A crime so evil it brought police to tears – yet the man who did it walked free: Now, 37 years later, a final insult for two Australian girls whose last moments were of unspeakable horror

Two teenage cousins ​​who died at the hands of a drunken sex predator have now suffered a final, devastating betrayal, more than 30 years after their killer went free.

The bodies of Mona Lisa and Jacinta Rose ‘Cindy’ Smith were found on a deserted Outback highway in the early hours of December 6, 1987, after they made the fatal mistake of striking up a conversation with Alexander Ian Grant, a white man who …spent the day roaming the streets of Bourke, NSW, looking for Indigenous girls drinking and propositioning sexually.

The NSW State Coroner found last year that Mona Lisa, 16, died in a crash caused by Grant, who then molested 15-year-old Cindy as she lay dead in the road. Grant was never held accountable for his sickening crimes due to racism in the police force.

In an inquest that shocked Australia, coroner Teresa O’Sullivan ruled that Grant had committed an act of necrophilia against Cindy on the side of the highway after the fatal accident from which he miraculously emerged unscathed.

Despite the heinous nature of his crimes and the evidence against him, racial prejudice ensured that he was acquitted by an all-white jury at his 1990 trial and that he died of old age in a retirement home many years later.

“Instead of giving them a lift home as he should have done, Mr Grant went with them,” said coroner O’Sullivan, who ruled that the then 40-year-old had engaged in “predatory and disgraceful behavior” with Cindy. by the police. along the road.

However, the NSW Police Commissioner has now handed the girls’ families the ultimate criticism by controversially refusing to follow the coroner’s recommendations.

Commissioner Karen Webb rejected coroner O’Sullivan’s recommendation to develop guidelines for assessing investigations, despite findings that there had been an ‘inexplicably’ flawed police investigation. Her response was that the recommendation regarding guidelines was “not supported.”

“I can advise you that the existing guidance used by the NSWPF State Crime Command Unsolved Homicide Team already covers the situation for assessing suspicious deaths,” Commissioner Webb said.

The National Justice Project, which had lobbied for the inquest 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 NSW Police Force and it appears it will continue,” she said.

The coroner’s findings included a report that ‘a white man who allegedly forced Aboriginal children to perform sexual acts was seen as irrelevant to white citizens’ concerns about law and order’ in Bourke in 1987.

“The uncomfortable truth, in my view, is that if two white teenage girls had died under the same circumstances… I cannot imagine that there would be such a patently flawed police investigation into the circumstances of their deaths,” the coroner said.

They were farm workers who came across the crash site on the Mitchell Highway between Bourke and Enngonia, in north-west NSW, just before dawn.

Mona Lisa’s corpse had been partially scalped and lay in the mud, meters away from the wreckage of Grant’s Toyota Hilux business.

Cindy was placed on a tarp, her pants pulled down to her ankles and her top pushed up to her neck so her breasts were exposed.

Grant slept with his arm draped over Cindy’s bare chest.

After farmhand Shane Baty left to drive the 30km to Enngonia to alert police, he left his brother to guard the bodies.

But ten minutes after Baty arrived at the police station, his brother showed up and said Grant had a gun and threatened to shoot him.

When police arrived on the scene about an hour later, they discovered that Cindy’s body was now almost completely naked, with her legs spread apart. The scene was so gruesome that a senior officer broke down in tears as he told the inquest.

Grant was disheveled, clearly drunk and smelled of alcohol. He was completely unharmed.

He told one of the officers that he had been driving the ute. Moments later, when he realized both girls were dead, he said it had been Mona Lisa 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… from multiple internal injuries.”

These included massive internal bleeding, a ruptured bladder and liver, a fractured pelvis and lung injury and extensive blood loss.

The morning of the accident, Grant returned a blood alcohol reading that estimated he had 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 as a digger in Bourke, had prowled the town the night before on a booze-fuelled hunt for Aboriginal girls to get drunk and sexually assaulted.

On the night of December 5, the digger was drinking in four Bourke pubs.

The girls got into the car around 8pm and at 10pm Grant bought takeaway alcohol from Bourke’s Riverview Hotel.

What happened next and how they ended up 63 km away is unclear.

The incident was so poorly investigated that a group of traumatized relatives of the girls visited the crime scene to retrieve Mona Lisa’s partial ear, which had been torn off in the accident, from the side of the road.

Mr Grant, who was 40 years old at the time, was charged with indecent interference with Cindy’s corpse and guilty driving causing the death of both girls.

But the sex charge was dropped on the eve of his trial in 1990 and he was acquitted of the driving charge by an all-white jury.

After the acquittal, Grant fled the city and later died at the age of 70 in a nursing home in New South Wales in 2018.

The inquest revealed details of the bizarre story Grant told police that it was Cindy who had taken off her clothes.

He claimed she somehow propositioned him after suffering serious injuries in the crash.

During the inquest, which lasted 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 announced her findings in April this year, including that Grant had sexually assaulted a deceased Cindy, and that racial prejudice in country NSW had hampered justice for the families of both girls.

“Horribly, the evidence indicates that he became sexually involved with Cindy after she died,” the coroner said.

“I am satisfied that there was some form of sexual interference by Cindy by touching Cindy’s breast or genital area after she passed away.”

The findings noted that: ‘There was a view in the Aboriginal community that there was one law for blacks and one law for whites.

“There is evidence that Aboriginal views on social and potentially serious criminal problems in the city were not taken seriously.”

The coroner has recommended that the NSW Police Commissioner ‘develop guidelines for the assessment of investigations relating to deaths that are the subject of a request for advice from the Attorney General of NSW to the Commissioner of Police of NSW, where the Attorney-General general is considering a request for investigation’. holding a new or further investigation into the death(s).

She said guidelines should include the methodology of the assessment, the transparency of the assessment process and the involvement of any experts (including independent experts where necessary); and consultation with the family of the deceased.

“In formulating the guidelines, the standard procedures applicable to the assessment of murder investigations should be taken into account and applied where appropriate,” Coroner O’Sullivan said.

Professor George Newhouse, CEO of the National Justice Project, criticized Commissioner Webb’s response to the recommendations.

“It is shameful that the commissioner is now ignoring these recommendations in such an arrogant and dismissive manner,” he said.

“The Commissioner is sadly mistaken to suggest that the current NSW Police Guidelines are sufficient at all.

“These guidelines have failed the Smith family, and so many other First Nations families, for half a century.

“To suggest otherwise is laughable and perpetuates what many people see as the racist culture of the NSW Police Force.”