The Night Dragon

by Matthew Condon

  However, there was also some time for fun. Peter Hall and his cohort were clowning around and decided to play some jokes on Vince. ‘He’s colour blind and me and Peter Hall done a menswear store … there was a heap of stuff there he [Peter] was selling and he said, “Take what you want Vince”, you know, it’s all on. Peter urged him to pick something out.

  ‘Peter said, because we were the same size, you know. Vince said he didn’t want any loud colours, I don’t know what … there was probably hundreds, there was pink there, pink pants and a fucking green shirt or something. That’s what Vince took. He was colour blind. Didn’t know what he was choosing. I used to try not to laugh and it was hard not to. Peter said, “He’ll wake up, you know, he’ll fucking kill you.” He was roaring with laughter.’

  Meanwhile, back in Queensland, after weeks of heavy rain, a catastrophic flood would inundate Brisbane. Fourteen people would lose their lives. Almost 8000 homes would be destroyed.

  The great flood would, seemingly, sweep away any further interest in the disappearance of Barbara, Vicki and Leanne McCulkin. When the sun finally came out again in Brisbane, it was as if they had never existed.

  After the Storm

  In the chaotic aftermath of the floods, it would take a full 17 days before the local press would report on the disappearance of the McCulkins. On Saturday 2 February a story on page three of the Courier-Mail expressed ‘concern’ for the safety of Barbara and the girls. ‘Police said they had no clue as to the whereabouts of the missing trio who appeared to have simply disappeared from the house,’ the story said.

  ‘Up to now we’ve been treating them as missing persons,’ a police officer said, ‘but by now we’ve had to start to think about something else happening to them. We just hope we have not got another murder on our hands.’

  The next day, the Sunday Mail escalated the drama surrounding the disappearances. Inspector J. Ryan of the Brisbane CIB said: ‘We have the strongest suspicion that there has been foul play,’ he said. ‘We are deeply concerned for the family’s safety.’

  And there the stories ended.

  One close associate of O’Dempsey’s wanted to see him after news broke of the disappearance of the McCulkins. ‘When that hit the papers I cruised up to Vince’s place … but the place was deserted. Little did I know at the time that when it hit the newspapers he’d been on the run for about three weeks. It was not until February that the coppers reported it to homicide and the media.’

  It was beyond fortuitous for the perpetrators that the media had not picked up on the story for a full two and a half weeks. Public pressure through the press was usually followed by increased police attention to a case. In the matter of the McCulkins, by fate or otherwise, the case had been allowed to languish for a significant amount of time. It wasn’t until Tuesday 5 February, that police photographic and forensic experts combed 6 Dorchester Street looking for clues.

  The disappearance and presumed murder of the McCulkins effectively ended the Clockwork Orange Gang and its operations, though some of them remained in contact. As Hall would later say, ‘it was never the same’ after the McCulkins.

  O’Dempsey and Dubois, however, remained in touch even if they didn’t risk being seen together. By April 1974, most of the Hawks Nest gang – including Peter Hall – had settled back in Brisbane. So too had Garry Dubois. Vince and Dianne were still moving around.

  During this time, for whatever reason, O’Dempsey acted entirely out of character and wrote a letter to Shorty Dubois. He wanted Shorty to do two specific jobs for him. ‘This was just a few months after the McCulkins disappeared,’ a witness says. ‘I saw that letter. Vince wanted Shorty to get rid of the Gaytons.’

  The Gayton sisters who lived across the road from the McCulkins, had identified Vince and Shorty outside the McCulkin home on the evening Barbara and the kids disappeared. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what was in the letter,’ the witness says. ‘He wanted to blow the fucking Gayton house to pieces with gelignite and petrol. He said don’t bother lighting the petrol because the fucking gelignite would ignite it. He had specific instructions about how the fuel and gelignite were to be placed at the front and back doors of the house so that nobody escaped, including the girls’ parents.’

  The other component of the letter was instructions on how to exhume and destroy ‘the bodies’, presumably those of the McCulkins. ‘He wanted Shorty to go and dig the bodies up, take drums, empty drums and drums of acid, put the bones in the acid and let it run down a fast flowing stream,’ the witness says. ‘I never told the police that, I don’t think I could say that, I couldn’t say that in a court of law. Of course Shorty didn’t do any of that. It was insane.’

  He says Tommy Hamilton was ‘filthy’ when he’d heard that Vince and Shorty had raped and murdered the McCulkin children.

  As for O’Dempsey, those around him didn’t know what to do about his growing menace. ‘Peter Hall used to sit up at night and wonder, you know, somebody has got to stop this cunt,’ one witness says. ‘But what could you do?’

  Port News

  It was not exactly The New York Times, but in turbulent Brisbane in the mid-1970s a small magazine was making huge waves in the criminal underworld. The Port News – the official journal of the Storemen and Packers’ Union (Queensland Branch) – was published every two months and was edited by Mr William ‘Billy’ Stokes.

  Stokes had done a stint in Westbrook Farm Home for Boys with Stuart and was familiar with members of the Clockwork Orange Gang. Stokes had gotten into some trouble in New South Wales, and taken off to New Zealand in the early 1970s. He worked selling advertisements into small magazines and on his return to Brisbane, secured the editorship of the Port News.

  In a series of explosive articles Stokes claimed he could expose the truth behind the nightclub fires. Stokes knew that Tommy Hamilton, a local champion boxer, and his gang (including Peter Hall, Keith Meredith and Garry Dubois) were supposedly paid to bomb Torino nightclub in Fortitude Valley, prior to the Whiskey fire. He claimed he had witnessed them bragging about it. Stokes wrote that he knew gangster Billy McCulkin and some members of the gang also had a hand in the Whiskey fire. He also published details about the vanishing and murder of the McCulkin girls.

  In February 1975, Stokes wrote in an editorial: ‘The following report is very real in all details, but because of the many legal consequences involved, it has been necessary to use only nicknames … and aliases …’

  According to Billy Stokes the primary suspect was someone he called ‘The Loner’. ‘He is considered a very violent man capable of violent acts … at present The Loner is hiding out in Sydney, wanted by police for questioning for five murders … [including] “Mrs X” and her two children.’

  Next was ‘Mr X’. Stokes wrote that X was a leading character in arranging both the Torino and Whiskey firebombings. ‘Because of an association that his estranged wife, “Mrs X”, had formed with “The Loner” … she and her two children were eventually to suffer cold blooded, premeditated murder.’

  Stokes claimed to have inside information on what happened the day ‘Mrs X’ and her two daughters vanished.

  The day came when ‘Mrs X’ was visited by ‘The Loner’ and ‘Shorty’ [Dubois]. On the surface it was just a typical social visit amongst friends. When [they] suggested a drive to break the monotony indoors, she accepted, and suspecting nothing took her children with her.

  Two months later, in the Port News April edition, Stokes continued his extraordinary series, with one page dedicated to the ‘killing of Mrs X’. The page was illustrated with a photograph of Barbara McCulkin.

  Whatever happened to Mrs X and children? I believe that she and the family have been sexually assaulted, cut open with knives, raped and degradedly abused when dead. I believe this because the Clockwork Orange Gang told me that that is what they did. The gory details came to me across the phone, and I taped all the calls. I wouldn
’t print the details because of the depraved butchery that they contained.

  In the June edition of Port News, with the story still running, Stokes identified ‘The Loner’ as Vincent O’Dempsey and ‘Shorty’ as Garry Dubois.

  Then, Tommy Hamilton was abducted by a masked intruder on the night of Friday 10 January 1975 from a house near Hamilton. He disappeared without trace and was never seen again. There was no suggestion that O’Dempsey was involved in Hamilton’s abduction. As Stokes was publishing his damning series of articles, O’Dempsey was arrested in Sydney and charged with the unlawful possession of explosives, possession of Indian hemp and use of an unlicensed pistol. In the end he was sentenced to two years in prison with a non-parole period of one year.

  During an inquest into Hamilton’s disappearance in January 1978, witnesses implicated Billy Stokes and he was committed for trial and later found guilty of Hamilton’s murder on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Stokes was sentenced to life in prison.

  ‘How could you?’ he reportedly asked the jury.

  Stokes was the first defendant to be found guilty of murder in the absence of a body in Queensland history. He has always maintained his innocence.

  Stokes claimed that publishing the stories at the time was a way of protecting himself. ‘It wasn’t as dangerous as doing nothing, publishing those stories.’ He said, ‘If I do nothing, they’re [the Clockwork Orange gang] only going to get stronger and stronger in their momentum … If I do nothing, the position is more dangerous. If I’d just sat back and ignored all of this … someone would have made a move on me.’

  Stokes and his little publication were also the source of enormous angst down in the offices of the CIB. One intelligence officer remembered: ‘There was some sort of fight going on between Vince O’Dempsey and Billy Stokes. I used to get the Port News delivered to my desk. Because of what Stokes was publishing in the Port News about the Whiskey and the Clockwork Orange Gang, we were expecting a gang war to break out.’

  In September 1976 O’Dempsey was released from prison in New South Wales and made his way home to Queensland.

  More Heat

  Not long after his release from gaol O’Dempsey once again found himself too close to the spotlight for his liking. In 1977, interest in not only the McCulkin disappearance but the presumed murders of Margaret Ward and Tommy Allen was ignited once again when Queensland police decided to reinvestigate the cold cases.

  It was in fact Inspector Tony Murphy, back in Brisbane as the head of the Consorting Squad, who ordered that the cases be looked at again. Murphy was back in his element in the city after his old friend, Terry Lewis, was elevated to commissioner in late 1976 following Whitrod’s resignation. And the wily detective loved nothing more than getting his teeth into a gritty murder.

  This situation, however, may not have been all it seemed. By initiating a cold case murder investigation into O’Dempsey, Murphy was seen as proactively seeking a resolution to the unsolved murders. But at the same time, by triggering a new investigation Murphy could retain control of the outcome of such an investigation, and ultimately ensure that nothing would come of any subsequent charges that may be recommended by a coroner.

  After all, Murphy had successfully avoided prosecution over allegations of corruption when a royal commission was called into sex workers at Brisbane’s National Hotel in 1963. By reopening the investigations into the McCulkins, Ward and Allen, and any lingering doubts about the Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing, Murphy could contain the speculation about O’Dempsey’s involvement and the involvement of others, including corrupt police. In this scenario, Murphy could say, there was simply not enough evidence to proceed through the court system.

  To the criminal underworld, however, these actions pointed more and more towards the reality that O’Dempsey was a protected species, and most probably by Tony Murphy himself.

  Still, Murphy chose two young guns – Alan Marshall and Trevor Menary – to look into the five disappearances and see what they came up with. ‘Billy McCulkin was known to Tony Murphy,’ Marshall said years later. ‘All those characters – Brian Aherne [owner of the Lands Office Hotel], Estelle Long. He knew all of them. And he liked to do unsolved murder investigations.’

  Both Marshall and Menary worked meticulously for about two years. They gathered statements from many of the leading players and joined some dots. They paid Billy McCulkin a visit. He was then married to Estelle Long.

  ‘We went out to their place,’ Marshall said. ‘He was ranting and raving [about] fucking coppers … He’d reported his kids missing and the coppers didn’t do the right thing, he said. They were stupid comments. Billy was a shit. He’s not the sort of person you’d have as a friend. But he really missed the girls.’

  They had enough material to see the instigation of a coronial inquest into the five disappearances. ‘I did think we had enough,’ Marshall said of the case they’d put together.

  The police thought there was a chance that McCulkin might roll over and tell everything he knew about the Whiskey Au Go Go and his missing family. ‘Trevor Menary didn’t drink,’ recalls Marshall. ‘But I would go there and I would sit down and we’d sit there for hours and I’d drink with Bill. We thought, one day he’s going to slip, he’s going to say something …’ Marshall says they were looking into McCulkin’s connections with the Whiskey firebombing, they thought if McCulkin implicated himself and those involved they could get him an indemnity. ‘We’d be drinking beer and whatever and trying to get him [Billy] to make a faux pas. Never happened. He stuck to his story.’

  At one point, Marshall took Billy McCulkin into police headquarters. Head of the CIB, Detective Tony Murphy, wanted to see him. ‘I took him into Tony Murphy’s office and sat him down. And Tony said to him, “Look Bill it’s your wife and kids. We don’t have … what we can see as being a watertight motive. But if you want to tell us what you were involved in that may have led to O’Dempsey killing your wife and kids, maybe we can sort of work it out with [lawyer] Des Sturgess and see what can happen.” But even as far as an indemnity, it never worked.’

  Meanwhile, O’Dempsey and his de facto, Dianne Pritchard, had settled temporarily at 9 Rise Street, Holland Park, with a friend he’d met in Boggo Road during the 1960s. Both O’Dempsey and his friend were working ‘straight’ jobs, as house painters. His friend had started the business and had his own crew. O’Dempsey would turn up to work in immaculate white KingGee overalls. There was not a tattoo in sight to ‘scare off the old ladies’.

  ‘Everyone in that crew was terrified of O’Dempsey,’ says one acquaintance, familiar with the house painting operation. ‘On the days they were spray-painting houses, you had to be finished by 3 p.m. so that Vince could clean the spray guns. Vince would pull the guns completely apart. He had tools of all sorts to keep every inch of the spray guns clean. He had all the parts laid out meticulously in the back of the ute. Then he’d put it all back together. No one was allowed to go to the back of the ute when Vince was doing his cleaning. He had all the parts laid out like a body.’

  Another time, the crew was on a job at Woodridge, south of the Brisbane CBD. O’Dempsey helped the lady of the house select the colour scheme for the painting job. ‘We all knew he was colour blind. Anyway, the colours picked out were mission brown for the main body of the house and burnt orange for the trims. From then on, the place was known as “The Jaffa”.’

  O’Dempsey also told friends about another botched job, courtesy of his eyesight. They were painting a woman’s house when his friend wanted to pack up early and go to the pub. ‘Because O’Dempsey didn’t get on the drink, he stayed behind to finish the touch-ups himself. Vince is fucking colour blind, so he’s got the fucking thing, the paintbrush, and started … doing the touch-ups. Well, the woman’s come home and she’s fucking distraught. She said, “What’s going on with my house? It looks like a fucking hyena!” And he said, because he’s heard the other b
oys say, “What happens is, it just goes on wet and looks like that, but it’ll dry and then you won’t notice it.” Apparently O’Dempsey’s friend got back and went, “Oh fuck, here we go” … it was a story they did talk about, and that was hilarious.’

  Life in Rise Street was good, except when Pritchard hit the bottle. The friend’s wife remembered in a statement to police: ‘I recall one time ... Vince said that he had tied Dianne up and left her on the bedroom floor. They had just finished painting a house and came home for tea ... O’Dempsey wasn’t drinking but he would fire up when the boys drank. He was talking about tying Dianne up. I remember he said he left her tied up on the bedroom floor at the house. I was shocked by this.

  ‘I remember Vince said to me, “I’ve tied up people and put them in shallow graves all over Australia.” He kind of laughed when he said it but the way he said it, he meant it. The comment scared me.’

  According to the friend’s wife, as the house painting venture continued, another scheme was cooking around the same time. ‘[My husband] set up an insurance fraud with Medibank,’ the wife told police. ‘He got me and other people to take in another person’s Medibank forms and get money for it. There were about five of us doing it … I told my mother what [my husband] had made me do and she rang the police and then Inspector [Tony] Murphy came and saw me about it. I knew who Inspector Murphy was, I had heard [my husband] talk about him a lot. [My husband] could not stand him.’

  Murphy interviewed the wife at her mother’s house in Nundah, and she became aware that he was taping their conversation. ‘I stopped talking then and left the room,’ she recounted. ‘I believe that tape was later played to Vince O’Dempsey. I think the tapes were given out over the legal system for him to hear what I said that day in my mother’s kitchen.’

  The couple were arrested in 1978 over the fraud. The wife eventually got six months’ gaol for her part in the fraud. Her husband and others got twelve months. According to O’Dempsey’s associates, he too had admitted his part in the Medibank scam, but he did no prison time. (At the end of 1979 he was issued a paltry fine for his involvement.)