Crime scene photos failing to match witness accounts. A fatal weapon that was never tested. A violent ex-partner with a criminal past. Destroyed or missing police notebooks. And at the centre of it all, a young mother whose unexpected death was summarily ruled by authorities to be a suicide.

These are just some of the dark but incongruous elements surrounding the demise of Gwen Grover, a 32-year-old mother-of-two found dead with a single gunshot wound in a car on the side of a Cairns road in October 1983.

Know the news with the 7NEWS app: Download today

A coronial inquest, held 38 years after her death, backed initial police beliefs at the time that her death was a suicide and she had ended it all with the rifle owned by her ex — and found in the car with her.

But now new evidence and major discrepancies in the initial police investigation into her death — including Queensland police’s failure to interview the first witness at the scene for almost four decades — could lead to a new coronial inquiry into just how the “generous, fun-loving” woman really died.

And the 7NEWS investigative team behind the smash-hit Lady Vanishes podcast is chronicling that fight for answers with new weekly series Shot In The Dark.

Grover’s sudden death left behind two young boys. Her youngest son, David, eventually took his own life in 2020.

But Grover’s sister Sue Cole, who is part of the family’s fight for a new coronial inquiry, didn’t believe the suicide ruling at all.

“David used to tell me the story about how he sat on the steps, waiting for Gwen to come and pick him up,” Cole told 7NEWS. “And she never came. And there’s only one reason Gwen would never come for her boys.

“And that’s because someone had killed her.”

A strange scene from the start

By Cole’s own account, Grover married her husband Duncan Grover after becoming pregnant as a 16-year-old in the northeast NSW town of Boggabri.

“She became pregnant with Duncan Grover at a very young age,” Cole said.

The young family moved to the far north Queensland city of Cairns.

Then, after 16 years and the birth of a second son, the marriage ended in acrimony in 1980 when Grover found her husband in bed with her best friend. She took her boys back to Boggabri before returning to Cairns two years later, where the boys’ father had stayed on with his new partner.

It was back in the far north that she began a relationship with another man, Ken Soper.

After six months that relationship also broke down.

This latest break-up came with an extra heartache, with Cole saying Grover was forced to move into a “dingy” flat.

Cole said her sister did her best to deal with the situation, scrubbing the flat relentlessly to make it suitable for her boys to settle into with her.

“The boys were staying at the father’s that night so that she could get the flat — this dirty, disgusting flat — clean enough for them to come and sleep in the next day,” Cole told 7NEWS. “That’s not the actions of someone that’s planning to kill herself.”

Authorities didn’t see it that way, however, and the 2021 coronial inquest found the mother-of-two had overcome a lifelong hatred of guns to grab a rifle from her ex’s house, drive to a remote spot, get drunk and end her life with a single gunshot.

“She was overwhelmed by the circumstances of her life,” coroner Nerida Wilson told the inquest in Cairns.

That’s despite other discrepancies in her seemingly lonely demise.

For starters, the bullet wound was in her left temple, despite her being right-handed.

And her body was discovered by a witness in a completely different position to what police crime scene photos indicate.

Passerby Craig Lock found Grover in her Chrysler Galant on Lake Street, about 100m down the road from where he lived in the north of Cairns. He said the driver’s side window was still open.

But in order to see Grover, she had to be sitting up. He even recalls asking if she was okay ... only to discover she wasn’t.

“I think I’d have remembered her lying down, but she wasn’t, she wasn’t, she was sitting up in the seat,” he told 7NEWS.

Yet original investigators never spoke to him about it. In fact, that interview wouldn’t happen for nearly 40 years.

Then there’s the matter of the man whose home Grover took the weapon from, her ex-boyfriend Soper. He didn’t have an alibi when Grover’s body was found days after their break-up. Yet it wasn’t until 17 days after her death that police interviewed him.

Ex-partner with a dark past

Soper, who initially told authorities he owned the gun before changing his story, was regarded as a pillar of the Cairns community before he died in a motorbike crash in 2021.

He was never considered a suspect at the time of Grover’s death.

“I thought his previous life would have been central to the investigation,” said retired Queensland police officer Gerry Thornton, who is helping Grover’s family in their fight for justice and a second coronial probe.

7NEWS can now reveal that previous life paints a grim picture.

A year before Grover’s death, Soper was convicted of child sex abuse.

His former wife Pamela attested to his dark side, describing him as “incredibly violent”.

“He was a horrible man ... he once put a rifle in my mouth,” she told cold-case investigators before the 2021 inquest into Grover’s death. “He could fool everybody and get away with everything and anything.”

However her interview was not included in the report handed to Coroner Wilson, who ultimately ruled Grover’s death a suicide.

Sister Sue Cole and her family are still fighting for a new coronial inquiry, a bid backed by Queensland opposition leader David Crisafulli, who has called on the state’s attorney-general to meet her.

“I still love Gwen as much today as I did the day she died in 1983. She still means as much to me — that’s the impact that she had on my life,” Cole told 7NEWS. “I will do anything, anything I can to see the truth come out and to try and get justice for Gwen.”

For more on the case of Gwen Grover, subscribe to the Shot in the Dark podcast.