For 37 years, Dawn Smith has dreamt about what life would be like if her daughter Cindy was still alive.
"I've always wondered what she would have been like today, whether she would have married and had kids," Ms Smith said, her voice wavering.
"You think of all of these things. I miss her very much."
Ms Smith was robbed of the opportunity to see her daughter grow up after the 15-year-old was killed in a car crash in the NSW outback in December 1987, alongside her 16-year-old cousin Mona Lisa Smith.
Evidence indicated the driver, Alexander Grant, sexually interfered with Cindy after her death, a coroner ruled in 2024.
Nearly four decades after the crash, Jacinta Rose "Cindy" Smith's legacy will live on, with the NSW government introducing legislation to close the legal loophole that protected Grant from prosecution over his sexual violence.
A charge of indecently interfering with a corpse was dropped ahead of Grant's 1990 trial due to difficulties with establishing the timing of Cindy's death.
He was then acquitted of driving-related offences and died in July 2017.
A new legal provision, introduced in parliament on Wednesday, aims to ensure offenders who sexually assault someone or indecently interfere with their body after death cannot escape prosecution when the time of death is unknown.
When it is found beyond a reasonable doubt that one of these crimes occurred - but it is unclear which one due to the uncertain timing of a death - a perpetrator will be sentenced for whichever offence has the lesser maximum penalty.
An offender would have previously gone unpunished.
NSW Attorney-General Michael Daley said the reform was a direct response to the inquest and the tireless advocacy of the girls' families.
George Newhouse, the chief executive of the National Justice Project, which represented Cindy's family, said her loved ones had to carry the circumstances of her death in their hearts for decades.
The amended law would mean no other family had to suffer in the same way.
"That's never going to bring back Cindy or Mona ... but at least the family have some legacy for the future to ensure no parent has to go through what they went through," Mr Newhouse told reporters in Sydney on Wednesday.
The girls died when Grant's ute rolled on the Mitchell Highway, between Bourke and Enngonia, in the early hours of December 6, 1987.
Grant had offered them a lift home, but instead "plied" them with alcohol and drove out onto the highway, State Coroner Teresa O'Sullivan concluded.
Ms O'Sullivan found some police officers did their best to investigate the crash, but several failures to collect critical evidence had an "irreparable" effect on the case.
"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 in her findings.
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