A woman dying from cancer has ticked off a disturbing item off her bucket list after it had haunted her for 42 years.
The woman was sexually abused by her uncle when she was a child and vowed to report him to the police after she was given just weeks to live.
It was one of her dying wishes but she passed away before he was finally punished for the crime, News.com.au reports.
The woman's mum, Kaye, has told of her daughter's devastating story and how she would have been happy with the outcome after bravely giving a statement to police.
The daughter told her mum about the abuse when she was 19, but didn't go to the police, Kaye told a new podcast by Australia's Victoria Police called Unspeakable.
Kaye said her daughter, whose name wasn't revealed, broke the news to her after returning from an overseas trip, but didn't want to do anything about it at the time.
She also didn't want her maternal grandmother to find out about the abuse.
Kaye said: "She’d been overseas and she came back and she rang me one night, it was a Saturday night, and told me about it. She said ‘Oh mum, you’re not going to like what I’ve got to tell you'.
“As soon as she said it I believed her and I said ‘what do you want to do about it’ and she said ‘I don’t want to do anything at the moment, I want you to know about it, I don’t want to do anything about it’.
“She said she didn’t want granny to know, that’s my mum.”
The mum even tried to report the crime herself, but the police told her there was nothing they could do.
Kaye said: "In those days there really was no support from anybody, nowhere to go.
"I’ve never felt so alone in my whole life and I went through a marriage breakup. This was just awful. I didn’t know where to go or who to turn to."
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Things changed, however, when the daughter was diagnosed with cancer and given just weeks to live.
She wrote a bucket list and listed reporting her uncle as a top priority.
Detective Leading Senior Constable Christine Robinson took a videotaped statement from the victim.
She said: "She gave me some indication of her illness, that she didn’t have much time left. Her reporting this was on her bucket list.
"It had affected her for the last 42 years of her life and she needed to report it before she passed away."
The daughter was soon admitted to hospital as her condition deteriorated and gave another videotaped statement in case she died before a trial.
Detective Robinson added: “Her doing that was such a relief. She felt that finally it was a weight off her shoulders. She told her story, put it in someone else’s hands to investigate and from that point it moved very fast."
Police arrested and charged her uncle, and obtained a victim impact statement from his niece just before she died.
She never got to see her uncle plead guilty in court.
Due to the passage of time, old legislation was used and he was given a suspended sentence of five months and was put on a sex offenders registry.
Kaye said her daughter would have been "blown away" by the result.
She said: "She was hoping for a good result. She said ‘It’s fine mum, I can die now knowing he’s going on the sex offenders list’. I was pretty confident we would but she was sure we’d get the outcome we did."
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