Stephen James Bradley, 52, will face the Melbourne Magistrates Court today after he was arrested and charged at his Brisbane home for the murder of Michelle Buckingham.

Michelle, 16, was allegedly stabbed 19 times and her body left on a lonely roadside in Kialla East in October 1983 in the clothes she was last seen wearing, a Mickey Mouse jumper and jeans.

Her mother yesterday sat in the same Shepparton home where she had brought up Michelle and siblings Karen and Phillip.

‘‘I don’t really know how I’m feeling,” Mrs Buckingham, 66, said.

“It’s all been topsy-turvy and hard to believe.

“It’s not over yet by a long shot, is it?

‘‘That broken heart will always be there, to the day I die I’ll have that.

“But if they can get justice...’’

Mrs Buckingham had to stop believing her daughter’s case would be solved in order to survive.

She watched glitzy television specials and read true crime books on the country’s most famous unsolved murders, but never did they remember her Michelle.

‘‘I had to close myself off. I had to keep going for my children and my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren, for my family,’’ she said.

‘‘You know what hurts me the most? They left her out there like a dog, out in the paddock.

“That’s what’s really sticking to my core.”

Michelle had finished Year 10 at Shepparton High School the year before she died.

She left school to work in a local cafe.

She dreamed, her mother remembered, of working in a shop, getting married and having two children, preferably two boys, of her own.

‘‘She was happy-go-lucky, always dancing, always joking,’’ her mother said.

Mrs Buckingham said she spoke with a church minister about selling the house to escape the memories after Michelle died.

‘‘He said, ‘No, leave it — later on a lot of people sell and they regret it. You might want the memories’,’’ she said.

‘‘Well I do want the memories now.’’