The murder of Michelle Buckingham

life and crimes. We're going to look at an old case that was committed Waiverack in the eighties and sat around for close to thirty years before it was solved. And it's a remarkable case because the betting was it would never be solved. And that is the case of Michelle Buckingham Shepherdon. But that reminds us of some other cases, cold cases where no one has actually been brought to justice and certainly no one has been convicted, and we

run through a few of those as well. That's nine years ago last month since a man was sentenced to twenty seven years prison for the murder of a teenage girl near Sheperton back in late nineteen eighty three. In court, this fellow, Stephen Bradley, was described as a dog groomer, but I'm tipping that in jail that will have been shortened to dog, and he is white. Even in jail what he did in company with two other people is

regarded as a dog act. This was Stephen Bradley's tenth Christmas inside and he faces another ten before having any chance of parole. That is, if there is a god. The girl he murdered was named Michelle Buckingham, and she was only sixteen. She was only just out of year ten. She wasn't really old enough to leave school the standards of most parents, they would want their child to stay at school longer than year ten, and she did not.

Her violent and senseless death was a macab mystery and a stain on the Shepherdon area for more than thirty years. But there's always a butt. Four men always knew the truth about Michelle and who'd killed her. Not just Bradley and his two co offenders, who were both eventually named in court alongside him, but the man that Bradley once

told a dreadful secret. That man was his brother in law, whose conscience finally outweighed his fear when he was moved by a photograph of the murdered girl's still grieving mother in a local newspaper, the Sheperdon News, three decades after her body was found. Long story short. Michelle Buckingham sixteen was a sheep girl. She went to sheper and High, but she left as soon as she could at fifteen years old, to work in a milk bar, then a

department store, and finally a supermarket. She was tall, looked a bit older than the year eleven school girl that she should have been. She lived with her mother, sister, and brother, but she'd moved out of home on Wednesday, October the nineteenth to stay temporarily with a friend at a local caravan park, the Stray Leaves Caravan Park, where her father was estrange from her mother also lived. That

was a Wednesday. She was dead by Friday night. Her mother had begged her not to leave home until she was more mature, but Michelee knew better. She wanted to move into a sharehouse and live her own life. Bunking in at the caravan park was strictly temporary, but it turned out to be fatal Because obviously, some bad people knew she was there. The night after she left home missus.

Thursday October the twentieth, she danced with friends at a rose tattoo gig at a big pub called the Golden Valley Hotel, very big, famous hotel in shep particularly in the past. The next day, a Friday, she was booked to work from ten am to nine pm at the local Coals, but she left work around six thirty pm, saying she felt unwell. Now we don't really know what that was, but anyway, she apparently dropped into the Victoria Hotel, another pub, and spoke to a friend before heading off

to walk the three kilometers to the caravan park. She's two years too young to drive, no carp she's left home, she's walking, She's vulnerable, the friend would recall. She seemed unhappy, not her usual bubbly self. Whether that had any bearing on what happened next is hard to say. Witnesses would later tell police they saw her near the caravan park. They were probably the last to see her alive apart

from the men who killed her. Michelle vanished that night, but no one knew she wasn't living with either parents, so each assumed she was with the other or with a friend. Her boss tried calling on Saturday morning from the supermarket when she didn't arrive at work, but her disappearance fell between the cracks. A week later, October twenty eighth,

she was formally reported missing. Her body was not found until ten days after that, on November seventh, So you can imagine at that time of year in central Victoria what that meant. Her body was half hidden in long grass on a gravel road at Kayala East, on the far out edge of Shepperdon's rural outskirts. She'd been stabbed nineteen times after seventeen days of exposure to warm weather, animals and insects. The body held no clue for police.

They stayed clueless for another twenty nine years. The homicide squad of that era had apatchy record with killings that were not simple domestics. The Buckingham case was one of a string of other cold cases that had baffled investigators, sometimes for years. In nineteen eighty three, Sheperdon still buzzed with fears and rumors about the double murder of local teenagers Gary Haywood and had been a medil back in

sixty six. Their bodies too, had been found after sixteen days abandoned in a bush paddock on the Golden River Flats near Murchison, which has past Kayla a lot of parallels quite similar. In October nineteen seventy three, a decade before Michelle Buckingham's death, a teenager called Bromwin Richardson had been abducted and murdered near Aubrey. Her body was found floating in the murray fairly quickly, and in January nineteen eighty forty year old Eline Jones was killed and thrown

in the murray near a camping spot at Tokemall. Her husband died of a heart attack when he found her bleeding body snagged in the river the next morning. It would take police nearly twenty years to arrest the killer of Gary Haywood, and had been a medill, that being Raymond Edmonds, the deviate the media dubbed mister Stinkey, But it would take another generation of detected thirty years to catch another unknown killer whose crime haunted the district where

poor Michelle Buckingham lived and died. At least the police had one fingerprint to work with in the Medil Haywood puzzle. They had absolutely nothing in the Buckingham case. The truth is it might never have been solved if not for the diligent work of a Shepherdon News reporter in two thousand twelve. This is twenty nine years after Michele's death. She's been written about by a young reporter who was

at that stage under the age of twenty nine. She had not even been born when Michele Buckingham was murdered. A five day blitz of stories and photographs, re examining every aspect of the case, was designed to arouse memories and maybe consciences, time changes, thinks, sometimes breaking down once

impenetrable relationships, and fears. Dozens of tips flowed in. One of them intrigued the seasoned homicide detective Ron Iddles, a name we hear quite a lot in our podcasts Iddles agreed to meet a local man discreetly at the Shepherdon East football ground. The mystery man was Norman Gribble. He had a story he had hidden for almost thirty years.

He told the detective that the day after Michelle was murdered, his brother in law had told him that he and two others had picked her up at the caravan park in his car. That's in Gribble's car. When she later refused to have sex with the men, they stabbed her to death in the car at the Pine Lodge Hotel car park, about nine kilometers east of the caravan park where she was picked up Gribble. This is Gribble being

the man who's telling on Idol's this terrible story. Gribble said he'd even bandaged the killer's cut hand injured committing the crime. When I say killer, one of three killers, only one conviction. Note the man who confessed the murder,

of course, was Stephen Bradley, brother of Gribble's wife. He had subsequently sold his car back in eighty three and left Sheperdon for interstate, and he very rarely came back to shep Gribble at first didn't want to go on the record, but Idyle's persuaded him to make a statement. When Eddles traced Bradley in Queensland, he was working as a dog groomer. He changed his story several times in many months, and he was not charged until May twenty fourteen.

This is relatively recently in terms of a very old cold case. The two men named in court as co offenders Bradley's associates, Rodney Butler and Trevor Corrigan, swore they weren't involved, but Supreme Court Judge Robert Osborn rejected their evidence outright, stating he was satisfied it was a quote killing carried out jointly unquote by them with Bradley. There was not enough formal evidence to assure convictions against Butler and Corrigan, so they walked while their so called mate

started a life of fear and loathing in prison. The court heard that most of the evidence was lost in the early nineteen nineties when a police inspector ordered it destroyed on grounds it was a quote biological hazard go figure. Only a handful of crime scene photographs were kept. That's andy. It wasn't the only time that murder investigations were bungled in Sheperdon. It was a bit of a black hole

for some motives. There was the brazen killing of Rocky Arrear, whose body was discovered hidden in someone else's grave at Pine Lodge Cemetery in early nineteen ninety eight, more than six years after Rocky supposedly ran away to avoid a second trial over a massive burglary of Bendigo with two hardened local identities from Shep. The other scandal in shepherd An Area that was never really resolved was the death of a farmer's wife called Kay King on the family

dairy property near Catandra, which is northeast of Shep. The mother of four was found battered and bruised and drowned in a shallow sump in an old pigpen. People often say she went into a well, but this sump was a It looked like a well on top. It was a hole maybe a meter by a meter, but it just went down a few feet or say a met or too deep, and it collected the water from an

old pigpen when it rained. Three of her now adult children believe she was murdered, but enough police back then in ninety eight bought the story that she'd fallen headfirst into the water. In truth, that crime scene had been innocently destroyed by neighbors who rushed to help. They didn't know what they were doing, they thought they were helping. There is still a chance that someone somewhere knows more than they admit about the deaths of Rocky Area and

Kay King. The past could still catch up with their killers the way it did with Stephen Bradley nine years ago this summer. This case, of course, will for many listeners bring up one of the most notorious cases in Australian history, and that is the Easy Street murders of nineteen seventy seven, and that happened six years before. It also involved two young women from the country, but they were living at this stage in Melbourne and Collingwood. They

were renting a house together in Easy Street, Collingwood. As listeners will know, they were called the Two sus They were Susan Bartlett and Susanne Armstrong. And Susan Bartlett was a teacher, had been teaching up at Broadford. Armstrong had traveled the world and come home with a little boy

called Gregory. They were old friends from when they went to school together at Euroa High School, which is just across the country a short drive, would you believe, from where Michelle Buckingham was found at Kayla, not that far across. The Easy Street case has always been notorious, but it has become extremely topical since last September when Victoria Police announced something that had been a very tightly held secret, and that was they had been observing a particular man

in Greece. Now, this man is a man with a dual citizenship because his parents were Greek migrants back in the fifties. He had dual citizenship and probably two passports. Whatever. And the story of this man, whose name is Perry Korumblas. He's real Greek name is slightly longer, but we'll call him Perry. Perry Krumbliss was a young man who lived in Collingwood with his parents, a few blocks away from

Easy Straight, as did many other people. The fact he lived nearby does not make him a natural suspect or anything of the kind, but that's where he lived. We don't want to bag. Perry was a relatively harmless young fellow, it would appear. And it turns out that a few days after the murders, after the bodies were found in the hot summer of nineteen seventy seven, a young Collingwood

policeman pulled him up driving around. Now there'll be arjibaji about why a seventeen year old was driving a car, but anyway he was, and he was pulled over, possibly like a lot of Mediterranean young many had a heavy growth of whiskers and probably looked older than he was. And the young policeman said, we'll step out of the car sun and let's look in the boot. And the policeman was Itel So later became a very famous homicide detective.

At that stage was just a big, flat foot uniform copper who had come down from the bush and joined the police force. And he did the right thing. They opened the boot and he looked in there looking for stolen goods or a weapon or whatever. And guess what he finds. He finds a knife in a leather sheath. That's a sheath knife as we used to call them, or a hunting knife as often called a sharp knife. Fairly knew no signs really have been sharpened or not

worn at all. And Itoles removed the knife and he handed it into his superiors, and so it ended up at the crime department, you would think, and with the what was then known as the homicide squad, which was a fairly understaffed squad, and they examined it and they found that there was a little bit of blood inside the sheath. It wasn't covert in blood. There was a

little bit of blood. Now we must be fair here and say it's not that unusual for a sheath knife to have some signs of blood, especially back in that era in the seventies, we had in Melbourne a lot of people who'd come from rural Greece and rural Italy and rural Middle East, all sorts of places, and they were keen on slaughtering their own lamb and their own goats.

It was a real thing back in the day. They would have little paddocks around Thomastown and out the other end of Coburg and Preston and you'd see half a dozen lambs there or three goats or something, and a lot of people would slaughter their own meat. In fact, a lot of those people started their working life in Australia at abbatars because you could get the work. It was dirty, it was a little bit dangerous, and it was unpleasant, but you could get the jobs and you

could often get some cheap meat. So the fact that this young fellow had a knife with some blood on it in itself doesn't indicate any sort of guilt necessarily. But the police were interested in this fellow and they took him into to be questioned, and I'm told he was questioned robustly, as people were in those days, and Apparently he stuck to his answer, and his answer may well be the truth. Let's assume for the moment that it was the truth, because we don't know any better.

He said to them something that actually has a sort of an internal logic. He said, no, no, I'd pick this knife up. I found it on the railway line underneath the footbridge that goes from the west side of Punt Road over the railway line towards Victoria Park, the football ground, and it looks to me, he must have told them as if it had been dropped from the railway bridge by someone perhaps fleeing the murdency, and that he'd spied it sitting there, this nice new knife, and

he looked down, saw it and felt, beauty, I'll get it. Well, I would have done that when I was seventeen. I'd go down and walk out in the tracks and get the knife. Probably don't now, And he tells them that story. Now it be true, and it certainly is a story that has a lot to commend it. It is logical, and the police after a while, they obviously nineteen seventy seven, early seventy seven, the police bought his story because subsequently, many months later, when there was an inquest into the

death of the two young women. Although his name Perry Crumblus, although his name was on a list of sort of minor witnesses, he didn't actually come to court. He didn't attend. He was a no show year on it, and we won't explore that too deeply. So he didn't front for court, and the police didn't seem to care much of the council assisting the coroner, and the coroner himself did not seem to care that this one person out of twenty wasn't there. His absence was noted, but nothing, no significance

was attached to it. This is how it sat for more than forty years. Easy Street was just one of the great mysteries until officially, at least last September, on a Saturday morning, the police announced that they'd arrested a man in Rome Airport, and this, of course was his Perry Crumblas. And it turns out that you know, Perry's name was on a list, a long, long, long list of people who've been spoken to back in seventy seven.

There was a one hundred and thirty odd of them, whatever one hundred and forty A lot of people more than half of them are still alive. I think ninety odd is still alive, and more as a duty and a chore than anything else, the police had gone around knocking on doors, finding people and saying, oh, sir, you know blah blah, could you please lick this swab or whatever, and getting DNA samples because the murder scene there was DNA. There was fluids body fluids at the murder scene which

provided DNA samples for the police to test against. It would appear that's what it seems like. Now we're not going to go into what happened in the meantime. Clearly Pericorumblus and one hundred plus others ninety plus others have been spoken to, and at some point after that he went to Greece. Now again, I wouldn't draw anything adverse

against that his family had returned to Greece. His parents, many many Greek migrants, having achieved a certain age retirement age particularly return to Greece because they can go back to a family property that is very cheap, or buy something very cheaply, often inherit it, and they can retain

their Australian pension. And rural Greece particularly is full of ex Australian and Canadian Greeks who's asking about how the foot's going or how the ice hockey is and you know, do your driver a hold in the home and all that because they used to drive taxies in Melbourne or whatever. So Greece is a place that has a big wide the aspra of migrants who many of them have gone home, and many of them they visit back and forth regularly.

If you sit on a beach in Greece long enough, you'll hear Australian accents, and it is Greek's come home to see grandma or auntie or whatever it might be. And so, long story short, the likely prosecution case against Perry Krumbler's he's probably going to raise the fact that he went back to Greece. But the defense, of course would raise the fact that a lot of people do.

Why shouldn't he He liked his dear old mum and he wanted to go home so she could cook him, you know, eggplant and mussaka and all that good stuff. So it's going to be an intriguing case. Why do we bring this up, Well, it's just another example of how after decades, the long arm of the law reached out and tapped somebody on the shoulder when they must have believed or hoped that it was all long gone

and all behind them. In the case of Perry Karumblas, we're not suggesting that there's a murder behind him, but of course he was questioned about it back in the day, so it would be an unpleasant scenario for him just being questioned back in nineteen seventy seven. The difference, of course, with the Bradley Michelle Buckingham case is that when the police came looking, they tapped the shoulder of the man against whom they successfully ran a prosecution. That is not

the case with Perry Karumblas. He will get his day in court and he's going to be very ably defended by one of the best criminal defense lawyers in Australia, Bill doug and that is a very good thing because we would hate to see an innocent man go down call a technicality. Thanks for listening.