It had been almost 30 years since the brutal murder of teenager Michelle Buckingham and police had all but forgotten her story.
Then, homicide detective Ron Iddles received a phone call that would crack one of Australia’s longest-running cold cases and bring down her murderer.
Then 16-year-old Michelle was stabbed 19 times in 1983 in a car in Victoria, after leaving her local pub and being offered a lift. She was killed when she refused to have sex with her attacker.
She was reported missing on October 21, with her badly decomposed body found two weeks later by a farmer on the side of a rural road outside of her home town of Shepparton.
But after local man Gregory Gleadhill was wrongfully charged in 1988, detectives failed to find the actual killer — or any leads — and Michelle’s case collected dust in the homicide squad offices for decades.
That is, until Mr Iddles got involved when a reporter for The Shepparton New s called him several times urging him to reopen the case, which he ended up doing in 2012 despite having no staff.
A man dubbed ‘Australia’s greatest detective’ — with a conviction rate of 99 per cent — Mr Iddles worked with local reporter Tammy Mills to urge the public to come forward with information surrounding Michelle’s death, in a gripping story profiled on Foxtel’s new show Ron Iddles: The Good Cop, which premieres on Crime + Investigation today, January 31.
It wasn’t long before the now-retired detective received an ominous phone call from a stranger who said he knew who had killed Michelle all those years ago.
The unknown man wanted to meet Mr Iddles in the evening at a footy field, in an eerie setting the former cop admits was unsafe.
“I can’t remember telling anyone I was going there. I had missing parts of a big jigsaw puzzle and needed to be solved. Did I do it safely? No,” Mr Iddles told news.com.au.
“But I was confident this person who called was going to tell me something significant.”
The man he was meeting turned out to be Norm Gribble, the brother-in-law of Stephen Bradley, who was eventually convicted of Michelle’s murder in 2015.
“He got out of his car, walked across the oval and he was smoking, so I asked him for a smoke,” Mr Iddles says.
“I don’t normally smoke but I found that sometimes just having a common denominator, it’s like breaking bread together. All of a sudden I’m normal. I’m dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.
“He told me his brother-in-law murdered Michelle and I knew when he told me it was true. There was too much detail in it.
“And I worked out in my head that the body hadn’t been found at the stage on Saturday morning when Stephen Bradley told Norm he’d murdered her.”
Mr Iddles tracked Mr Bradley to where he was living in a tiny Brisbane flat, working as a cleaner at a vet, and took him in for questioning.
He said he “couldn’t remember” if he killed Michelle after Mr Iddles informed him he’d spoke to his brother-in-law.
Mr Bradley then said a female ghost had been haunting him for years, and described a recurring dream of him murdering a woman and frantically driving away.
He was brought to trial for Michelle’s murder in 2015 and sentenced to 32 years in jail for the crime.
It was Mr Iddles’ last ever case with the homicide squad — and one of the biggest emotional roller-coasters, after he bonded with Michelle’s mother Elvira, who tragically had a heart attack and died just days before the trial.
“I made a promise to her mum that we would solve it, and she didn’t make it to that day to see her daughter get justice,” Mr Iddles says.
Interestingly, he also says the case was tough because he “felt sorry” for the killer.
“He was living in a small room in a boarding house, it was about 14 ft by 8ft,” Mr Iddles says.
“The day I told him I was going to charge him he said he had to get his things, and he put all his belongings from 30 years in a small bag, and his colour TV was his pride and joy.
“I just stood there and thought, ‘After 30 years, this is all he has to show for it’.
“I always say most killers aren’t bad, they make bad choices. Their emotions outrun their intelligence.”
Ron Iddles: The Good Cop is a six-part series available to view on Foxtel’s Crime + Investigation channel every Thursday at 7.30pm AEDT.
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