‘As we ran down the steps, I’m not 100 per cent sure but I think the lights started to go out. And I remember having to climb over something. I’m sure one of the fellows said to me, “Better be careful”. I was a scuba diver back then, very athletic and a bit of a rock hopper. I said to myself, “It’s alright, you can do this, I’m alright.” I have no memory of slipping. I don’t know whether there was grease on the floor inside the door or not. However, I planted my feet, I was fine.
‘We’ve run from the door to the gate, the six foot-tall security gate. We’ve looked back because we could hear glass … being broken. I did hear later, or read later that somebody had smashed the artist’s room with a chair. Smashed the window with a chair to get out.
‘Nevertheless, we heard the smashing of the glass, people screaming and one of the fellows that’s climbed the gate first with the help of the second fellow, the second one’s helped me over … Then I walked across the road and all I remember there is that I sat down on the footpath … [someone] put a blanket around me and asked me if I was okay.’
Bevan Childs, the saxophonist for the band Trinity, was sitting with other band members at a table near the stage, having a drink together between sets. Their instruments were resting in stands on the stage. He was drinking beer, others were having spirits. ‘Then everything just went black,’ Childs says.
When he’d first arrived at the club earlier that evening he noted the dressing room on the right-hand side of the stage. In the dressing room he’d had a look around and seen …’a long table, and above that was a long window, a rectangular window and you couldn’t see out of it, it was so high up. So I jumped up on the table and looked out just to see what was out there. And the roof of the building next door was only about a metre below that window. So when it happened I thought bang, I know what to do.’
Childs didn’t panic. He dashed for the dressing room. ‘I guess for me it was just a flight thing, you know?’ he says. ‘It was just like – bang. I went straight there … I said [to the others], follow me …’
He and fellow bandmate Graham Rennex smashed the high window out with their shoes and managed to clamber to safety. Another Trinity member, Ray Roberts, simply picked up his guitar case and rammed one of the windows on the St Pauls Terrace side of the building. ‘Ray was probably the only one who got injured,’ Childs remembers. ‘As far as I know there’s only two ways to get out of the building. The way Donna [Phillips] went out and the way we went out. But Ray, he found a third way, he picked up his guitar, put it … he just went through the window, boom, and got cuts on his head.
‘When we got out there on the roof, I think there was a fire escape from that into a back lane. And then there was the three of us I think, Dave [Neden], Graham and I standing in front of that pub in St Pauls Terrace and I thought, oh shit, I should go back and get me saxes, this is stupid, you know? Obviously just, you know, and that’s why [fellow bandmate] Darcy [Day] died, he tried to get his saxes.
‘We were just watching the flames and … all the services and fire trucks we were standing around waiting. And of course it took a while for us to realise that people are dead inside, you know? I thought, Darcy would have got out, I thought, well, everybody would have got out.
‘Suddenly the penny dropped. Yes.’
At a long table in front of the stage and dance floor, young police officer Hunter Nicol was enjoying a drink with three friends. One of the men, Bill Nolan, had befriended Nicol when they worked together at the Canungra military jungle training centre in the Gold Coast hinterland. Nolan was in the 10th Independent Rifle Company. Nicol had been a military police officer.
Earlier that evening, Nicol had gone over to the Witton Barracks at Indooroopilly to meet up with Nolan for a few drinks in the mess. It was there he met Les Palethorpe for the first time. Les was down from Townsville army base where he was a lance corporal with the regimental police. ‘I only met Les that night,’ Nicol recalls. ‘He was a hell of a nice bloke. We thought we’d go into town. We knew that the Lands Office Hotel had Laurel Lea on that night (Lea was a popular Australian singer at the time who regularly featured on the music television shows Bandstand and Six O’Clock Rock). She was pretty big, so we thought we’d go and see her. Unfortunately the place was packed out and we couldn’t get in. It was full.
‘The Delltones were playing at the Whiskey Au Go Go. Let’s go down there. So I jumped in my car and we were driving down. I had a Hillman Hunter Royal sedan.’
Incredibly, Nicol and his two friends spotted Palethorpe’s mother (who lived in Brisbane) walking down Adelaide Street as they headed to the club. ‘From memory we were driving along and Les said, “There’s my mother.” He’d only come down from Townsville that day, so we stopped and he jumped out and we’re all talking to her for a while, she’s all pleased to see him not knowing what was going to happen that night,’ says Nicol.
Nicol, from Ayr in Far North Queensland, and from a family with generations of police officers, was physically fit and had trained with both the State and Federal military police. Later in the evening, his attention was captured by a man near the front entrance to the club. ‘I can remember looking over to the left,’ he says. ‘I saw who I believed to be a male person, somebody in authority there. A manager, duty manager, owner, it was obvious by his dress, demeanour, everything else, he was the boss there. He was in charge. He was standing not too far away talking to a woman.’
Nicol, who was happily sipping a bourbon and Coke, suddenly heard an almighty roar. ‘The next minute I hear this whoosh, and felt a hell of a heat hit me, a whoosh and a roar, flames and thick heavy smoke came roaring in. Someone yelled out, “Fire!”
‘Everyone started to scatter. It was that quick. The smoke. In less than a minute we were all overcome. We were all fit in those days. I had a hanky with me. I poured my drink over the hanky. It was wet. I put it over my mouth and that and went down low. That’s what I’d been trained to do. You couldn’t breathe, it was that quick. I thought I saw an exit sign. I heard the roar. I thought somebody must have activated a fire hose but it wasn’t, it must have been the flames. I headed over to where I thought the exit sign was.
‘Somehow I got totally disorientated. A girl was standing on the dance floor screaming, “We’re going to die, we’re going to die!” I’ve grabbed her and dragged her with me. I’ve ended up in the kitchen area. There were little windows. I saw people getting into it. I wasn’t sure if it was a window. I could see something; it turned out it was the night sky. At that stage I was really stuffed. I totally and utterly 100 per cent believed I was going to die.’
Years later, John Bell would tell his daughter, Kathy Hancock, about the tragedy of that night. ‘He basically said everyone was screaming,’ Kathy says. ‘They couldn’t get the back door open. He was trying to get people out. It was horrific.’
When bar attendant Donna Phillips made it outside she was in a state of shock. ‘I walked across the road. I sat down on the footpath. We’ve sat there while all the emergency services have arrived. Sometime later, one of the barmen from Chequers arrived … with Brian Little’s brother [Ken] … from the other club.’
The Chequers Nightclub barman she recognised was Darryl Charles Schlecht. Less than a quarter of an hour earlier, Schlecht had closed up at Chequers and driven his boss Ken Little up Barry Parade to the Whiskey.
‘Well, as we came up Barry Parade and we just … I saw the smoke come out of … coming out of the St Pauls Terrace side of [the] Whiskey and fire engines and flashing lights and things. I dropped him [Ken] off at Barry Parade, just on the corner of Brunswick Street and then I went and parked the car, and came back.’
Darryl enquired about the welfare of people inside the club, in particular his friend, the barman Peter Marcus. Donna Phillips was still sitting in a daze on the footpath opposite the smouldering club. ‘I saw this fellow Darryl,’ she remembered. ‘And it was Darryl, he was a
very close friend of the fellow who was the barman. When I told him I saw him fall, he became hysterical. And somebody said, “You’ve got to take him to [the] hospital, he’s in shock.”
‘So he and I went to the hospital. He was seen to. One of the nurses said to me, “Are you alright?” And I said, “Yeah, look, I’m fine,” doing my best version of, you know, the British stiff upper lip. Then I came back, I guess I came back, I’m still not sure. And then I don’t remember anything else after but I’m assuming I walked home. I have a recollection of having a shower and noticing that I had black soot on my skin … I washed that off, hopped into bed, woke up the next morning and told my husband … and he said, “You better have the day off then.”’
Hunter Nicol managed to get out the window but didn’t see anyone come out after him. ‘I got onto a bit of a rooftop,’ he recalls. ‘I’ve jumped down. The fire escape was shut. I couldn’t see if it was locked or not. I ran around behind the building. It had six-foot high fences facing onto St Pauls Terrace. Don’t ask me how but I jumped it … it was pandemonium. It was just so quick. Les would have been dead within a few minutes. It was really hot. I got scorched lungs out of it. I was covered in all this greasy soot. You couldn’t see anything. The way it billowed in through the place, I reckon within 30 seconds we were overcome with smoke. It came in like a storm front. Really thick and putrid.
‘What killed them was not only carbon monoxide, this stuff on the floor was nylon. Nylon and plastic chairs, they burn and they give off cyanide gas. Not many vicitms actually got burnt.
‘It was terrifying. I went through a stage of terror, and then I accepted the fact that I was going to die. There was nothing I could do about it … Les ended up in the far corner, heading towards the fire. I think people went that way not realising where the exit was. They didn’t have a chance. It just roared through that place. Whether it was the air conditioning that assisted it. We didn’t have a hope.’
It was around 2.20 a.m.
*
Firefighter Arnold Eggins from Kemp Place Fire Station in Fortitude Valley arrived at the scene about 30 minutes after the first emergency call came in. Two pumps had initially attended but back-up was swiftly called. ‘I was involved in carrying one of the fatalities out of the building,’ says Eggins. ‘It was certainly the most fatalities I’d ever witnessed at one incident.’ Firefighters had the blaze under control by 2.21 a.m. When the conditions were deemed safe, authorities – including constables McSherry and Suhr – began removing the bodies. ‘Kaye and I carried out one or two bodies,’ McSherry says. ‘I tagged the bodies. It was one of my tasks. I wrote who found which body and where on the tags. We tried to cover them as best we could. It was a terribly traumatic situation for everyone involved.’
It was not yet 3 a.m.
*
According to author Geoff Plunkett in his book The Whiskey Au Go Go Massacre, not long after this detectives from the Criminal Investigation Branch arrived at the scene of the Whiskey tragedy. As he writes:
At this time Detective Senior Sergeant Robert ‘Brian’ Hayes (who was in charge of the Homicide Squad and this investigation), Detective Sergeant Ronald Redmond and Detective Sergeant Thomas (Syd) Atkinson (all CIB) arrived at the Whiskey and walked around the smouldering ruins. Their shoes crunched on the debris and caused the still-warm ashes to waft in their wake.
Inspector Les Bardwell, head of the police scientific section, had been alerted about the fire by the Operations Room and at around 3.30 a.m. arrived at the Whiskey. En route, he learned that the death count was mounting. First nine. Then 12. Then 14.
Commissioner of Police, Ray Whitrod, arrived not long after, with one of the force’s most senior detectives, Don ‘Buck’ Buchanan. Buchanan’s son, David, heard the story of that moment from his father sometime later. ‘My father said, Whitrod nearly fainted as the crime scene was so terrible,’ David recalls. ‘My father was disturbed by the fire.’
Bardwell took detailed notes of what he saw in the early hours of that tragic morning. ‘There was carpet on the floor of the vestibule, steps and also the main area of the nightclub, with the exception of … some wooden parquetry floor obviously there for dancing,’ Bardwell would tell the inquest. ‘On the ground floor, this in the vestibule, I saw a four gallon and five gallon steel drum, both of these were in the horizontal position with the bung out. One was situated towards the centre of the south-western wall and the second under the staircase. Examination disclosed that one of the drums was empty of fluid but there was a strong odour of petrol emanating from it, whilst the second drum had fluid in it, and it also had a strong odour of petrol …’
He was confident that there were no more than 50 people in the club at the time of the fire. He also concluded that the contents of the two drums at the entrance to the club was super-grade petrol, and the brand probably Amoco.
It was close to 4 a.m.
*
It didn’t take long for Sunday Sun reporter Brian Bolton to get to his desk that morning and find two notes that John Andrew Stuart had left for him the night before. After making his phone call at Flamingos, as witnessed by bouncer Alf Quick, Stuart had pre-aranged to meet Bolton at his office in the Sun Building in the Valley, just around the corner from Flamingos. He had wanted to go on a tour of the doomed clubs with Bolton and tell them face to face, with the journalist as his witness, that he was not involved. Instead, Bolton fell asleep and didn’t make their post-midnight meeting. Bolton later told Humphris: ‘Stuart has left me a note here at my desk signed about 10 minutes after the fire started, abusing me for not keeping our appointment.’
Police needed to find Stuart.
It was almost dawn.
Mass Murder
Had the deadly firebombing been a part of John Andrew Stuart’s predictions of a Sydney gangster takeover? He had been warning the owners of the club, the Little brothers, that the Whiskey was going to be hit. And he’d been shouting loudly to police and the newspapers that another fire was imminent.
Sydney detective Roger Rogerson says he was flown from Sydney to help in the investigation. He knew John Andrew Stuart as a ‘lunatic’.
‘Stuart kept saying it was Sydney criminals, the Mr Bigs – Lenny McPherson, George Freeman; he was dropping a lot of names,’ said Rogerson. ‘And there was a journalist [Brian Bolton] up there writing up stories about Sydney crims taking over the Valley. It was all bullshit he was getting from Stuart. It was a way of setting up an alibi. It was all crap.’
Police immediately carried out a city-wide sweep of Brisbane’s known criminals and potential suspects, and brought them in for questioning. According to a police source, Vincent O’Dempsey was one of those brought in that morning and interrogated. Another who was swiftly nabbed was none other than Stuart’s good mate Billy McCulkin. He was interrogated for several hours before being released.
By 10 a.m. McCulkin was in the bar of the Treasury Hotel at the corner of George and Elizabeth streets in the CBD where he talked with his friend (and future wife) Estelle Long. McCulkin had known Long for years. She was a long-term lover to bookmaker Paul Meade, who had employed both McCulkin and O’Dempsey in his mock auctions business before it was shut down by authorities.
Long later recalled to police: ‘I was living and working at the Treasury Hotel and when I got into the bar at opening time Billy was already there. He looked terrible, kind of panicky and I asked him what was wrong. He told me he’d been picked up by the police about the Whiskey Au Go Go fire. I didn’t know what had happened and he told me about the fire and all the people who had died. He said he had been there at the police station all night and that they gave him a hard time. Billy didn’t tell me what he told the police but he seemed very worried by this.’
John Andrew Stuart was finally tracked down and brought into headquarters with a solicitor. He was similarly subjected to intense questioning but let go without charge.
The news soon reached the ears of members of the Clockwork Orange Gang, and Tommy Hamilton was also worried. His sister, Carolyn Scully, remembers talking to her brother on the day of the fire: ‘Tommy … came to have a coffee … he put the cream in the fridge and he said, “I’m just going to go, and I’ll be back, I won’t be long.” He was back in five minutes and he was in shock. He says, “Do you know what’s happened?’’ And I said no because I wasn’t watching the TV.
‘He said, “A nightclub has been blown up, 15 people are dead. They’re going to think the people who blew up Torino’s did this too.” But at that point in time I didn’t know about Torino’s. I knew how they came home that night but I didn’t think anything of it. Because it wasn’t until after that that Peter Hall told me, and it wasn’t until after Peter told me that Tommy told me.’
One associate, who was close to the Clockwork Orange Gang, said when he heard the news of the Whiskey, one thing struck him. ‘In the back of my mind was Torino’s,’ he recalls. ‘It was very similar. Stuart and Finch. They’d known each other since they were teenagers. Stuart didn’t drink but he was always in nightclubs and clubs. Stuart and Finch were very close. Then there was the Clockwork Orange Gang. They were different teams.
‘Finch and Stuart. It was never suggested that they did Torino’s because Finch was still out of the country and Stuart had been arrested that night when Torino’s went up. He was in custody on that Sunday night. I cannot find out who arrested him. It’s odds-on that Stuart wanted to alibi himself for that night.’
They Did It
Nothing prepared Barbara McCulkin for the morning of 8 March 1973. If the weary mother of two had been standing on her back landing at Dorchester Terrace just after 2 a.m. that day, and she had looked across the city towards Fortitude Valley, just behind the Story Bridge, she would have seen a smudge of orange fire in the darkness.
The Night Dragon Page 11
