'I WANT JUSTICE FOR MY SISTER'

She never believed her sibling took her own life - now she's fighting to learn the truth

- Emma Levett.

From the moment she was told her older sister Gwen Grover had died by suicide in October 1983, Sue Cole refused to believe it. Sue knew how much Gwen loved her two young sons and that she wasn’t depressed – and when she heard more about the circumstances of Gwen’s supposed suicide with a shotgun, huge questions arose, throwing her into a lifelong quest for the truth.

“I tossed it around for years with my family, but the police said they had investigated and there was nothing more they could do,” Sue tells Woman’s Day. “I knew if I kicked up a stink while my parents were alive, it would compound their grief, so it was more recently, after they passed, that I started really looking into it.”

The Gold Coast resident already had questions about the method of Gwen’s suicide, which took place in her car, next to a Cairns park. Not only is suicide by shooting highly unusual for women, but Gwen, then a single mum, hated guns and had never used them.

“We’d been brought up to be fearful of guns,” says Sue. “That’s not how she would have done it.”

FOUL PLAY

Gwen was also right-handed and, as Sue would discover, the bullet wound was in her left temple.

Sue was surprised that Ken Soper, Gwen's former boyfriend and a man with a criminal history, wasn't questioned until 17 days after her death, despite not having an alibi. But it was only in 2018, when Sue applied for the police reports, that she realised her suspicions of foul play weren't unfounded.