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Speaker 1: The Buckingham case was one of a string of other

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Speaker 1: cold cases that have baffled investigators, sometimes for years. Her

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Speaker 1: violent and senseless death was a macab mystery and a

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Speaker 1: stain on the Shepherdon area for more than thirty years.

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Speaker 1: But there's always a but four men always knew the truth.

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Speaker 1: It would take another generation of detectives thirty years to

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Speaker 1: catch another unknown killer whose crime haunted the district where

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Speaker 1: poor Michelle Buckingham lived and died. I'm Andrew Rule his

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Speaker 1: life and crimes. We're going to look at an old

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Speaker 1: case that was committed Waiverack in the eighties and sat

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Speaker 1: around for close to thirty years before it was solved.

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Speaker 1: And it's a remarkable case because the betting was it

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Speaker 1: would never be solved. And that is the case of

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Speaker 1: Michelle Buckingham Shepherdon. But that reminds us of some other cases,

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Speaker 1: cold cases where no one has actually been brought to

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Speaker 1: justice and certainly no one has been convicted, and we

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Speaker 1: run through a few of those as well. That's nine

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Speaker 1: years ago last month since a man was sentenced to

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Speaker 1: twenty seven years prison for the murder of a teenage

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Speaker 1: girl near Sheperton back in late nineteen eighty three. In court,

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Speaker 1: this fellow, Stephen Bradley, was described as a dog groomer,

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Speaker 1: but I'm tipping that in jail that will have been

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Speaker 1: shortened to dog, and he is white. Even in jail

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Speaker 1: what he did in company with two other people is

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Speaker 1: regarded as a dog act. This was Stephen Bradley's tenth

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Speaker 1: Christmas inside and he faces another ten before having any

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Speaker 1: chance of parole. That is, if there is a god.

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Speaker 1: The girl he murdered was named Michelle Buckingham, and she

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Speaker 1: was only sixteen. She was only just out of year ten.

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Speaker 1: She wasn't really old enough to leave school the standards

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Speaker 1: of most parents, they would want their child to stay

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Speaker 1: at school longer than year ten, and she did not.

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Speaker 1: Her violent and senseless death was a macab mystery and

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Speaker 1: a stain on the Shepherdon area for more than thirty years.

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Speaker 1: But there's always a butt. Four men always knew the

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Speaker 1: truth about Michelle and who'd killed her. Not just Bradley

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Speaker 1: and his two co offenders, who were both eventually named

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Speaker 1: in court alongside him, but the man that Bradley once

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Speaker 1: told a dreadful secret. That man was his brother in law,

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Speaker 1: whose conscience finally outweighed his fear when he was moved

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Speaker 1: by a photograph of the murdered girl's still grieving mother

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Speaker 1: in a local newspaper, the Sheperdon News, three decades after

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Speaker 1: her body was found. Long story short. Michelle Buckingham sixteen

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Speaker 1: was a sheep girl. She went to sheper and High,

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Speaker 1: but she left as soon as she could at fifteen

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Speaker 1: years old, to work in a milk bar, then a

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Speaker 1: department store, and finally a supermarket. She was tall, looked

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Speaker 1: a bit older than the year eleven school girl that

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Speaker 1: she should have been. She lived with her mother, sister,

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Speaker 1: and brother, but she'd moved out of home on Wednesday,

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Speaker 1: October the nineteenth to stay temporarily with a friend at

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Speaker 1: a local caravan park, the Stray Leaves Caravan Park, where

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Speaker 1: her father was estrange from her mother also lived. That

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Speaker 1: was a Wednesday. She was dead by Friday night. Her

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Speaker 1: mother had begged her not to leave home until she

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Speaker 1: was more mature, but Michelee knew better. She wanted to

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Speaker 1: move into a sharehouse and live her own life. Bunking

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Speaker 1: in at the caravan park was strictly temporary, but it

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Speaker 1: turned out to be fatal Because obviously, some bad people

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Speaker 1: knew she was there. The night after she left home missus.

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Speaker 1: Thursday October the twentieth, she danced with friends at a

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Speaker 1: rose tattoo gig at a big pub called the Golden

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Speaker 1: Valley Hotel, very big, famous hotel in shep particularly in

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Speaker 1: the past. The next day, a Friday, she was booked

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Speaker 1: to work from ten am to nine pm at the

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Speaker 1: local Coals, but she left work around six thirty pm,

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Speaker 1: saying she felt unwell. Now we don't really know what

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Speaker 1: that was, but anyway, she apparently dropped into the Victoria Hotel,

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Speaker 1: another pub, and spoke to a friend before heading off

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Speaker 1: to walk the three kilometers to the caravan park. She's

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Speaker 1: two years too young to drive, no carp she's left home,

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Speaker 1: she's walking, She's vulnerable, the friend would recall. She seemed unhappy,

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Speaker 1: not her usual bubbly self. Whether that had any bearing

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Speaker 1: on what happened next is hard to say. Witnesses would

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Speaker 1: later tell police they saw her near the caravan park.

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Speaker 1: They were probably the last to see her alive apart

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Speaker 1: from the men who killed her. Michelle vanished that night,

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Speaker 1: but no one knew she wasn't living with either parents,

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Speaker 1: so each assumed she was with the other or with

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Speaker 1: a friend. Her boss tried calling on Saturday morning from

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Speaker 1: the supermarket when she didn't arrive at work, but her

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Speaker 1: disappearance fell between the cracks. A week later, October twenty eighth,

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Speaker 1: she was formally reported missing. Her body was not found

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Speaker 1: until ten days after that, on November seventh, So you

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Speaker 1: can imagine at that time of year in central Victoria

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Speaker 1: what that meant. Her body was half hidden in long

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Speaker 1: grass on a gravel road at Kayala East, on the

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Speaker 1: far out edge of Shepperdon's rural outskirts. She'd been stabbed

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Speaker 1: nineteen times after seventeen days of exposure to warm weather,

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Speaker 1: animals and insects. The body held no clue for police.

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Speaker 1: They stayed clueless for another twenty nine years. The homicide

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Speaker 1: squad of that era had apatchy record with killings that

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Speaker 1: were not simple domestics. The Buckingham case was one of

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Speaker 1: a string of other cold cases that had baffled investigators,

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Speaker 1: sometimes for years. In nineteen eighty three, Sheperdon still buzzed

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Speaker 1: with fears and rumors about the double murder of local

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Speaker 1: teenagers Gary Haywood and had been a medil back in

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Speaker 1: sixty six. Their bodies too, had been found after sixteen

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Speaker 1: days abandoned in a bush paddock on the Golden River

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Speaker 1: Flats near Murchison, which has past Kayla a lot of

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Speaker 1: parallels quite similar. In October nineteen seventy three, a decade

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Speaker 1: before Michelle Buckingham's death, a teenager called Bromwin Richardson had

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Speaker 1: been abducted and murdered near Aubrey. Her body was found

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Speaker 1: floating in the murray fairly quickly, and in January nineteen

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Speaker 1: eighty forty year old Eline Jones was killed and thrown

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Speaker 1: in the murray near a camping spot at Tokemall. Her

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Speaker 1: husband died of a heart attack when he found her

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Speaker 1: bleeding body snagged in the river the next morning. It

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Speaker 1: would take police nearly twenty years to arrest the killer

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Speaker 1: of Gary Haywood, and had been a medill, that being

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Speaker 1: Raymond Edmonds, the deviate the media dubbed mister Stinkey, But

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Speaker 1: it would take another generation of detected thirty years to

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Speaker 1: catch another unknown killer whose crime haunted the district where

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Speaker 1: poor Michelle Buckingham lived and died. At least the police

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Speaker 1: had one fingerprint to work with in the Medil Haywood puzzle.

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Speaker 1: They had absolutely nothing in the Buckingham case. The truth

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Speaker 1: is it might never have been solved if not for

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Speaker 1: the diligent work of a Shepherdon News reporter in two

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Speaker 1: thousand twelve. This is twenty nine years after Michele's death.

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Speaker 1: She's been written about by a young reporter who was

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Speaker 1: at that stage under the age of twenty nine. She

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Speaker 1: had not even been born when Michele Buckingham was murdered.

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Speaker 1: A five day blitz of stories and photographs, re examining

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Speaker 1: every aspect of the case, was designed to arouse memories

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Speaker 1: and maybe consciences, time changes, thinks, sometimes breaking down once

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Speaker 1: impenetrable relationships, and fears. Dozens of tips flowed in. One

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Speaker 1: of them intrigued the seasoned homicide detective Ron Iddles, a

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Speaker 1: name we hear quite a lot in our podcasts Iddles

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Speaker 1: agreed to meet a local man discreetly at the Shepherdon

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Speaker 1: East football ground. The mystery man was Norman Gribble. He

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Speaker 1: had a story he had hidden for almost thirty years.

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Speaker 1: He told the detective that the day after Michelle was murdered,

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Speaker 1: his brother in law had told him that he and

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Speaker 1: two others had picked her up at the caravan park

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Speaker 1: in his car. That's in Gribble's car. When she later

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Speaker 1: refused to have sex with the men, they stabbed her

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Speaker 1: to death in the car at the Pine Lodge Hotel

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Speaker 1: car park, about nine kilometers east of the caravan park

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Speaker 1: where she was picked up Gribble. This is Gribble being

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Speaker 1: the man who's telling on Idol's this terrible story. Gribble

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Speaker 1: said he'd even bandaged the killer's cut hand injured committing

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Speaker 1: the crime. When I say killer, one of three killers,

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Speaker 1: only one conviction. Note the man who confessed the murder,

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Speaker 1: of course, was Stephen Bradley, brother of Gribble's wife. He

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Speaker 1: had subsequently sold his car back in eighty three and

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Speaker 1: left Sheperdon for interstate, and he very rarely came back

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Speaker 1: to shep Gribble at first didn't want to go on

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Speaker 1: the record, but Idyle's persuaded him to make a statement.

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Speaker 1: When Eddles traced Bradley in Queensland, he was working as

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Speaker 1: a dog groomer. He changed his story several times in

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Speaker 1: many months, and he was not charged until May twenty fourteen.

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Speaker 1: This is relatively recently in terms of a very old

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Speaker 1: cold case. The two men named in court as co

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Speaker 1: offenders Bradley's associates, Rodney Butler and Trevor Corrigan, swore they

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Speaker 1: weren't involved, but Supreme Court Judge Robert Osborn rejected their

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Speaker 1: evidence outright, stating he was satisfied it was a quote

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Speaker 1: killing carried out jointly unquote by them with Bradley. There

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Speaker 1: was not enough formal evidence to assure convictions against Butler

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Speaker 1: and Corrigan, so they walked while their so called mate

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Speaker 1: started a life of fear and loathing in prison. The

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Speaker 1: court heard that most of the evidence was lost in

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Speaker 1: the early nineteen nineties when a police inspector ordered it

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Speaker 1: destroyed on grounds it was a quote biological hazard go figure.

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Speaker 1: Only a handful of crime scene photographs were kept. That's andy.

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Speaker 1: It wasn't the only time that murder investigations were bungled

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Speaker 1: in Sheperdon. It was a bit of a black hole

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Speaker 1: for some motives. There was the brazen killing of Rocky Arrear,

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Speaker 1: whose body was discovered hidden in someone else's grave at

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Speaker 1: Pine Lodge Cemetery in early nineteen ninety eight, more than

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Speaker 1: six years after Rocky supposedly ran away to avoid a

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Speaker 1: second trial over a massive burglary of Bendigo with two

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Speaker 1: hardened local identities from Shep. The other scandal in shepherd

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Speaker 1: An Area that was never really resolved was the death

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Speaker 1: of a farmer's wife called Kay King on the family

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Speaker 1: dairy property near Catandra, which is northeast of Shep. The

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Speaker 1: mother of four was found battered and bruised and drowned

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Speaker 1: in a shallow sump in an old pigpen. People often

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Speaker 1: say she went into a well, but this sump was

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Speaker 1: a It looked like a well on top. It was

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Speaker 1: a hole maybe a meter by a meter, but it

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Speaker 1: just went down a few feet or say a met

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Speaker 1: or too deep, and it collected the water from an

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Speaker 1: old pigpen when it rained. Three of her now adult

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Speaker 1: children believe she was murdered, but enough police back then

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Speaker 1: in ninety eight bought the story that she'd fallen headfirst

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Speaker 1: into the water. In truth, that crime scene had been

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Speaker 1: innocently destroyed by neighbors who rushed to help. They didn't

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Speaker 1: know what they were doing, they thought they were helping.

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Speaker 1: There is still a chance that someone somewhere knows more

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Speaker 1: than they admit about the deaths of Rocky Area and

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Speaker 1: Kay King. The past could still catch up with their

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Speaker 1: killers the way it did with Stephen Bradley nine years

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Speaker 1: ago this summer. This case, of course, will for many

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Speaker 1: listeners bring up one of the most notorious cases in

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Speaker 1: Australian history, and that is the Easy Street murders of

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Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, and that happened six years before. It

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Speaker 1: also involved two young women from the country, but they

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Speaker 1: were living at this stage in Melbourne and Collingwood. They

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Speaker 1: were renting a house together in Easy Street, Collingwood. As

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Speaker 1: listeners will know, they were called the Two sus They

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Speaker 1: were Susan Bartlett and Susanne Armstrong. And Susan Bartlett was

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Speaker 1: a teacher, had been teaching up at Broadford. Armstrong had

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Speaker 1: traveled the world and come home with a little boy

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Speaker 1: called Gregory. They were old friends from when they went

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Speaker 1: to school together at Euroa High School, which is just

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Speaker 1: across the country a short drive, would you believe, from

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Speaker 1: where Michelle Buckingham was found at Kayla, not that far across.

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Speaker 1: The Easy Street case has always been notorious, but it

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Speaker 1: has become extremely topical since last September when Victoria Police

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Speaker 1: announced something that had been a very tightly held secret,

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Speaker 1: and that was they had been observing a particular man

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Speaker 1: in Greece. Now, this man is a man with a

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Speaker 1: dual citizenship because his parents were Greek migrants back in

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Speaker 1: the fifties. He had dual citizenship and probably two passports. Whatever.

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Speaker 1: And the story of this man, whose name is Perry Korumblas.

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Speaker 1: He's real Greek name is slightly longer, but we'll call

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Speaker 1: him Perry. Perry Krumbliss was a young man who lived

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Speaker 1: in Collingwood with his parents, a few blocks away from

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Speaker 1: Easy Straight, as did many other people. The fact he

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Speaker 1: lived nearby does not make him a natural suspect or

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Speaker 1: anything of the kind, but that's where he lived. We

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Speaker 1: don't want to bag. Perry was a relatively harmless young fellow,

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Speaker 1: it would appear. And it turns out that a few

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Speaker 1: days after the murders, after the bodies were found in

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Speaker 1: the hot summer of nineteen seventy seven, a young Collingwood

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Speaker 1: policeman pulled him up driving around. Now there'll be arjibaji

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Speaker 1: about why a seventeen year old was driving a car,

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Speaker 1: but anyway he was, and he was pulled over, possibly

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Speaker 1: like a lot of Mediterranean young many had a heavy

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Speaker 1: growth of whiskers and probably looked older than he was.

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Speaker 1: And the young policeman said, we'll step out of the

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Speaker 1: car sun and let's look in the boot. And the

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Speaker 1: policeman was Itel So later became a very famous homicide detective.

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Speaker 1: At that stage was just a big, flat foot uniform

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Speaker 1: copper who had come down from the bush and joined

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Speaker 1: the police force. And he did the right thing. They

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Speaker 1: opened the boot and he looked in there looking for

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Speaker 1: stolen goods or a weapon or whatever. And guess what

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Speaker 1: he finds. He finds a knife in a leather sheath.

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Speaker 1: That's a sheath knife as we used to call them,

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Speaker 1: or a hunting knife as often called a sharp knife.

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Speaker 1: Fairly knew no signs really have been sharpened or not

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Speaker 1: worn at all. And Itoles removed the knife and he

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Speaker 1: handed it into his superiors, and so it ended up

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Speaker 1: at the crime department, you would think, and with the

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Speaker 1: what was then known as the homicide squad, which was

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Speaker 1: a fairly understaffed squad, and they examined it and they

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Speaker 1: found that there was a little bit of blood inside

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Speaker 1: the sheath. It wasn't covert in blood. There was a

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Speaker 1: little bit of blood. Now we must be fair here

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Speaker 1: and say it's not that unusual for a sheath knife

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Speaker 1: to have some signs of blood, especially back in that

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Speaker 1: era in the seventies, we had in Melbourne a lot

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Speaker 1: of people who'd come from rural Greece and rural Italy

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Speaker 1: and rural Middle East, all sorts of places, and they

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Speaker 1: were keen on slaughtering their own lamb and their own goats.

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Speaker 1: It was a real thing back in the day. They

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Speaker 1: would have little paddocks around Thomastown and out the other

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Speaker 1: end of Coburg and Preston and you'd see half a

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Speaker 1: dozen lambs there or three goats or something, and a

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Speaker 1: lot of people would slaughter their own meat. In fact,

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Speaker 1: a lot of those people started their working life in

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Speaker 1: Australia at abbatars because you could get the work. It

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Speaker 1: was dirty, it was a little bit dangerous, and it

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Speaker 1: was unpleasant, but you could get the jobs and you

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Speaker 1: could often get some cheap meat. So the fact that

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Speaker 1: this young fellow had a knife with some blood on

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Speaker 1: it in itself doesn't indicate any sort of guilt necessarily.

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Speaker 1: But the police were interested in this fellow and they

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Speaker 1: took him into to be questioned, and I'm told he

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Speaker 1: was questioned robustly, as people were in those days, and

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Speaker 1: Apparently he stuck to his answer, and his answer may

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Speaker 1: well be the truth. Let's assume for the moment that

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Speaker 1: it was the truth, because we don't know any better.

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Speaker 1: He said to them something that actually has a sort

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Speaker 1: of an internal logic. He said, no, no, I'd pick

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Speaker 1: this knife up. I found it on the railway line

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Speaker 1: underneath the footbridge that goes from the west side of

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Speaker 1: Punt Road over the railway line towards Victoria Park, the

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Speaker 1: football ground, and it looks to me, he must have

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Speaker 1: told them as if it had been dropped from the

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Speaker 1: railway bridge by someone perhaps fleeing the murdency, and that

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Speaker 1: he'd spied it sitting there, this nice new knife, and

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Speaker 1: he looked down, saw it and felt, beauty, I'll get it. Well,

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Speaker 1: I would have done that when I was seventeen. I'd

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Speaker 1: go down and walk out in the tracks and get

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Speaker 1: the knife. Probably don't now, And he tells them that story.

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Speaker 1: Now it be true, and it certainly is a story

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Speaker 1: that has a lot to commend it. It is logical,

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Speaker 1: and the police after a while, they obviously nineteen seventy seven,

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Speaker 1: early seventy seven, the police bought his story because subsequently,

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Speaker 1: many months later, when there was an inquest into the

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Speaker 1: death of the two young women. Although his name Perry Crumblus,

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Speaker 1: although his name was on a list of sort of

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Speaker 1: minor witnesses, he didn't actually come to court. He didn't attend.

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Speaker 1: He was a no show year on it, and we

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Speaker 1: won't explore that too deeply. So he didn't front for court,

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Speaker 1: and the police didn't seem to care much of the

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Speaker 1: council assisting the coroner, and the coroner himself did not

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Speaker 1: seem to care that this one person out of twenty

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Speaker 1: wasn't there. His absence was noted, but nothing, no significance

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Speaker 1: was attached to it. This is how it sat for

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Speaker 1: more than forty years. Easy Street was just one of

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Speaker 1: the great mysteries until officially, at least last September, on

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Speaker 1: a Saturday morning, the police announced that they'd arrested a

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Speaker 1: man in Rome Airport, and this, of course was his

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Speaker 1: Perry Crumblas. And it turns out that you know, Perry's

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Speaker 1: name was on a list, a long, long, long list

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Speaker 1: of people who've been spoken to back in seventy seven.

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Speaker 1: There was a one hundred and thirty odd of them,

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Speaker 1: whatever one hundred and forty A lot of people more

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Speaker 1: than half of them are still alive. I think ninety

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Speaker 1: odd is still alive, and more as a duty and

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Speaker 1: a chore than anything else, the police had gone around

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Speaker 1: knocking on doors, finding people and saying, oh, sir, you

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Speaker 1: know blah blah, could you please lick this swab or whatever,

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Speaker 1: and getting DNA samples because the murder scene there was DNA.

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Speaker 1: There was fluids body fluids at the murder scene which

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Speaker 1: provided DNA samples for the police to test against. It

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Speaker 1: would appear that's what it seems like. Now we're not

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Speaker 1: going to go into what happened in the meantime. Clearly

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Speaker 1: Pericorumblus and one hundred plus others ninety plus others have

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Speaker 1: been spoken to, and at some point after that he

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Speaker 1: went to Greece. Now again, I wouldn't draw anything adverse

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Speaker 1: against that his family had returned to Greece. His parents,

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Speaker 1: many many Greek migrants, having achieved a certain age retirement

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Speaker 1: age particularly return to Greece because they can go back

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Speaker 1: to a family property that is very cheap, or buy

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Speaker 1: something very cheaply, often inherit it, and they can retain

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Speaker 1: their Australian pension. And rural Greece particularly is full of

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Speaker 1: ex Australian and Canadian Greeks who's asking about how the

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Speaker 1: foot's going or how the ice hockey is and you know,

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Speaker 1: do your driver a hold in the home and all

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Speaker 1: that because they used to drive taxies in Melbourne or whatever.

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Speaker 1: So Greece is a place that has a big wide

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Speaker 1: the aspra of migrants who many of them have gone home,

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Speaker 1: and many of them they visit back and forth regularly.

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Speaker 1: If you sit on a beach in Greece long enough,

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Speaker 1: you'll hear Australian accents, and it is Greek's come home

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Speaker 1: to see grandma or auntie or whatever it might be.

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Speaker 1: And so, long story short, the likely prosecution case against

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Speaker 1: Perry Krumbler's he's probably going to raise the fact that

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Speaker 1: he went back to Greece. But the defense, of course

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Speaker 1: would raise the fact that a lot of people do.

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Speaker 1: Why shouldn't he He liked his dear old mum and

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Speaker 1: he wanted to go home so she could cook him,

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Speaker 1: you know, eggplant and mussaka and all that good stuff.

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Speaker 1: So it's going to be an intriguing case. Why do

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Speaker 1: we bring this up, Well, it's just another example of

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Speaker 1: how after decades, the long arm of the law reached

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Speaker 1: out and tapped somebody on the shoulder when they must

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Speaker 1: have believed or hoped that it was all long gone

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Speaker 1: and all behind them. In the case of Perry Karumblas,

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Speaker 1: we're not suggesting that there's a murder behind him, but

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Speaker 1: of course he was questioned about it back in the day,

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Speaker 1: so it would be an unpleasant scenario for him just

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Speaker 1: being questioned back in nineteen seventy seven. The difference, of course,

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Speaker 1: with the Bradley Michelle Buckingham case is that when the

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Speaker 1: police came looking, they tapped the shoulder of the man

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Speaker 1: against whom they successfully ran a prosecution. That is not

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Speaker 1: the case with Perry Karumblas. He will get his day

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Speaker 1: in court and he's going to be very ably defended

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Speaker 1: by one of the best criminal defense lawyers in Australia,

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Speaker 1: Bill doug and that is a very good thing because

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Speaker 1: we would hate to see an innocent man go down

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Speaker 1: call a technicality. Thanks for listening.

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Speaker 2: Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for

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Speaker 2: True crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns,

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Speaker 2: features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot AU

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