How Steven Bradley was found and convicted of Shepparton teen Michelle Buckingham’s murder

Michelle Buckingham’s violent and senseless death was a macabre mystery and a stain on the Shepparton area for more than 30 years – until a journalist and cop started asking questions.

In court, he was described as a dog groomer. In jail, that will have been shortened to “dog”. His given name is Steven Bradley and nine years ago today, he was sentenced to 27 years prison for the murder of a teenage girl near Shepparton in late 1983.

This will be Bradley’s 10th Christmas inside and he faces another 10 before having any chance of parole.

The girl he murdered was named Michelle Buckingham and she was only 16. Her violent and senseless death was a macabre mystery and a stain on the Shepparton area for more than 30 years.

But four men always knew the truth about Michelle. Not just Bradley and his two co-offenders, both eventually named in court alongside him, but the man Bradley once told his dreadful secret.

Dog groomer Steven Bradley was convicted of killing Shepparton teenager Michelle Buckingham.

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 three decades after her body was found.

Michelle Buckingham was a “Shep girl”. She went to Shepparton High but left as soon as she could, at 15, to work in a milk bar, then a department store and finally a supermarket.

She was tall, looking older than the Year 11 schoolgirl she should have been. She lived with her mother, sister and brother, but had moved out of home on Wednesday October 19 to stay temporarily with a friend at the Strayleaves caravan park, where her father also lived. She was dead by that Friday night.

Michelle Buckingham was only 16 when she was murdered.

Her mother had begged her not to leave home until she was more mature but Michelle wanted to move into a share-house and live her own life. Bunking in at the caravan park was strictly temporary but turned out to be fatal.

The night after she left home, October 20, she danced with friends at a Rose Tattoo gig at the Goulburn Valley Hotel.

The next day, a Friday, she was booked to work from 10am to 9pm at Coles but left work around 6.30pm, saying she felt unwell. She dropped into the Victoria Hotel and spoke to a friend before heading off to walk the 3km to the caravan park.

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.

Because she was too young to drive, let alone own a car, she relied on hitching lifts.

Witnesses would later tell police they saw her near the caravan park. They were probably the last to see her alive, apart from the killers.

Michelle vanished that night but no one knew. She wasn’t living with either parent, so each assumed she was with the other or with the friend. Her boss tried calling on Saturday morning when she didn’t arrive at work, but her disappearance fell between the cracks.

A week later, on October 28, she was formally reported missing. Her body was found 10 days after that, on November 7. It was half-hidden in long grass on a gravel road at Kialla East, on Shepparton’s rural outskirts.

The spot where Michelle’s body was found.

She had been stabbed 19 times. After 17 days of exposure to warm weather, animals and insects, the body held no clue for police. They stayed clueless for another 29 years.

The homicide squad of that era had a patchy record with killings that were not simple “domestics.” The Buckingham case was one of a string of other cold cases that had baffled investigators.

In 1983, Shepparton still buzzed with fears and rumours about the double murder of local teenagers Garry Heywood and Abina Madill in 1966. Their bodies, too, had been found after 16 days, abandoned in a bush paddock on the Goulburn River flats near Murchison, past Kialla.

In October 1973, a decade before Michelle Buckingham’s death, teenager Bronwynne Richardson had been abducted and murdered near Albury. Her body was found floating in the Murray.

And in January, 1980, 40-year-old Elaine Jones was killed and thrown in the Murray near a camping spot at Tocumwal. Her husband died of a heart attack when he found her body snagged in the river the next morning.

It would take police nearly 20 years to arrest the killer of Garry Heywood and Abina Madill — Raymond Edmunds, the deviate dubbed “Mr Stinky.” But it would take another generation of detectives 30 years to catch another unknown killer whose crime haunted the district where Michelle Buckingham lived and died.

Raymond Edmunds, dubbed “Mr Stinky” Picture: Supplied

At least the police had one fingerprint to work with in the Madill-Heywood puzzle. They had nothing in the Buckingham case. The truth is it might never have been solved if not for the diligent work of a Shepparton News reporter in 2012.

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 things, sometimes breaking down once impenetrable relationships and fears.

Dozens of tips flowed in. One of them intrigued the seasoned homicide detective Ron Iddles, who agreed to meet a local man discreetly at the Shepparton East football ground.

The mystery man was Norman Gribble. He had a story he had hidden for almost 30 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.

When she later refused to have sex with them, they stabbed her to death in the car at the Pine Lodge Hotel car park, about nine km east of the caravan park. Gribble had even bandaged the man’s cut hand, injured committing the crime.

Life and Crimes with Andrew Rule

The man who confessed to the murder was Steven Bradley, brother of Gribble’s wife. He had subsequently sold his car and left Shepparton for interstate.

Gribble didn’t want to go “on the record” but Iddles persuaded him to make a statement.

When Iddles traced Bradley in Queensland, he was working as a dog groomer. He changed his story several times in many months and was not charged until May 2014.

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, stating he was satisfied it was a “killing carried out jointly” by them with Bradley.

There was not enough formal evidence to assure convictions against Butler and Corrigan, so they walked while their “mate” started a life of fear in prison.

The court heard that most of the evidence was lost in the early 1990s when a police inspector ordered it destroyed on grounds it was a “biological hazard.” Only a handful of crime-scene photographs were kept.

Rocky Iaria was murdered in September 1991.

It wasn’t the only time murder investigations were bungled in Shepparton.

There was the brazen killing of Rocky Iaria, whose body was discovered hidden in someone else’s grave at Pine Lodge cemetery in early 1998, more than six years after he supposedly “ran away” to avoid a second trial over a massive burglary at Bendigo with two hardened local “identities”.

The other scandal was the death of farmer’s wife Kaye King on the family dairy property near Katandra, northeast of Shepparton. The mother-of-four was found battered and bruised and drowned in a shallow “sump” in an old pig pen.

Three of her (now adult) children believe she was murdered but enough police “bought” the story that she’d fallen head first into the water. In truth, the crime scene had been innocently destroyed by neighbours who rushed to help.

There is still a chance that someone, somewhere, knows more than they admit about the deaths of Rocky Iaria and Kaye King. The past could still catch up with their killers, the way it did with Steven Bradley exactly nine years ago.