Her Killer Has Stolen All My Joy

A murdered teenager, a bungled investigation, a suspect never charged ... Debi Marshall visits the scene of the brutal killing of Michelle Bright and meets a family who won’t rest until justice is done.

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It was not just the violence and violation of Michelle Bright’s murder and rape, but the callous indifference with which her killer discarded her body when his terrible night’s work was done.

Michelle, once a vivacious young woman, was discovered half-naked and face down in the earth, tossed aside, hidden by long grass, just steps away from a railway line, outside the tiny town of Gulgong in rural NSW.

It was an ignominious end for a woman with so much vitality and life. In the emotionless language of the coronial inquest, heard 10 years after Michelle’s murder, the details sound clinical, almost detached, despite the Coroner’s expressed sympathy for the family. “Michelle Loraine Bright died on 27 February, 1999, at Gulgong from homicidal violence, but the actual cause of death the evidence adduced does not enable me to say.”

In the cold light of day, the case remains another long-standing unsolved murder on the NSW Police’s cold case division’s books. Yet, as autumn sun strains through the windows of Michelle’s mother, Loraine’s, modest kitchen in Wyong, on the NSW Central Coast, there’s nothing clinical about the bittersweet memories that pepper her conversation about the daughter and best friend she lost to a savage, senseless death.

“Michelle was just perfect from the day she was born,” Loraine says, wistfully. “She was so lovely, a tomboy who loved older people and animals. She wanted to be a veterinary nurse.”

On the night Michelle went missing, she’d attended a 15th birthday party and planned to stay at her best friend, Lauren’s, house. Loraine was at work at the local RSL.