How masterful interrogation, SMS helped solve 30-year-old cold case of Michelle Buckingham’s murder

Shepparton teenager Michelle Buckingham’s brutal killer thought he’d gotten away with it for more than 30 years. One text message and a masterful interrogation by Australia’s best detective would finally crack the cold case.

For years, the rumours percolated around Shepparton.

A death as brutal and callous as that of teenager Michelle Buckingham must have been the work of bikies, word went. Or the local weirdo, Punchy, who seemed a likely sort.

But truth remained elusive for 30 years until, spurred by coverage in the local paper of her family’s torment, legendary cold case investigator Ron Iddles sent the text message that finally brought Michelle’s killer to justice.

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CRIMES THAT KEEP IDDLES AWAKE AT NIGHT

The text from the former Victorian Homicide squad detective led to a clandestine meeting with a local man at a football field, where he revealed the darkest of family secrets: His brother-in-law Steven James Bradley had confessed to the murder the morning after Michelle disappeared from the regional town, about 180km northeast of Melbourne, in October 1983.

Michelle Buckingham’s murder remained unsolved for decades.

Steven Bradley, a Queensland dog groomer, was eventually jailed for the murder. Picture: Nicole Garmston

“He said I carried the secret for 30 years and it wasn’t until I looked at the front page of the paper (the local Shepparton News) … and I thought, I can’t keep this secret any longer,” Iddles recalls of his meeting with Norman Gribble, Bradley’s brother-in-law.

Blonde store assistant Michelle was last seen wearing a Mickey Mouse jumper and blue denim jeans.

She left the local Coles where she worked part time at about 7.30pm on Friday October 21, dropping into the nearby Victoria Hotel where she spoke to friends for a few minutes.

Michelle was seen several minutes later talking to a girl, before walking east along Fryers St.

She was headed to see her mother. It was the last time Michelle was seen alive.

Mr Gribble would later give evidence that Bradley, then 21, told him he and two boys aged 16 had killed Michelle in a pub car park.

“The guys picked up Michelle from a caravan park and drove her to the Pine Lodge Pub. They put the hard word on her. She wouldn’t put out so they continued. They stabbed her,” he said.

“One said to the other. ‘We all have to do it, that way we can’t point fingers.”

Police were convinced Michelle had been picked up in a green early 1970s Holden HQ sedan on the night she went missing.

Iddles with Steven Bradley after his arrest. Picture: Channel 7

Her body was bundled into the car boot then left in long grass next to a wheat field beside the quiet Violet Town Rd in Kialla East, about 16km from Shepparton.

It lay for a fortnight before being discovered by a local hay carter.

Bradley drove the group back to Shepparton after dumping Michelle. The next morning he went to see Mr Gribble, bleeding from his hand and in a state.

Mr Gribble wrapped up the bleeding cut then drove him to Waranga Basin with a few beers.

It was there that Bradley confessed: “I’ve killed someone.”

He tried to downplay his role and move blame onto the others involved, asserting that one of them had stabbed Michelle first and forced him to do the same. He even claimed he faked stabbing her.

But pathologists gave evidence at Bradley’s trial that the injury pattern suggested there was only one attacker who inflicted the wounds while others held her.

A jury found Bradley guilty in 2015.

When Bradley was sentenced by Supreme Court Justice Robert Osborn to 27 years in jail with a minimum of 21 years, he praised the work of the seasoned detective.

Part-time Coles worker Michelle was dumped by the side of a rural road.

Michelle Buckingham and her mother Elvira Buckingham a few weeks before she was killed.

“When Detective Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles interviewed you in Brisbane in 2013, he put to you the account that he obtained from Norman Gribble. He explored aspects of the information in what can only be called a masterful interrogation,” the judge said in sentencing.

“You admitted that elements of that account were in your recurrent nightmares and then purported to progressively recollect limited elements of the facts.

“You subsequently told a workmate that it was as if Ron Iddles was inside your head and that he knew your nightmares.”

While the killer’s unmasking may have brought closure for Michelle’s family, it came too late for local man Gregory Gleadhill, who spent much of his life as a pariah in the regional centre after being accused of the murder.

The spot where Michelle’s body was found by a local farmer.

The mentally challenged man, known as Punchy, had been charged with the murder in 1988 after volunteering a fanciful story about what happened. He’d given a florid account to the coroner’s inquest into Michelle’s death, claiming he saw her stabbed by a drug-crazed madman and later mutilated on a bed in a nearby house before being dumped. Forensics experts could find no evidence Michelle was taken to the house he mentioned or to back his story.

The charges against him were thrown out at a preliminary hearing when it became clear his story was nonsense.

Gleadhill endured beatings and torment for the rest of his life, which ended just six weeks before the real killer was charged.

Ron Iddles: The Good Cop airs on Foxtel Thursdays, 7.30pm on Crime + Investigation and on Demand.

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