Police handling of evidence in Bourke case a ‘nightmare’

A former crime scene expert has described NSW Police’s flawed preservation of crucial evidence and a remote road crash site at which two Indigenous teenage girls died as ‘a nightmare’.

Cindy Smith (left) and her cousin Mona-Lisa Smith, who died in 1987 on the Mitchell Highway, just outside of Bourke, when a car rolled. An inquest into their deaths has resumed. Picture: Adam Taylor

A former crime scene expert has described NSW Police’s flawed preservation of crucial evidence and a remote road-crash site at which two Indigenous teenage girls died as “a nightmare”.

Testifying at a resumed inquest into the 1987 deaths of cousins Mona Lisa Smith, 16, and Jacinta Rose Smith, 15, ex-policeman John Ludwig said when he arrived at the site outside Bourke, in NSW’s outback, two days after the accident, he did not see police paint markings or traffic cones to show tyre marks or where the crashed car left the road.

“When I got out there, there was nothing there,’’ said the then-member of NSW Police’s Crime Scene Unit (Physical Evidence).

Mr Ludwig was disturbed to find police had placed the crashed ute outdoors at a cotton gin – a key piece of evidence, as it was owned by 40-year-old white man Alexander Ian Grant, who had given the Aboriginal girls a lift on the night of their deaths.

He said keeping evidence in a secure location out of the weather, would normally have been “mandatory practice’’.

“It was just a nightmare,’’ he said, referring to the police’s initially poor handling of important physical evidence and the crash site.

Family members Fiona, June, Kerrie and Dawn Smith marched for Mona Lisa and Jacinta Rose on Monday.

In a dramatic twist, the Smith girls’ cousin, Michael Knight, testified on Friday that another man told him soon after the accident that he had sex with Cindy and Mona at the crash site and bit one of the girl’s ears off. The man was “intoxicated” when he admitted this in a Dubbo pub, Mr Knight said.

Counsel assisting the inquest, Peggy Dwyer SC, said this man had made a statement accusing Mr Knight of falsely implicating him in the girls’ deaths, after the man gave evidence against Mr Knight in a Bourke court case.

Mr Knight said he “had no animosity towards him’’, adding: “I wrote it down (the man’s admission) ­exactly the way he said it.’’

When she died, Mona was partially scalped and had lost an ear. Experts have testified that both girls’ injuries were consistent with them being in a road accident.

Grant, who died around 2017, was charged with culpable driving causing the death of both girls and indecently interfering with Cindy’s body, but was acquitted at his 1990 trial. His defence team convinced the jury that Mona was driving the crashed ute, while the second charge was withdrawn shortly before Grant’s trial.

Another cousin, Carl William Smith, testified he had seen Cindy and Mona before the accident at a Bourke pub, standing by Grant’s ute. He remembers “rousing on them about stranger danger’’.

Around that time, he went to a party along Brewarrina Rd attended by Aboriginal people and an armed white man – whom he took to be Grant. He said: “I felt threatened, in fear of my life, because that (white) man had a gun out there.’’

He reported this to police, but he said they laughed at him because he was drunk.

The inquest continues.