The Night Dragon

by Matthew Condon

  ‘I remember there was a time … Billy thought O’Dempsey and Dubois were going to shoot him and he had my shotgun ready at the flat. I think Bill was frightened of O’Dempsey but after the girls disappeared he was more so.’

  Shortly after, Estelle Long got a phone call from O’Dempsey at the hotel where she worked. ‘It was just on the normal hotel line,’ she said. ‘He said, “I just want you to know I have had nothing to do with Barbara’s disappearance.” I was shaking and told him, “Don’t phone me again, I’m not your friend, [am] never likely to be your friend, so don’t ring.”’

  She remembered Billy McCulkin talking about the disappearances every day. ‘What happened to his family haunted him,’ she said.

  When the Sun Came Up

  Billy McCulkin and Norman Wild immediately raced over to Garry Dubois’s mother’s home at 19 Allan Street, Kedron. The property was a raised housing commission – style home set well back from the street. Norman Wild went around the back of the house while Billy knocked on the front door.

  Shorty answered the door.

  ‘Have you seen my wife?’ Billy asked.

  ‘No, why?’ he replied.

  ‘The kid across the road told me that you were there on Wednesday night.’

  ‘I don’t know your wife,’ Dubois supposedly replied. ‘I’m surprised you asked me.’

  ‘Alright, fair enough,’ Billy said.

  He got back in the car with Wild and they headed back into the city on Lutwyche Road. By chance he saw O’Dempsey’s orange Charger parked outside the shopping arcade where he ran Polonia’s. Soon after he saw O’Dempsey walking across Lutwyche Road and approached him.

  ‘Have you seen Barbara?’ Billy asked.

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘She hasn’t been home for a couple of days. The kid across the road said you were there on Wednesday night with Dubois.’

  O’Dempsey supposedly hesitated.

  ‘Was Shorty with you?’ Billy pressed him.

  ‘Have you seen Shorty?’ O’Dempsey asked.

  ‘Yes, I’ve just come from his place. Was Shorty with you?’

  O’Dempsey again supposedly hesitated.

  ‘Well was he with you or wasn’t he?’ Billy insisted. ‘If he wasn’t with you, then who was?’

  ‘I forget,’ O’Dempsey said. He suggested they both go back and see Shorty.

  Back in Allan Street, McCulkin sat down with O’Dempsey and Dubois in the kitchen. It was time to get down to brass tacks. Billy had known O’Dempsey for about eight years and they had had some criminal adventures together. Billy was also aware that O’Dempsey’s reputation was not a savoury one. Allegations that he murdered people who got in his way or threatened his freedom swirled around him. He had briefly lived in their house when he got out of gaol in late 1970. And Billy knew that in recent weeks O’Dempsey had shown some physical interest in his wife, Barbara.

  As for Dubois, he was largely an unknown quantity who had served a long prison stretch for rape, even though Shorty had helped Vince and himself pull off the Torino insurance scam bombing.

  Billy went on about his missing family. ‘If you know anything about it, tell me,’ Billy said, ‘I’ve had to go to the bobbies about it. I’m worried about them.’

  Both Vince and Shorty assured him that they would like to help.

  Then Billy turned to Vince and asked: ‘What were you doing there [at Dorchester Street]?’

  ‘I wasn’t there,’ O’Dempsey said according to McCulkin’s statement to police.

  ‘Well I don’t care if she’s run off with anybody or anything like that, all I want to do is find out if she’s alright.’

  ‘We don’t know anything,’ O’Dempsey and Dubois told him.

  ‘Well look,’ Billy said, ‘if anything has happened to them, I’ll just blow the heads off the person whoever done it.’

  The next day – Sunday 20 January – Detective Basil Hicks was telephoned by Billy McCulkin, who asked to see him urgently.

  ‘I met him at the Ampol Service Station at The Gap [in the city’s west],’ Hicks said in a statement. ‘At the time, McCulkin was very upset. He told me that his wife and two children were missing and that he feared that they may have been murdered.’

  Hicks met McCulkin at Dorchester Street the following day. McCulkin informed him that the girls across the road had seen ‘Vince and Shorty’ at the house the previous Wednesday night.

  ‘He [Billy] said that he was sure that they were responsible for his wife’s and children’s disappearance,’ Hicks added in his statement. ‘McCulkin said that he knew O’Dempsey as a vicious criminal and that he was capable of committing any offence, including murder. He said that he knew Dubois as a sexual pervert who was always talking about having sex with very young girls. He said he was convinced that they had gone to the house to rape his wife and two children either there or away from the house, and afterwards murder them.’

  McCulkin reiterated to Hicks that if he found out that Vince and Shorty were definitely responsible, he would ‘shoot them both’.

  ‘I am telling you now, I don’t want it to go any further than you,’ Billy told Hicks. ‘If I find out that Vince and Shorty have done anything to Barbara and the kids I will fuckin’ blow them both apart. I won’t do them one at a time. I will fuckin’ blow them both apart at one time.’

  Hicks concluded, in his CIU report, that he believed if Billy found any evidence that Vince and Shorty had something to do with the disappearances, he would ‘murder them without any hesitation’.

  On Monday, O’Dempsey telephoned McCulkin and told him not to worry about his wife and children – he was sure they would all be back in time for the children to begin the school year. During this conversation he also asked McCulkin if he had a gun. Perhaps someone was trying to ‘square up’ with Billy McCulkin over something that happened in the past, O’Dempsey suggested. McCulkin was positive O’Dempsey was just sounding him out to see if he had an available weapon.

  McCulkin assured him that he had a shotgun ready. McCulkin confided in Detective Hicks that he in fact feared that O’Dempsey might harm him.

  What Billy McCulkin – frantic about his missing family – did not know about were the conversations that were going on between members of the Clockwork Orange Gang.

  It was the morning habit of Peter Hall, living in Chermside with Carolyn Scully, to cruise by Shorty’s mother’s house in Kedron, where Shorty was living, pick him up and then sort out ‘what jobs we could find’ that day, namely break and enters and general theft.

  But Shorty was nowhere to be found on the morning of Thursday 17 January, the day after the disappearance of the McCulkins. Hall told police in a statement decades after the event: ‘When we got there [Allan Street, Kedron] Shorty was not there and we were told he had not come home the night before; neither his mum nor Jan [Stubbs, Shorty’s partner] knew where he was. It was unusual for him not to come home, but more so for us not to know what we were all up to.

  ‘We checked all the usual places, we checked in with Tom [Hamilton]. We did not know where O’Dempsey lived so we could not go there to see if Shorty was with him. This was unusual and Keith [Meredith] and I went to try and find him.’

  As it transpired, Dubois turned up at Scully’s house later that day. According to Hall: ‘He initially wouldn’t say where he had been the night before, he said he got tied up with something, he was pretty vague, but I could tell something wasn’t right. He didn’t even want to come out cruising. It was also strange that he didn’t want to talk about the night before. Shorty was not himself after [that] night. He could not settle down.’

  Either that day or the next, O’Dempsey turned up at Allan Street and sat in his parked car. Dubois went outside to talk to him then O’Dempsey left. Hall was convinced ‘something had gone on’ with the two men but Shorty said nothing.

 
On that weekend the gang convened in the kitchen at Allan Street with O’Dempsey and Dubois. Tommy Hamilton asked O’Dempsey directly if he had anything to do with the disappearance of the McCulkins. ‘He denied it saying that he was being set up by the coppers for things he’d done in the past,’ Hall recalled in his statement.

  Then, as Billy McCulkin was racing around Brisbane looking for his family, and sought help from Detective Basil Hicks, the gang – Peter Hall, Tommy Hamilton, Keith Meredith and Shorty Dubois – were in one of their cars just shooting the breeze when Dubois allegedly opened up about what had really happened on the night of Wednesday 16 January.

  ‘He told us they took the girls for a drive,’ Hall said in his statement. ‘He said he didn’t know what was in O’Dempsey’s head at first, but Vince tied them up. He said he drove them to the bush and that’s where it happened.

  ‘He said Vince took Barbara away into the dark and strangled her. He said that Barbara was not raped; he thought that’s what it was going to be but he just killed her. He said he couldn’t see it but he could hear the gurgling sound. He said he felt sick and it seemed to take forever. He said he knew then that the kids were going to be killed.’

  According to Hall, O’Dempsey raped one of the children and told Dubois to rape the other. ‘He said he didn’t want to but was not game to refuse,’ Hall alleged. ‘He said that Vince then killed the girls. He said O’Dempsey asked him to kill the other one but he couldn’t do it.

  ‘He didn’t say specifically how the girls were killed but he was clear he didn’t kill anyone. Vince killed them all. He said they were buried. He said that they had both been digging. Shorty said he felt even worse when the sun came up and he had to look at them, they were laying there …’

  Shorty now feared O’Dempsey, Hall said, and the gang kept a keen eye on O’Dempsey. ‘We knew what he was capable of, and were wary of him having some strange thoughts, and that he might want to tie up loose ends,’ Hall said.

  For the first time, some members of the Clockwork Orange Gang began to suspect that O’Dempsey may have been ‘protected’ by corrupt police.

  ‘Looking back at it now … and realising that for many years O’Dempsey may have been a protected species – I have no doubt police were involved somewhere along the line,’ one former gang member says. ‘He got away with stuff for so long. How they were never convicted to start with [after the coroner’s recommendations at the 1980 inquest] … I didn’t even know that they’d hauled him and Shorty in for trial. Why wasn’t I dragged in to give evidence then?

  ‘Then I hear the stories about files going missing and different stuff going missing … I’d say he worked for Murphy. What he did for Tony Murphy I don’t know … [or] who disappeared under Murphy’s orders to him…

  ‘He definitely got away with things he shouldn’t have. If Murphy had some control over him, he would have been an ace in his pocket for sure. We all knew around town that McCulkin was an informer. We didn’t know with who, but I heard later it was a guy named Hicks. Apparently he [Hicks] was also getting information off O’Dempsey too. They were at one stage fairly close, McCulkin and O’Dempsey.

  ‘Then later we started to realise that Murphy was maybe mixed up in [the McCulkin disappearances]. We could not work out how, after witnesses saw them [Vince and Shorty] there [in Dorchester Street] … Vince must have felt pretty safe, that he wasn’t going to be dragged into it, and if he did get dragged into it, that nothing was going to happen.’

  On Monday 21 January, as Billy was giving Detective Hicks a tour of the empty house at 6 Dorchester Street, O’Dempsey telephoned Ross Stephens Car Sales at Newstead and arranged for a salesman to come to the flat in Rosalie and make an offer on his beloved Valiant Charger.

  As Detective Hicks pointed out in his official investigation into the McCulkin disappearances in 1974, O’Dempsey treated that car ‘like a baby’.

  ‘It is suggested that if O’Dempsey could possibly love anything it was this car,’ Hicks noted. ‘He would cover it each night with a sheet of silk and it was a standing joke with all persons who knew him that it was the only thing he really cared for.’

  O’Dempsey sold the car on the spot for $2900.

  The next day his de facto, Dianne Pritchard, turned up at the Polonia massage parlour. A co-worker reported that she ‘appeared to be particularly worried at this time’. Soon after she headed over to the Vogue Private Hotel in South Brisbane and picked up some belongings she had stored there. That evening, a couple living in the flat next door to O’Dempsey and Pritchard in Rosalie observed men taking household goods and personal items to a car parked outside.

  ‘Shorty asked us to help Vince leave town [and] we agreed to help,’ Peter Hall later told police in a statement. ‘Shortly after we went to Vince’s unit … Vince was not there when we got there, but his partner, Dianne, let us in … I recall we were carrying heavy stuff down some stairs and putting it in the car. We transported it all to a relative of Dianne’s, maybe her parents. I remember Dianne was really upset and angry that she had to move. She was pretty drunk at the time and was blowing up because everything was in turmoil.’

  Hall said he knew O’Dempsey was leaving town because of the McCulkin investigation. On Tuesday 22 January Adrian Burton, the owner of the ‘Nethercote Court’ block of flats, was at the property doing the gardening when he saw O’Dempsey leave.

  ‘… he arrived back an hour later,’ Burton later told a court. ‘He had three gentlemen with him.’ He observed the men removing garbage bags of items.

  The next day, while collecting the rent from tenants, he noticed that the occupants of Unit 8 had gone.

  ‘It was empty,’ he said. ‘There was nothing there other than coathangers.’

  Hawks Nest

  Just north of the working-class town of Newcastle, then a rough and tumble port town, is Port Stephens, and on the northern tip of its inlet is the village of Hawks Nest. Popular with holidaymakers since the 1950s Hawks Nest was just a thatch of streets facing Bennetts Beach, and despite the seasonal crowds, it was a fine place to lie low. It was also a convenient bolt hole for anyone who might have pulled a job in Sydney or Newcastle and needed to disappear fast.

  It also happened to be the temporary base for a handful of Queensland criminals in January 1974, and it was where Clockwork Orange Gang member, Peter Hall, chose to shack up until the dust settled over the McCulkins’ disappearances. Not long after, in late January or early February, Hall was staying with a mate when they received unexpected visitors.

  ‘While I was there O’Dempsey and Dianne Pritchard turned up …’ Hall later told police. ‘They had their own place … there was no discussion or conversation with Vince while we were in NSW about the McCulkins other than that he was laying low for a while. Nothing was ever said to him about what Shorty had told us.’

  Another associate says he remembers O’Dempsey and Pritchard arriving at Hawks Nest. It was more than a week after the McCulkins vanishing, and in the back of his mind he had an idea that O’Dempsey and Pritchard, as well as Dubois and his partner, Jan, might have had some time away together before O’Dempsey turned up down south.

  ‘At that point I never heard a thing about the McCulkins, I never heard a thing about it, nothing. Then Vince rung a mate’s place and my mate asked him, how did he get his phone number, or something, and he said Shorty gave him the number. He [O’Dempsey] was ringing from Newcastle … and my mate arranged to meet him in a suburb called Hamilton, in Newcastle, outside the post office there.

  ‘O’Dempsey said he was sick of it up in Queensland and he wanted a good place to stay down here,’ the criminal remembered. ‘He said he definitely didn’t want to stay in the city. It was suggested he might want to settle in Nelson Bay, across Port Stephen from Hawks Nest, on the southern side. O’Dempsey said he’d drive around and take a look.

  ‘I watched a fight with my mate and O’D
empsey on the 28th, I think it might have been [in] February, with Tony Anthony, no Tony Mundine and Bennie Briscoe,’ he recalls. (Middleweight Australian champion Tony Mundine fought tough Philadelphia fighter Bad Bennie Briscoe at the Palais des Sports in Paris on the night of 25 February 1974. Mundine lost by knockout in the fifth round.)

  Anyone who observed O’Dempsey at Hawks Nest noticed his unusual living habits. ‘He was a nut case, he’d stay in his room all day,’ one witness said. ‘He bought a fishing rod because someone esle bought one and we could go fishing and he couldn’t fish, he’d try it out and it’d go backwards. And Dianne would say, you fucking idiot, and all this sort of stuff.

  ‘He’d be fucking reading … drawing maps … “I could rob this bank and do this and do that … that’s Warwick, the bank there, somewhere else … I know this area, we could get straight into the bush.” By then, you know, we got to know what happened in Brisbane with the McCulkins. O’Dempsey said Billy McCulkin had been looking for him and Shorty…

  ‘Someone said to Vince, what’s this about the McCulkins?

  ‘“Oh,” he said, “she’s most likely run off to her sister’s or something,” which I thought that sounds more like it. No one in their right mind would think that what happened to them happened to them, you know. Then we started to have a bit of a look at him, [and] I thought, oh fuck, there’s a big fight in this cunt.’

  Everyone who came into contact with O’Dempsey began to keep a cautious eye on him.

  One acquaintance of O’Dempsey at that time in Hawks Nest noticed that he had a moderately sized hunting knife. The acquaintance borrowed it to go fishing, and promptly lost it. O’Dempsey was enraged, and scoured the local fishing spots for the missing knife. ‘He went insane, lost his mind over that knife,’ one witness says.