Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains the names and images of people who have died. This story contains some confronting details about sexual assault.
Teenage cousins Murrawarri and Kunja girl Mona Lisa (‘Mona’) Smith and Wangkumara girl Jacinta Rose ‘Cindy’ Smith died following a motor vehicle crash near Bourke in 1987.
Their families have waged a decades-long fight for justice, with a coroner last year finding the police investigation into the man driving the car was “manifestly deficient” and impacted by racial bias.
Now, thanks to their advocacy, a legal loophole that allowed the man to avoid prosecution for interfering with Cindy’s body will be closed, nearly 40 years after her death.
Cindy’s family called this “Cindy’s Law”.
The 2024 coronial inquest found 40-year-old non-Indigenous man Alexander Ian Grant was driving the car in which Mona and Cindy were passengers and he was “highly likely” intoxicated.
It heard a witness found him after the accident with his arm draped across Cindy’s near-naked body.
“Horrifyingly, the evidence indicates that Mr Grant sexually interfered with Cindy after she had passed,” State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan found.
Ms O’Sullivan also found “numerous, significant failings” in the police investigation that led to Grant’s acquittal on charges of culpable driving in 1990.
“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 found.
Crucially, Ms O’Sullivan noted police prosectors had dropped the charge against Grant of interfering with Cindy’s body because they couldn’t determine the time at which she died.
With Grant dying in 2017, “the perpetrator escaped justice ‘due to a loophole’,” Cindy’s family told the inquest.
On Wednesday, the New South Wales Parliament introduced a bill that will enable the prosecution of offenders when it is not clear if an act of sexual violence occurred before or after death.
Source: ‘Cindy’s Law’ follows tireless fight by families of Cindy and Mona Smith – ABC News