in which two dingoes mauled a 9-year-old boy to death. In another incident in 2007, a four-year-old girl was badly injured after she was bitten by a dingo on the same island.”

The Australian quotes the baby’s father’s about the case’s reopening.

“Mr Chamberlain yesterday said he hoped the latest inquest … would find that a dingo was responsible for the death of Azaria. ‘I am pleasantly surprised and gratified,’ Mr Chamberlain told ABC radio yesterday. ‘It has been 31 years and now I just hope this will be the ultimate verdict which we've been looking for.’”

A reporter for The Herald Sun has covered the story since the baby’s disappearance and explains why, even 30 years later, the family is still pushing to put the record straight.

“The Chamberlains were, and presumably still are, sticklers for getting things right. Lindy, the daughter of a Seventh Day Adventist pastor and then the wife of one, is devoutly religious, and fastidious to a fault; Michael even more so. One or both of them would have been pressing for the law to put things right.”
 

The case has been called the longest legal saga in Australia’s history. The new inquest will officially open on February 24.