Bourke tragedy inquest: Daughter ‘bashed after car crashed’

June Smith, the mother of a 16-year-old Indigenous girl who died hours after accepting a lift from a middle-aged white man, has told an inquest her daughter was brutally bashed, and did not die in a car accident

Mother of Mona Lisa Smith, June Smith.

The mother of a 16-year-old Indigenous girl who died from horrific injuries hours after accepting a lift from a middle-aged white man, told an inquest she believed her daughter had been brutally bashed by the man, and did not die in a car accident.

“In my heart I don’t believe it was a car accident,’’ said June Smith, the still-grieving mother of deceased teenager Mona Lisa Smith. In highly emotive testimony, Ms Smith, who still lives in the NSW outback town of Bourke, near where the accident happened nearly 36 years ago, said losing a child “is the worst thing that could ever happen to you’’.

Along with her cousin Jacinta Rose Smith, Mona was killed after getting into a utility driven by 40-year-old excavator driver Alexander Ian Grant in December 1987. Grant was found drunk and uninjured with the deceased teenagers at the crash site outside Bourke, with his arm across 15-year-old Cindy’s near-naked body, yet he escaped justice.

Ms Smith revealed at a resumed Bourke inquest into the girls’ deaths that her sister Lisa Edwards told her in 2004 she and other Bourke locals had been at the crash site and had seen Grant assault Mona.

“Half of Bourke was out there,’’ claimed Ms Smith.

She said Grant bashed her daughter after mistaking her for another girl who had robbed him: “Lisa said Alexander Grant took some sort of iron tool out of the car and hit Mona over the head with it, three or four times.

“He kept saying, ‘You’re Julie Smith’ … because Julie Smith was supposed to be the one who robbed him.’’

Ms Smith, who wore a T-shirt with the word “Justice” and Mona’s face on it, wept at how some family members had never “sat with me, told me anything (about who was allegedly at the crash site) since the day it ­happened’’.

With her voice breaking, she said: “I couldn’t speak her (Mona’s) name for ages because it used to bring back all the horrible memories of what happened to her.’’

One distressed male lawyer asked to be excused from the Bourke Court House, while NSW State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan said: “We’re all feeling for you.’’

The inquest later heard from biomechanical engineer Andrew McIntosh, who said Cindy and Mona’s injuries were “very consistent’’ with them not wearing seatbelts and being in “a rollover’’ car accident.

Lisa Edwards told the inquest she couldn’t remember making a 2004 statement to police, claiming several men apart from Grant were at the crash site the night the girls died.

Ms Edwards later told police she had been confused about this.

The inquest was previously told that Bourke police held a meeting with local Aboriginal people soon after the 1987 double fatality, but Ms Smith said “there was no such meeting’’.

Rather than being informed by police about Mona’s death, she was taken to Bourke Hospital by her brother, and asked to identify her daughter’s body.

She waited several weeks before police spoke to her. “If they had done the right thing in the first place, we mightn’t be here today,’’ she said of the police ­investigation.

The inquest has exposed flaws in the police investigation, including that Grant’s vehicle was not seized and the steering wheel not tested for fingerprints.

Grant, who died around 2017 and admitted lying to police, was acquitted at his 1990 trial after his lawyers argued that Mona was driving his ute when it crashed.

He was charged with sexually interfering with Cindy’s corpse, but this charge was controversially withdrawn by prosecutors just before his trial.

The inquest will continue on Friday.