"It haunted her until the day she died." The moment Lindy Chamberlain's mother never forgot. 

“It haunted her until the day she died,” Lindy Chamberlain, now 71, told Anh Do on Wednesday night’s episode of Anh’s Brush with Fame.

She was talking about something that happened in 1982 – two years after her two month old daughter, Azaria, disappeared.

“Mum had to tell them (Aidan and Reagan) that they’d sent me to prison which haunted her until the day she died,” Chamberlain said through tears on the ABC program.

“She said it was the worst thing she ever had to do was tell them when they woke up in the morning.

“She’d never heard a noise come out of a kid like that in her life before and never wanted to hear it again.”

Chamberlain spent three years in prison, serving what was intended to be a life sentence.

“Thankfully she didn’t tell me that until after I came out of prison. That’s not the sort of thing you want to remember….” she said to Do, crying as he listened to her story.

Chamberlain knew she was innocent – yet was dragged through the press as harshly as she was dragged through the courts. Commentators at the time didn’t believe she was a mother ‘properly’ mourning the loss of a newborn, reading her expression as unemotional and cold.

An early report on Lindy Chamberlain. Post continues below. 

As history would later prove, the story Chamberlain told, right from the beginning, was true.

In 1980, Lindy and her husband Michael Chamberlain took their three children on a camping trip to Uluru.

As baby Azaria slept in a tent alongside her brother Reagan, a dingo entered the tent and took Azaria.

Though her body was never found, the jump suit she had been wearing was discovered one week after her disappearance, about 4000 metres from the tent.

Bloodstains were found around the neck.

A substance that some believed to be blood – though the origin was unknown – was also found inside the Chamberlain’s car, leading to the prosecution and conviction of murder. Lindy Chamberlain was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, and Michael was charged as an accessory. He was issued an 18 month suspended sentence.

The discovery of new evidence in early 1986 changed the course of the Chamberlains’ life. A matinee jacket worn by baby Azaria was found partially buried next to a dingo lair near Uluru.

Five days later, Lindy Chamberlain was released from prison.

Over subsequent inquests, it was determined that the substance in the car was not blood.

While in custody, Chamberlain gave birth to her daughter Kahlia.

She spoke to Do about the pain of giving birth, and knowing that immediately afterwards Kahlia would go into foster care.

“I knew the moment she was born they were going to take her off me,” she told Do.

“So every moment of birth I fought it. It was like, ‘‘You keep her inside and she’s yours, the minute she’s out she’s not.'”

For more:

Lindy Chamberlain on realising her son remembered the night his sister was taken by a dingo.

“Unacceptable maternal behaviour”. The distressing parallels between Lindy Chamberlain and Kate McCann.