Dawn Smith was at church the morning she heard there had been a fatal car crash on the lonely stretch of highway outside her home town of Bourke in far west New South Wales.
A cousin came to tell her she needed to go to the hospital to identify a body. It was her beloved daughter, 15-year-old Jacinta “Cindy”.
Cindy was killed in the crash in the early hours of Sunday 6 December 1987, along with her cousin, 16-year-old Mona Lisa Smith. A 40-year-old white man, Alexander Ian Grant, survived.
Grant was found lying beside Cindy – who was partially undressed – with his arm across her body. Grant was very drunk but seemingly unharmed.
For Dawn Smith and her sister-in-law – Mona’s mother, June Smith – that morning was the start of a 36-year struggle to discover the truth about the crash and to seek justice for their girls.
A coronial inquest into their deaths took place late last year, and the coroner handed down her report in April.
The Smith family has not stopped telling the story of their girls, including in a submission to the parliamentary inquiry on missing and murdered Aboriginal women and children, which is due to release its report on Thursday.
For Dawn Smith, now a great-grandmother, the memory of that morning is still raw. She says the police didn’t speak to her that day, or later. She says they never came to officially tell her Cindy had died.
“She was up at the hospital, in the morgue,” she says. “We had to go and identify her. I’ll never get over that.”
Smith says she would have told the police how loved the girls were; how they went everywhere together; how they were best friends with kind hearts who had a bright future.
It was one of many indignities the family say they endured during the police investigation of the crash, an accumulation of disrespect that has left them with anguish and trauma.
One police crash expert told the inquest that of the more than 500 car accidents he had investigated, it was the worst police work he had ever seen.
“[Because] it was two little black girls,” Smith says. “If they were two little white girls it would have been different.”
The coroner, Teresa O’Sullivan, agreed.
In her findings in April, O’Sullivan was deeply critical of multiple police failures. She found that “the existence of racial bias within the NSW Police Force” had been a factor in the investigation.
“The uncomfortable truth, to my mind, is that had two white teenage girls died in the same circumstances, I cannot conceive of there being such a manifestly deficient police investigation into the circumstances of their deaths,” she said.
She found that Grant had been “scoping the Bourke township for young girls to ply with alcohol and to sexually proposition” and that Mona and Cindy had got in his car expecting he would give them a lift, although they did not normally accept such offers from strangers.
O’Sullivan found that Grant’s conduct was “predatory and disgraceful” in sexually interfering with Cindy, who was “close to death” as he assaulted her. The coroner commended the family’s “tireless advocacy” and said she hoped the findings would bring them some long-awaited answers.
Grant died of natural causes in 2017.
Four months on from the findings – nearly four decades since the deaths – there is still unfinished business. The family wants the police held accountable.
‘That’s how her clothes got pulled down’
Two men driving to work near Enngonia were the first to report the crash. The ute’s roof was crushed. Cindy was lying face up on a tarpaulin nearby, her pants pulled down. Grant was next to her, his arm across her chest, passed out but alive. Mona was further away, lying face down.
Both girls were clearly dead, the men told Enngonia police. It looked to them as though the four-wheel drive had come off the road at high speed and rolled down an embankment.
The inquest found that when the police arrived at 5.45am, Grant was awake but “incoherent”, slurring his speech. Police noted that Cindy’s clothes had been almost completely removed. Const Kenneth McKenzie wrote in his notebook, and gave evidence again to the inquest, that when asked who was driving, Grant replied, “I was.”
Grant insisted the girls were just asleep, according to McKenzie’s notes. A second officer, Const Ken Harper, later confirmed that account, and repeated that evidence at the inquest. But after learning that the girls were dead, the witnesses said, Grant changed his story: he claimed Mona had been driving.
Mona did not know how to drive, her family says, let alone how to handle a 4WD.
Later – at the same hospital where Dawn Smith had been summoned to identify her daughter’s body – Grant recorded a blood alcohol reading of 0.159, indicating significant impairment, the inquest found. He continued to claim that Mona had been driving.
In a report to the coroner at the time in anticipation of an inquest, the police declared that Mona had been driving. No inquest was held immediately after Grant was charged and ultimately acquitted of numerous offences but, in their evidence to the 2023 inquest Mckenzie and the lead detective at the time – Det Sgt Peter Ehsman – disagreed on whether Ehsman was told that Grant had initially admitted to being the driver.
Nevertheless the coroner accepted both their accounts, and found “in this regard, there was certainly no evidence or even suggestion of some form of cover-up”.
By the time the crime scene unit was notified – more than 24 hours after the crash – and before the unit’s detectives had visited the site, Enngonia police had towed the vehicle away.
First they left it unsecured outside Enngonia police station and then, for reasons never fully explained, it was towed to an unsecured location outside the Bourke cotton gin.
A crime scene detective, John Ludewig, told the inquest that when he arrived in town and found the car at the cotton gin, he had taken photographs, but was concerned that leaving it open to the elements could destroy crucial evidence. He felt the car should have been locked in a secure shed for further examination.
Ludewig was also able to photograph the crash scene but was troubled that police had not cordoned it off or left markings to indicate where the crash had happened. He said the site was “covered with dust and vehicles, and cars driving over it anyway”.
O’Sullivan noted other failings: police did not keep a record of who entered the scene, or the status of exhibits. They did not take detailed photographs of the bodies and the vehicle in situ. They did not seize and examine the tarpaulin. They did not photograph the debris or the vehicle.
While finding that racial bias “did in fact impact upon the investigation”, O’Sullivan made no findings that the failings were due to overt racial motives of any individual officers, saying only that Ehsman’s evidence “simply cannot be understood without imputing a level of unconscious bias on his part”.
She found it was “very plain” that there was a lack of Indigenous cultural training available to NSW police at the time, and that “the unconscious racial bias” she outlined was “simply representative of the ill informed, and frankly racist social views of many within the Australian community at the relevant time”.
The case reopened
Two days after the crash, detectives interviewed Grant again, who said he had been drunk and Mona was driving. He said he didn’t remember the crash but that afterwards Cindy had been “on her feet”, asking for beer. The tarpaulin had fallen out of the car, he said. Cindy had walked there herself and removed her own clothes, he said.
In January 1988 police charged him with two counts of causing bodily harm, one charge of aiding and abetting an unlicensed driver and drunk driving. Grant had a record of driving offences, including driving under the influence, driving at excessive speed, and driving while disqualified.
In May 1988, before the case went to court, it was revisited by Senior Sgt Raymond Godkin, who told the coroner he had found himself at Enngonia station during the Brewarrina floods and, to pass the time, had started reading the station occurrence pad. Godkin discussed the matter with McKenzie and found they shared suspicions about what had taken place.
Godkin was given permission to reopen the investigation, which incurred some hostility among local police.
He and another officer reinterviewed Grant at Hurstville police station in Sydney, where Grant told them: “A lot of the stuff I told the detectives is not right and some things I said is really bullshit.” He again said Mona had been driving, but claimed he had dragged Cindy out of the car, and “that’s how her clothes got pulled down”.
Godkin sought to re-examine the 4WD. He discovered that the car, which should have been an exhibit in the custody of police, had instead been returned to Grant’s excavation business and then been sold in January 1988.
By the time detectives examined the vehicle, parts had been removed, including the steering wheel. The buyer later told police he had sent the steering wheel to Grant, at his request, the day before detectives visited his workshop.
After these investigations, the original charges were withdrawn and Grant was instead charged with two counts of culpable driving under the influence causing death and one charge of indecently interfering with a dead human body and was committed to stand trial in Bourke. But just before the trial the latter charge was dropped when prosecutors decided there was not enough evidence to determine Cindy’s time of death.
In February 1990 an all-white jury acquitted Grant of the remaining charges, because of the lack of clarity about who had been driving.
O’Sullivan said despite “very extensive efforts to locate the trial transcript of these proceedings, it could not be found”.
‘People think it was 200 years ago’
It is usual practice for the coroner to resume an inquest once a criminal matter is finished. But this did not happen for Cindy and Mona until late 2023, after prolonged lobbying by the families and their legal representatives, the National Justice Project.
The family and their legal team are now considering the next steps, particularly whether to seek redress from NSW police.
The force would not comment directly on the coronial report. In a statement a spokesperson said the findings and recommendations of the coroner were “currently under consideration”.
“The NSWPF is committed to continuing to improve the way its officers engage with, and foster relationships with, the local Indigenous communities,” the statement read.
Sitting in the park in Bourke, watching her great-granddaughter playing, Dawn Smith says the inquest has gone some way to validating everything the family knew to be true.
They knew Grant was driving. They knew he had assaulted Cindy. They knew he had lied, they knew the police had botched the investigation.
“I don’t want an apology because that’d be all lies,” Smith says. “The police have got to be accountable.
“[I want to] make them understand that they didn’t do their job properly. And if they had done the job properly, we wouldn’t be in this situation where we are today, without a better understanding – 36 years is a long time.”
Smith’s granddaughters Cinta Smith-Robins and Verhonda Smith-Robins now find themselves taking on the role of speaking for their families. They only recently learned the full story of what happened to the aunties who were killed before they were born.
“I can’t believe my nan has lived in this much pain for so long,” Verhonda says. “It’s like, how is this real? You sit there and you’re listening to the inquest. I just think: how can you not care? How do you not care about people and their children? They were babies.
“People think it was 200 years ago. Sadly its more common than you think. This is my mother’s sister. This is my aunt. This has happened in our lifetime.”
Smith-Robins, who carries her aunt’s name, was born the year after the cousins died.
“It’s just dragged on, everybody’s grief, for 30-something years. I’ve had my whole life and two children in that time,” she says.
“Aunty Cindy and Aunty Mona are not just some story or something from the past. They were real people, and they had futures, and they’ve left a big hole in our family,” Smith-Robins says.
The family are clear about what they would like to see change.
In their submission to the inquiry, they say coroners should be required to consider and comment upon systemic racism, discrimination and bias where they may have contributed to the death, or investigation of a death, of any First Nations woman or child.
They want law reform so that alleged perpetrators of sexual assault cannot escape prosecution because the precise time of a victim’s death cannot be ascertained.
And they want respectful and culturally safe protocols to be developed for investigating First Nations deaths.
Out on the Enngonia road, the family has placed a sandstone plaque at the site where their girls were killed. It’s adorned with flowers and fairy lights. Two angels are inscribed on either side of a short poem.
Dawn Smith says she has tried to keep herself and her family strong all these years.
“I don’t show my feelings in front of my kids, because it hurts them as much as it hurts me,” she says. “I wait until I get home and when I go to bed at night, I cry and think. Even now.
“I go out to [the] cemetery now and again when I feel down. I go out there and talk to them.”
