Two teenage cousins who died at the hands of a drunken sexual predator have now suffered a final, devastating betrayal more than three decades after their killer walked free.
The bodies of Mona Lisa and Jacinta Rose ‘Cindy’ Smith were found on a desolate Outback road in the early hours of December 6, 1987, after they made the fatal mistake of getting into a ute with Alexander Ian Grant, a man white I had spent the day roaming the streets of Bourke, New South Wales, looking for indigenous girls to drink and proposition.
Last year, the New South Wales state coroner found that 16-year-old Mona Lisa died in an accident caused by Grant, who then sexually abused 15-year-old Cindy as she lay dead on the road. Grant was never held responsible for his disgusting crimes due to police racism.
In an inquest that shocked Australia, coroner Teresa O’Sullivan ruled that Grant had committed an act of necrophilia with Cindy on the side of the road after the fatal crash from which he miraculously emerged unharmed.
Despite the repulsive nature of his crimes and the evidence against him, racial prejudice meant he was acquitted by an all-white jury at his 1990 trial and died of old age in a nursing home many years later.
“Instead of taking them home as he should have done, Mr Grant left with them,” Coroner O’Sullivan said, ruling that the then 40-year-old had engaged in “predatory and disgraceful conduct” with Cindy over the roadside.
However, the NSW Police Commissioner has now given the girls’ families the biggest snub by controversially refusing to follow the coroner’s recommendations.
Commissioner Karen Webb rejected Coroner O’Sullivan’s recommendation to develop guidelines for the review of investigations, even though an “inexplicably” poor police investigation had been found to have been carried out. Their response was to say that the guideline recommendation was “not supported.”
Jacinta Rose ‘Cindy’ Smith was sexually abused by Alexander Ian Grant shortly after she died from massive internal injuries caused by the drunken and lascivious digger’s road accident.
The coroner found that Cindy and Mona Lisa Smith (above) died after being picked up by a drunk Grant.
“I can advise that existing guidelines used by the NSWPF State Crime Command’s Unsolved Homicide Team already cover the situation for reviewing suspicious deaths,” Commissioner Webb said.
The National Justice Project, which had pushed for the inquiry on behalf of the Smith families, reported that Mona Lisa’s sister, Fiona, said the commissioner’s response did not surprise her family.
“There is a long history of racism in the New South Wales police and it looks set to continue,” he said.
The coroner’s findings included a report that “a white person allegedly forcing Aboriginal children to perform sexual acts was not considered relevant to white citizens’ concerns about law and order” in Bourke in 1987.
“The inconvenient truth, in my opinion, is that if two white teenage girls had died in the same circumstances… I cannot conceive that there would be such a manifestly flawed police investigation into the circumstances of their deaths,” the coroner said.
Farmworkers stumbled upon the crash site shortly before dawn on the Mitchell Highway between Bourke and Enngonia in north-west New South Wales.
Mona Lisa’s body was partially scalped and lay on the ground meters from the wreckage of Grant’s Toyota Hilux van.
Cindy was lying on a tarp, with her pants pulled down to her ankles and her blouse pulled up to her neck so that her breasts were exposed.
Grant was asleep with his arm draped over Cindy’s bare chest.
Alexander Grant’s ute, in which he roamed the streets of Bourke looking for young indigenous people to drink and proposition, after the accident that killed Mona Lisa and Cindy Smith.
After the accident: The highway crime scene that police failed to properly investigate, leaving it up to indigenous relatives to find Mona Lisa’s torn off ear on the side of the road.
After laborer Shane Baty set off to drive the 30 kilometers to Enngonia to alert the police, he left his brother in charge of guarding the bodies.
But ten minutes after Baty arrived at the police station, his brother showed up, saying Grant had a gun and was threatening to shoot him.
When police arrived at the scene about an hour later, they found that Cindy’s body was now almost completely naked with her legs spread. The scene was so horrific that a senior officer broke down in tears recounting it during the investigation.
Grant was disheveled, obviously intoxicated and smelled of alcohol. He was completely unharmed.
He told one of the officers he had been driving the ute. Moments later, realizing that both girls were dead, he said it was Mona Lisa who was behind the wheel.
Coroner O’Sullivan would find that the girls had suffered “non-survivable injuries”.
‘Mona… from multiple internal injuries, including head and lung injuries, and extensive blood loss. Cindy… due to multiple internal injuries.
These included massive internal bleeding, bladder and liver rupture, pelvic fracture and lung injuries and extensive blood loss.
Cindy and Mona Lisa died on a road 63 kilometers from their hometown of Bourke, in north-west New South Wales, after accepting a white man’s ride.
The stretch of road near Enngonia where the fatal accident occurred in December 1987.
On the morning of the accident, Grant provided a blood alcohol reading that he estimated would have been between 0.2 and 0.3 at the time of the accident. He was not arrested or charged.
Details emerged of how Grant, who worked in Bourke as an excavator, had prowled the town the previous night in an alcohol-fueled search for Aboriginal girls to get drunk and sexually assault.
On the night of December 5, the digger had been drinking in four pubs in Bourke.
The girls got into the car around 8pm and at 10pm, Grant bought takeaway alcohol from Bourke’s Riverview Hotel.
It is unclear what happened next and how they ended up 63 kilometers away.
The incident was so poorly investigated that it took a group of the girls’ traumatized relatives to visit the crime scene to recover Mona Lisa’s partial ear, torn off in the accident, from the roadside.
Grant, then 40, was charged with indecently interfering with Cindy’s corpse and culpable driving, causing the death of both girls.
But the sex charge was dropped on the eve of his trial in 1990, and an all-white jury acquitted him of the driving charges.
After the acquittal, Grant fled the city and later died aged 70 in a nursing home in New South Wales in 2018.
Mona Lisa Smith’s sister, Fiona, left, with her mother, June, Cindy’s sister, Kerrie, and her mother, Dawn, said of the commissioner’s response: “There is a long history of racism in police New South Wales and it seems to be continuing’
The inquest heard details of the strange story Grant had told police: it was Cindy who took off her clothes.
He claimed that she somehow propositioned him after he suffered serious injuries in the accident.
During the investigation, which took place over several days, including what would have been Mona Lisa Smith’s 52nd birthday on November 29 last year, a veteran police officer broke down in tears.
Coroner O’Sullivan delivered his findings in April this year, which included that Grant had sexually abused a deceased Cindy and that racial prejudice in country New South Wales had interfered with justice being awarded to the families of both girls.
“Horribly, the evidence indicates that he sexually interfered with Cindy after she died,” the coroner said.
“I am convinced that there was some type of sexual interference on Cindy’s part by touching his chest or genital area after his death.”
The findings noted: ‘In the Aboriginal community there was a view that there was one law for black people and one law for white people.
“There is evidence that Aboriginal views were not taken seriously about potentially serious social and criminal problems in the city.”
The coroner recommended that the New South Wales Police Commissioner “develop guidelines for the review of investigations relating to deaths that are the subject of a request for advice from the New South Wales Attorney General to the Commissioner of the New South Wales Police Force.” South, where the Attorney General is considering a request for a new or further investigation into the death(s).
He said the guidelines should include the methodology of the review, transparency of the review process, participation of any experts (including independent experts as necessary); and consult with the family of the deceased.
“In formulating the guidelines, standard operating procedures applicable to the review of homicide investigations should be considered and applied as appropriate,” Coroner O’Sullivan said.
After the accident, a passer-by observed Mona Lisa’s partially scalped body lying on the ground meters from the wreckage of the ute.
Professor George Newhouse, executive director of the National Justice Project, criticized Commissioner Webb’s response to the recommendations.
“It is shameful that the commissioner ignores these recommendations in such an arrogant and disdainful manner,” he said.
‘The commissioner is woefully wrong to suggest that current NSW Police guidance is anything but adequate.
‘These guidelines have failed the Smith family, as well as… so many other First Nations families for half a century.
“To suggest otherwise is ridiculous and perpetuates what many people see as the racist culture of the New South Wales Police.”