Michael Chamberlain, the Australian man whose daughter’s tragic death in 1980 led to a notorious murder trial that inspired the 1988 Meryl Streep movie “A Cry in the Dark,” died Monday. He was 72.
Chamberlain, who was born in New Zealand but became a pastor in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Tasmania during the 1960s, died of acute leukemia, according to SkyNews.
He was vacationing in the Australian Outback with his then-wife Lindy when their nine-week-old daughter Azaria was snatched from a tent and killed.
The couple were later convicted, Lindy for murder and Michael as an accessory to the crime. She served more than three years of a life sentence; he served an 18-month suspended sentence.
Both were later exonerated by a special government commission in 1987 and a 2012 ruling found that a wild dog known as a dingo was responsible for the baby’s death.
The couple split up in 1990.
Streep earned an Oscar nomination playing Lindy in director Fred Schepisi’s “A Cry in the Dark,” which co-starred Sam Neill as Michael.