It was February 27th, 1999, and seventeen-year-old Michelle Bright had been at a friend’s birthday party in New South Wales, Australia. Another friend dropped her off near her home on Mayne Street in Gulgong at about quarter to one in the morning. She was never seen alive again.
Three days later, her body was found lying in the grass on Barneys Reef Road, only a little over a mile from her house. She had been raped, and killed by either strangulation or suffocation.
For more than twenty years, the Bright family was forced to live with the knowledge that the individual who brutally murdered Michelle might never receive justice. But then, in 2020, a truck driver named Craig Henry Rumsby confessed the crime to undercover police. Though his defense team would later argue that his confession was unreliable, Rumsby was eventually convicted of Michelle Bright’s slaying in June of 2023.
Rumsby, it turned out, had a long rap sheet, including the attempted rape of a teenager in early 1998, two indecent assaults in 2014 and 2020 (which consisted of forcibly groping and kissing two different women, one a retail worker and one a passenger on a train), and masturbating in a public park in 2019. He had also been arrested several times for robbery and drunk driving.
At trial, Rumsby received a twenty-four to thirty-two year sentence in prison for the rape and murder of Michelle Bright, as well as the 1998 attempted rape. He will be eligible for parole in 2044.
Crime Immemorial 