Speaker 1: The Buckingham case was one of a string of other
Speaker 1: cold cases that have baffled investigators, sometimes for years. Her
Speaker 1: violent and senseless death was a macab mystery and a
Speaker 1: stain on the Shepherdon area for more than thirty years.
Speaker 1: But there's always a but four men always knew the truth.
Speaker 1: It would take another generation of detectives thirty years to
Speaker 1: catch another unknown killer whose crime haunted the district where
Speaker 1: poor Michelle Buckingham lived and died. I'm Andrew Rule his
Speaker 1: life and crimes. We're going to look at an old
Speaker 1: case that was committed Waiverack in the eighties and sat
Speaker 1: around for close to thirty years before it was solved.
Speaker 1: And it's a remarkable case because the betting was it
Speaker 1: would never be solved. And that is the case of
Speaker 1: Michelle Buckingham Shepherdon. But that reminds us of some other cases,
Speaker 1: cold cases where no one has actually been brought to
Speaker 1: justice and certainly no one has been convicted, and we
Speaker 1: run through a few of those as well. That's nine
Speaker 1: years ago last month since a man was sentenced to
Speaker 1: twenty seven years prison for the murder of a teenage
Speaker 1: girl near Sheperton back in late nineteen eighty three. In court,
Speaker 1: this fellow, Stephen Bradley, was described as a dog groomer,
Speaker 1: but I'm tipping that in jail that will have been
Speaker 1: shortened to dog, and he is white. Even in jail
Speaker 1: what he did in company with two other people is
Speaker 1: regarded as a dog act. This was Stephen Bradley's tenth
Speaker 1: Christmas inside and he faces another ten before having any
Speaker 1: chance of parole. That is, if there is a god.
Speaker 1: The girl he murdered was named Michelle Buckingham, and she
Speaker 1: was only sixteen. She was only just out of year ten.
Speaker 1: She wasn't really old enough to leave school the standards
Speaker 1: of most parents, they would want their child to stay
Speaker 1: at school longer than year ten, and she did not.
Speaker 1: Her violent and senseless death was a macab mystery and
Speaker 1: a stain on the Shepherdon area for more than thirty years.
Speaker 1: But there's always a butt. Four men always knew the
Speaker 1: truth about Michelle and who'd killed her. Not just Bradley
Speaker 1: and his two co offenders, who were both eventually named
Speaker 1: in court alongside him, but the man that Bradley once
Speaker 1: told a dreadful secret. That man was his brother in law,
Speaker 1: whose conscience finally outweighed his fear when he was moved
Speaker 1: by a photograph of the murdered girl's still grieving mother
Speaker 1: in a local newspaper, the Sheperdon News, three decades after
Speaker 1: her body was found. Long story short. Michelle Buckingham sixteen
Speaker 1: was a sheep girl. She went to sheper and High,
Speaker 1: but she left as soon as she could at fifteen
Speaker 1: years old, to work in a milk bar, then a
Speaker 1: department store, and finally a supermarket. She was tall, looked
Speaker 1: a bit older than the year eleven school girl that
Speaker 1: she should have been. She lived with her mother, sister,
Speaker 1: and brother, but she'd moved out of home on Wednesday,
Speaker 1: October the nineteenth to stay temporarily with a friend at
Speaker 1: a local caravan park, the Stray Leaves Caravan Park, where
Speaker 1: her father was estrange from her mother also lived. That
Speaker 1: was a Wednesday. She was dead by Friday night. Her
Speaker 1: mother had begged her not to leave home until she
Speaker 1: was more mature, but Michelee knew better. She wanted to
Speaker 1: move into a sharehouse and live her own life. Bunking
Speaker 1: in at the caravan park was strictly temporary, but it
Speaker 1: turned out to be fatal Because obviously, some bad people
Speaker 1: knew she was there. The night after she left home missus.
Speaker 1: Thursday October the twentieth, she danced with friends at a
Speaker 1: rose tattoo gig at a big pub called the Golden
Speaker 1: Valley Hotel, very big, famous hotel in shep particularly in
Speaker 1: the past. The next day, a Friday, she was booked
Speaker 1: to work from ten am to nine pm at the
Speaker 1: local Coals, but she left work around six thirty pm,
Speaker 1: saying she felt unwell. Now we don't really know what
Speaker 1: that was, but anyway, she apparently dropped into the Victoria Hotel,
Speaker 1: another pub, and spoke to a friend before heading off
Speaker 1: to walk the three kilometers to the caravan park. She's
Speaker 1: two years too young to drive, no carp she's left home,
Speaker 1: she's walking, She's vulnerable, the friend would recall. She seemed unhappy,
Speaker 1: not her usual bubbly self. Whether that had any bearing
Speaker 1: on what happened next is hard to say. Witnesses would
Speaker 1: later tell police they saw her near the caravan park.
Speaker 1: They were probably the last to see her alive apart
Speaker 1: from the men who killed her. Michelle vanished that night,
Speaker 1: but no one knew she wasn't living with either parents,
Speaker 1: so each assumed she was with the other or with
Speaker 1: a friend. Her boss tried calling on Saturday morning from
Speaker 1: the supermarket when she didn't arrive at work, but her
Speaker 1: disappearance fell between the cracks. A week later, October twenty eighth,
Speaker 1: she was formally reported missing. Her body was not found
Speaker 1: until ten days after that, on November seventh, So you
Speaker 1: can imagine at that time of year in central Victoria
Speaker 1: what that meant. Her body was half hidden in long
Speaker 1: grass on a gravel road at Kayala East, on the
Speaker 1: far out edge of Shepperdon's rural outskirts. She'd been stabbed
Speaker 1: nineteen times after seventeen days of exposure to warm weather,
Speaker 1: animals and insects. The body held no clue for police.
Speaker 1: They stayed clueless for another twenty nine years. The homicide
Speaker 1: squad of that era had apatchy record with killings that
Speaker 1: were not simple domestics. The Buckingham case was one of
Speaker 1: a string of other cold cases that had baffled investigators,
Speaker 1: sometimes for years. In nineteen eighty three, Sheperdon still buzzed
Speaker 1: with fears and rumors about the double murder of local
Speaker 1: teenagers Gary Haywood and had been a medil back in
Speaker 1: sixty six. Their bodies too, had been found after sixteen
Speaker 1: days abandoned in a bush paddock on the Golden River
Speaker 1: Flats near Murchison, which has past Kayla a lot of
Speaker 1: parallels quite similar. In October nineteen seventy three, a decade
Speaker 1: before Michelle Buckingham's death, a teenager called Bromwin Richardson had
Speaker 1: been abducted and murdered near Aubrey. Her body was found
Speaker 1: floating in the murray fairly quickly, and in January nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty forty year old Eline Jones was killed and thrown
Speaker 1: in the murray near a camping spot at Tokemall. Her
Speaker 1: husband died of a heart attack when he found her
Speaker 1: bleeding body snagged in the river the next morning. It
Speaker 1: would take police nearly twenty years to arrest the killer
Speaker 1: of Gary Haywood, and had been a medill, that being
Speaker 1: Raymond Edmonds, the deviate the media dubbed mister Stinkey, But
Speaker 1: it would take another generation of detected thirty years to
Speaker 1: catch another unknown killer whose crime haunted the district where
Speaker 1: poor Michelle Buckingham lived and died. At least the police
Speaker 1: had one fingerprint to work with in the Medil Haywood puzzle.
Speaker 1: They had absolutely nothing in the Buckingham case. The truth
Speaker 1: is it might never have been solved if not for
Speaker 1: the diligent work of a Shepherdon News reporter in two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve. This is twenty nine years after Michele's death.
Speaker 1: She's been written about by a young reporter who was
Speaker 1: at that stage under the age of twenty nine. She
Speaker 1: had not even been born when Michele Buckingham was murdered.
Speaker 1: A five day blitz of stories and photographs, re examining
Speaker 1: every aspect of the case, was designed to arouse memories
Speaker 1: and maybe consciences, time changes, thinks, sometimes breaking down once
Speaker 1: impenetrable relationships, and fears. Dozens of tips flowed in. One
Speaker 1: of them intrigued the seasoned homicide detective Ron Iddles, a
Speaker 1: name we hear quite a lot in our podcasts Iddles
Speaker 1: agreed to meet a local man discreetly at the Shepherdon
Speaker 1: East football ground. The mystery man was Norman Gribble. He
Speaker 1: had a story he had hidden for almost thirty years.
Speaker 1: He told the detective that the day after Michelle was murdered,
Speaker 1: his brother in law had told him that he and
Speaker 1: two others had picked her up at the caravan park
Speaker 1: in his car. That's in Gribble's car. When she later
Speaker 1: refused to have sex with the men, they stabbed her
Speaker 1: to death in the car at the Pine Lodge Hotel
Speaker 1: car park, about nine kilometers east of the caravan park
Speaker 1: where she was picked up Gribble. This is Gribble being
Speaker 1: the man who's telling on Idol's this terrible story. Gribble
Speaker 1: said he'd even bandaged the killer's cut hand injured committing
Speaker 1: the crime. When I say killer, one of three killers,
Speaker 1: only one conviction. Note the man who confessed the murder,
Speaker 1: of course, was Stephen Bradley, brother of Gribble's wife. He
Speaker 1: had subsequently sold his car back in eighty three and
Speaker 1: left Sheperdon for interstate, and he very rarely came back
Speaker 1: to shep Gribble at first didn't want to go on
Speaker 1: the record, but Idyle's persuaded him to make a statement.
Speaker 1: When Eddles traced Bradley in Queensland, he was working as
Speaker 1: a dog groomer. He changed his story several times in
Speaker 1: many months, and he was not charged until May twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: This is relatively recently in terms of a very old
Speaker 1: cold case. The two men named in court as co
Speaker 1: offenders Bradley's associates, Rodney Butler and Trevor Corrigan, swore they
Speaker 1: weren't involved, but Supreme Court Judge Robert Osborn rejected their
Speaker 1: evidence outright, stating he was satisfied it was a quote
Speaker 1: killing carried out jointly unquote by them with Bradley. There
Speaker 1: was not enough formal evidence to assure convictions against Butler
Speaker 1: and Corrigan, so they walked while their so called mate
Speaker 1: started a life of fear and loathing in prison. The
Speaker 1: court heard that most of the evidence was lost in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen nineties when a police inspector ordered it
Speaker 1: destroyed on grounds it was a quote biological hazard go figure.
Speaker 1: Only a handful of crime scene photographs were kept. That's andy.
Speaker 1: It wasn't the only time that murder investigations were bungled
Speaker 1: in Sheperdon. It was a bit of a black hole
Speaker 1: for some motives. There was the brazen killing of Rocky Arrear,
Speaker 1: whose body was discovered hidden in someone else's grave at
Speaker 1: Pine Lodge Cemetery in early nineteen ninety eight, more than
Speaker 1: six years after Rocky supposedly ran away to avoid a
Speaker 1: second trial over a massive burglary of Bendigo with two
Speaker 1: hardened local identities from Shep. The other scandal in shepherd
Speaker 1: An Area that was never really resolved was the death
Speaker 1: of a farmer's wife called Kay King on the family
Speaker 1: dairy property near Catandra, which is northeast of Shep. The
Speaker 1: mother of four was found battered and bruised and drowned
Speaker 1: in a shallow sump in an old pigpen. People often
Speaker 1: say she went into a well, but this sump was
Speaker 1: a It looked like a well on top. It was
Speaker 1: a hole maybe a meter by a meter, but it
Speaker 1: just went down a few feet or say a met
Speaker 1: or too deep, and it collected the water from an
Speaker 1: old pigpen when it rained. Three of her now adult
Speaker 1: children believe she was murdered, but enough police back then
Speaker 1: in ninety eight bought the story that she'd fallen headfirst
Speaker 1: into the water. In truth, that crime scene had been
Speaker 1: innocently destroyed by neighbors who rushed to help. They didn't
Speaker 1: know what they were doing, they thought they were helping.
Speaker 1: There is still a chance that someone somewhere knows more
Speaker 1: than they admit about the deaths of Rocky Area and
Speaker 1: Kay King. The past could still catch up with their
Speaker 1: killers the way it did with Stephen Bradley nine years
Speaker 1: ago this summer. This case, of course, will for many
Speaker 1: listeners bring up one of the most notorious cases in
Speaker 1: Australian history, and that is the Easy Street murders of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, and that happened six years before. It
Speaker 1: also involved two young women from the country, but they
Speaker 1: were living at this stage in Melbourne and Collingwood. They
Speaker 1: were renting a house together in Easy Street, Collingwood. As
Speaker 1: listeners will know, they were called the Two sus They
Speaker 1: were Susan Bartlett and Susanne Armstrong. And Susan Bartlett was
Speaker 1: a teacher, had been teaching up at Broadford. Armstrong had
Speaker 1: traveled the world and come home with a little boy
Speaker 1: called Gregory. They were old friends from when they went
Speaker 1: to school together at Euroa High School, which is just
Speaker 1: across the country a short drive, would you believe, from
Speaker 1: where Michelle Buckingham was found at Kayla, not that far across.
Speaker 1: The Easy Street case has always been notorious, but it
Speaker 1: has become extremely topical since last September when Victoria Police
Speaker 1: announced something that had been a very tightly held secret,
Speaker 1: and that was they had been observing a particular man
Speaker 1: in Greece. Now, this man is a man with a
Speaker 1: dual citizenship because his parents were Greek migrants back in
Speaker 1: the fifties. He had dual citizenship and probably two passports. Whatever.
Speaker 1: And the story of this man, whose name is Perry Korumblas.
Speaker 1: He's real Greek name is slightly longer, but we'll call
Speaker 1: him Perry. Perry Krumbliss was a young man who lived
Speaker 1: in Collingwood with his parents, a few blocks away from
Speaker 1: Easy Straight, as did many other people. The fact he
Speaker 1: lived nearby does not make him a natural suspect or
Speaker 1: anything of the kind, but that's where he lived. We
Speaker 1: don't want to bag. Perry was a relatively harmless young fellow,
Speaker 1: it would appear. And it turns out that a few
Speaker 1: days after the murders, after the bodies were found in
Speaker 1: the hot summer of nineteen seventy seven, a young Collingwood
Speaker 1: policeman pulled him up driving around. Now there'll be arjibaji
Speaker 1: about why a seventeen year old was driving a car,
Speaker 1: but anyway he was, and he was pulled over, possibly
Speaker 1: like a lot of Mediterranean young many had a heavy
Speaker 1: growth of whiskers and probably looked older than he was.
Speaker 1: And the young policeman said, we'll step out of the
Speaker 1: car sun and let's look in the boot. And the
Speaker 1: policeman was Itel So later became a very famous homicide detective.
Speaker 1: At that stage was just a big, flat foot uniform
Speaker 1: copper who had come down from the bush and joined
Speaker 1: the police force. And he did the right thing. They
Speaker 1: opened the boot and he looked in there looking for
Speaker 1: stolen goods or a weapon or whatever. And guess what
Speaker 1: he finds. He finds a knife in a leather sheath.
Speaker 1: That's a sheath knife as we used to call them,
Speaker 1: or a hunting knife as often called a sharp knife.
Speaker 1: Fairly knew no signs really have been sharpened or not
Speaker 1: worn at all. And Itoles removed the knife and he
Speaker 1: handed it into his superiors, and so it ended up
Speaker 1: at the crime department, you would think, and with the
Speaker 1: what was then known as the homicide squad, which was
Speaker 1: a fairly understaffed squad, and they examined it and they
Speaker 1: found that there was a little bit of blood inside
Speaker 1: the sheath. It wasn't covert in blood. There was a
Speaker 1: little bit of blood. Now we must be fair here
Speaker 1: and say it's not that unusual for a sheath knife
Speaker 1: to have some signs of blood, especially back in that
Speaker 1: era in the seventies, we had in Melbourne a lot
Speaker 1: of people who'd come from rural Greece and rural Italy
Speaker 1: and rural Middle East, all sorts of places, and they
Speaker 1: were keen on slaughtering their own lamb and their own goats.
Speaker 1: It was a real thing back in the day. They
Speaker 1: would have little paddocks around Thomastown and out the other
Speaker 1: end of Coburg and Preston and you'd see half a
Speaker 1: dozen lambs there or three goats or something, and a
Speaker 1: lot of people would slaughter their own meat. In fact,
Speaker 1: a lot of those people started their working life in
Speaker 1: Australia at abbatars because you could get the work. It
Speaker 1: was dirty, it was a little bit dangerous, and it
Speaker 1: was unpleasant, but you could get the jobs and you
Speaker 1: could often get some cheap meat. So the fact that
Speaker 1: this young fellow had a knife with some blood on
Speaker 1: it in itself doesn't indicate any sort of guilt necessarily.
Speaker 1: But the police were interested in this fellow and they
Speaker 1: took him into to be questioned, and I'm told he
Speaker 1: was questioned robustly, as people were in those days, and
Speaker 1: Apparently he stuck to his answer, and his answer may
Speaker 1: well be the truth. Let's assume for the moment that
Speaker 1: it was the truth, because we don't know any better.
Speaker 1: He said to them something that actually has a sort
Speaker 1: of an internal logic. He said, no, no, I'd pick
Speaker 1: this knife up. I found it on the railway line
Speaker 1: underneath the footbridge that goes from the west side of
Speaker 1: Punt Road over the railway line towards Victoria Park, the
Speaker 1: football ground, and it looks to me, he must have
Speaker 1: told them as if it had been dropped from the
Speaker 1: railway bridge by someone perhaps fleeing the murdency, and that
Speaker 1: he'd spied it sitting there, this nice new knife, and
Speaker 1: he looked down, saw it and felt, beauty, I'll get it. Well,
Speaker 1: I would have done that when I was seventeen. I'd
Speaker 1: go down and walk out in the tracks and get
Speaker 1: the knife. Probably don't now, And he tells them that story.
Speaker 1: Now it be true, and it certainly is a story
Speaker 1: that has a lot to commend it. It is logical,
Speaker 1: and the police after a while, they obviously nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: early seventy seven, the police bought his story because subsequently,
Speaker 1: many months later, when there was an inquest into the
Speaker 1: death of the two young women. Although his name Perry Crumblus,
Speaker 1: although his name was on a list of sort of
Speaker 1: minor witnesses, he didn't actually come to court. He didn't attend.
Speaker 1: He was a no show year on it, and we
Speaker 1: won't explore that too deeply. So he didn't front for court,
Speaker 1: and the police didn't seem to care much of the
Speaker 1: council assisting the coroner, and the coroner himself did not
Speaker 1: seem to care that this one person out of twenty
Speaker 1: wasn't there. His absence was noted, but nothing, no significance
Speaker 1: was attached to it. This is how it sat for
Speaker 1: more than forty years. Easy Street was just one of
Speaker 1: the great mysteries until officially, at least last September, on
Speaker 1: a Saturday morning, the police announced that they'd arrested a
Speaker 1: man in Rome Airport, and this, of course was his
Speaker 1: Perry Crumblas. And it turns out that you know, Perry's
Speaker 1: name was on a list, a long, long, long list
Speaker 1: of people who've been spoken to back in seventy seven.
Speaker 1: There was a one hundred and thirty odd of them,
Speaker 1: whatever one hundred and forty A lot of people more
Speaker 1: than half of them are still alive. I think ninety
Speaker 1: odd is still alive, and more as a duty and
Speaker 1: a chore than anything else, the police had gone around
Speaker 1: knocking on doors, finding people and saying, oh, sir, you
Speaker 1: know blah blah, could you please lick this swab or whatever,
Speaker 1: and getting DNA samples because the murder scene there was DNA.
Speaker 1: There was fluids body fluids at the murder scene which
Speaker 1: provided DNA samples for the police to test against. It
Speaker 1: would appear that's what it seems like. Now we're not
Speaker 1: going to go into what happened in the meantime. Clearly
Speaker 1: Pericorumblus and one hundred plus others ninety plus others have
Speaker 1: been spoken to, and at some point after that he
Speaker 1: went to Greece. Now again, I wouldn't draw anything adverse
Speaker 1: against that his family had returned to Greece. His parents,
Speaker 1: many many Greek migrants, having achieved a certain age retirement
Speaker 1: age particularly return to Greece because they can go back
Speaker 1: to a family property that is very cheap, or buy
Speaker 1: something very cheaply, often inherit it, and they can retain
Speaker 1: their Australian pension. And rural Greece particularly is full of
Speaker 1: ex Australian and Canadian Greeks who's asking about how the
Speaker 1: foot's going or how the ice hockey is and you know,
Speaker 1: do your driver a hold in the home and all
Speaker 1: that because they used to drive taxies in Melbourne or whatever.
Speaker 1: So Greece is a place that has a big wide
Speaker 1: the aspra of migrants who many of them have gone home,
Speaker 1: and many of them they visit back and forth regularly.
Speaker 1: If you sit on a beach in Greece long enough,
Speaker 1: you'll hear Australian accents, and it is Greek's come home
Speaker 1: to see grandma or auntie or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1: And so, long story short, the likely prosecution case against
Speaker 1: Perry Krumbler's he's probably going to raise the fact that
Speaker 1: he went back to Greece. But the defense, of course
Speaker 1: would raise the fact that a lot of people do.
Speaker 1: Why shouldn't he He liked his dear old mum and
Speaker 1: he wanted to go home so she could cook him,
Speaker 1: you know, eggplant and mussaka and all that good stuff.
Speaker 1: So it's going to be an intriguing case. Why do
Speaker 1: we bring this up, Well, it's just another example of
Speaker 1: how after decades, the long arm of the law reached
Speaker 1: out and tapped somebody on the shoulder when they must
Speaker 1: have believed or hoped that it was all long gone
Speaker 1: and all behind them. In the case of Perry Karumblas,
Speaker 1: we're not suggesting that there's a murder behind him, but
Speaker 1: of course he was questioned about it back in the day,
Speaker 1: so it would be an unpleasant scenario for him just
Speaker 1: being questioned back in nineteen seventy seven. The difference, of course,
Speaker 1: with the Bradley Michelle Buckingham case is that when the
Speaker 1: police came looking, they tapped the shoulder of the man
Speaker 1: against whom they successfully ran a prosecution. That is not
Speaker 1: the case with Perry Karumblas. He will get his day
Speaker 1: in court and he's going to be very ably defended
Speaker 1: by one of the best criminal defense lawyers in Australia,
Speaker 1: Bill doug and that is a very good thing because
Speaker 1: we would hate to see an innocent man go down
Speaker 1: call a technicality. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2: Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for
Speaker 2: True crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns,
Speaker 2: features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot AU
Speaker 2: Forward slash Andrew rule. One word. For advertising inquiries, go
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