The 'Dingo-Baby' Case That Inspired A 'Seinfeld' Joke Reopened

If you've seen the "Seinfeld" episode "The Stranded," then you know the "dingo" bit.

Elaine Benes, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is at a party where a woman is prattling on about how she can't find her fiancee, eventually calling him "the poor baby." Looking mildly annoyed, Elaine quips in her most stereotypical of stereotypical Aussie accents, "Maybe the dingo ate your baby."

Taken randomly, it's a pretty funny moment. Still, anyone who had seen the 1988 true-crime drama "A Cry in the Dark" probably smirked knowingly.

Meryl Streep leaps from a tent at one point and howls - again, approximating an Aussie - "The dingo's got my baby!" when her daughter goes missing from her tent. Both exclamations - "Seinfeld" obviously more removed than Streep's "A Cry In The Dark" performance - have become almost memes through the years - the geek in me notes also that Oz's band during his stint on "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" was named Dingos Ate My Baby - but they're based on the very real, strange case of Lindy Chamberlain. That case has just recently made some headway toward closure.

Chamberlain is an Australian woman who was convicted of murder following her nine-week-old baby's 1980 disappearance. She was eventually cleared, but the case to date hasn't yet been solved. People.com reports that a coroner's inquest may confirm horribly true what's been a somewhat misunderstood pop-culture joke: wild dogs really did steal her daughter, Azaria.

"I . . . hope that this will give a final finding which closes the inquest into my daughter's death, which so far has been standing open and unfinished," Lindy told The Australian Friday following a hearing.

Testimony by Lindy - who has since the incident remarried and is now Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton - and her ex-husband and Azaria's father, Michael Chamberlain, have focused on the two having a health fear of dingos and dingos having a confirmed reputation of having killed at least three children in Australia's wilderness.

Lindy has maintained always that when her family was camping near Ayer's Rock in the Australian outback, she saw a dingo leave the family's tent, her baby in its mouth. Witnesses claimed that she actually slit the baby's throat, hid it inside a large camera case and proclaiming in front of other campers that the dingo had taken her baby.

She was sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labor and her husband received an 18-month suspended sentence as an accessory, but the convictions were overruled in 1987 after a jacket belonging to Azaria had been found inside a dingo lair.

"I ... hope that this will give a final finding which closes the inquest into my daughter's death, which so far has been standing open and unfinished," Lindy, who since remarried and is now known as Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, said after the hearing Friday, according to The Australiannewspaper.