The Night Dragon

by Matthew Condon

  Why did Tony Murphy, back in Brisbane from his exile in Longreach under previous police commissioner Ray Whitrod, get personally involved in the Medibank con? And how did O’Dempsey evade prosecution altogether?

  It at least appeared that since his release from Boggo Road Gaol in Brisbane in late 1970, Vincent O’Dempsey had tiptoed through a minefield of crime, including allegations of murder, and come through relatively unscathed, despite his year in prison in New South Wales.

  According to criminal associates, O’Dempsey was ‘dropped’ by his Sydney cohorts following the McCulkin murders, and in particular the deaths of the two children, Vicki and Leanne. If O’Dempsey had committed the crime, he had broken the sacred code among criminals of not harming children.

  ‘After the McCulkins, the work for Vince in Sydney dried up, they dropped off him,’ says one acquaintance. O’Dempsey’s criminal activities would now play out a lot closer to home.

  The Lady Vanishes

  Detective Sergeant Keith Smith of the Brisbane Homicide Squad could have been forgiven for thinking his shift on Sunday 18 September 1977 was going to be a quiet one. He had clocked on to work at around 9 a.m. and was joined by his good friend and policing partner, Detective Robert Cassidy.

  It was expected to be a fine day, and soon more than 37,000 football punters from across the city would congregate at Lang Park for the Brisbane Rugby League premiership grand final between the Easts Tigers and the Redcliffe Dolphins.

  Smith and Cassidy were settling into their shift in Forbes House in Makerston Street, North Quay, when the phone rang. It was the senior sergeant on the front desk. ‘You’d better come out to the counter here, we’ve got the uniform police,’ he said. ‘They’ve got a woman, a missing person case, you might have to look into.’

  The uniform police were there with a woman called Marcia Barnard, and the officers explained the background to the situation. ‘So we took Marcia into our office and sat her down and took a statement off her. She was very distressed, Marcia, she was genuinely distressed.’

  The detectives would soon learn that this appeared to be much more than a run of the mill missing person’s case. Barnard wanted to report that her boss, Norma Jean Pavich, also known as Simone Vogel, had not been seen since Friday afternoon.

  Vogel, it turned out, ran an empire of massage parlours in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast, and this disappearing act was hugely out of character. She was married to a Gold Coast plasterer and builder called Steve Pavich, and had one child – Mark Baptiste – to a previous marriage. He was set to turn 21 in less than three weeks and she was very excited about planning his upcoming party in Sydney.

  ‘Marcia was the overall manageress of all the parlours, she was at Stones Corner and that was the head office of Simone’s massage parlours,’ Smith says. ‘Marcia was a friend, a good friend to Simone, so she reported her missing.’

  The official one-page Missing Person Report stated that Vogel, originally from Sydney, was 42 years old, 152 centimetres tall, of medium build with a fair complexion and blonde hair (she often sported a wig). She was wearing blue jeans, a multi-coloured jumper and sandal-type shoes.

  Vogel had last been seen at one of her parlours – the Kon Tiki Health Studio at 91 Gympie Road, Kedron. (She also owned: Beau Brummel in Beckman Street, Zillmere; Napoleon’s Retreat at 454 Lutwyche Road, Lutwyche; Golden Hands at 1145 Ipswich Road, Moorooka; Saunette at 144 Adelaide Street, Brisbane city; the Coronet Parlour in South Brisbane; and her headquarters, New Executive Suite, at 431 Logan Road, Stones Corner.) She had a mighty empire, and one you wouldn’t think might be troubled by O’Dempsey’s little Polonia operation on Lutwyche Road, with its tiny rooms and kitchen out the back.

  The report said that on Friday 16 September 1977 Vogel had travelled to Brisbane from her Gold Coast home. Barnard saw her at the Executive Suite at Stones Corner where Vogel received a telephone call from her son, Mark, in Sydney. Vogel showed signs of relief after the call. She then received another call at about midday, and Barnard heard Vogel say, ‘You name the place and I’ll meet you there.’

  The report continued: ‘The Missing Person [Vogel] went away and returned at about 3.30 p.m. She received a telephone call at 3.45 p.m. during which the following conversation was overheard by the Inquirer [Barnard]. “I’ll meet you in the same parking spot that I met you at before about half past six.”’

  Barnard told police that when Vogel got off the phone she asked for $3000. A cash cheque was produced. Vogel then left the New Executive at 5.10 p.m. and went to her Kon Tiki massage parlour at Kedron, where she picked up another $3000. This was the last seen of the missing person,’ the report said.

  Simone Vogel, Brisbane’s largest brothel madam, socialite, and mother, had vanished off the face of the earth. Unbeknown to anyone, that quiet Sunday morning was the beginning of a complex 40-year cold case murder mystery.

  The High Life

  Norma Jean Beniston, born on 4 April 1935, grew up as part of a sprawling family in West Ryde, 13 kilometres north-west of the Sydney CBD. Frank Beniston, a plumber, and his wife Kathleen, married in their teens and went on to have seven children – six girls and a boy. Norma was the oldest.

  Her brother, Bob Beniston, remembers a crowded household and a hard-working father who tried his best to provide for his children. ‘Dad was the sole bread winner and he really looked after us,’ Beniston remembers. ‘Every time there was a school holiday, because he was a plumber that worked for himself all his life, and you know … as soon as the school holiday started on the Thursday, we’d be off … the whole car or ute would be packed. I can remember Norma coming with us when I was really young.’

  At 17, Norma married Kevin Frederick Tayler, but the union was short-lived. By 1955 she had hooked up with a man named Raymond Eugene Baptiste (also known as David Marshall). Less than two years later she began her peripatetic career as a prostitute on the streets of Kings Cross. Between 1957 and 1966 she accrued 170 convictions for street prostitution. There is no doubt she crossed paths with former Queensland prostitute and brothel madam Shirley Brifman, who was operating out of the Cross at the same time, as was Dianne Pritchard, who later become de facto to O’Dempsey.

  Bob Beniston, though young, remembers his oldest sister’s comings and goings early in her career. ‘Well, she’d come home and live with us for a little while, like Mum and Dad and me and our little sisters. And then sort of go again,’ he says. ‘And I know at one stage she said she was going somewhere and she didn’t come back for about nine months. Nobody knew where she was. Whether she went to gaol or not, and that was the story I got, I’ve got no idea.’

  By 1965, Norma had married Baptiste, and the following year she began work for notorious inner-city brothel king, Joe ‘The Writer’ Borg. Borg, a Maltese immigrant, invested heavily in The Lanes – a ‘red light’ precinct of townhouses off Palmer Street in inner-city Darlinghurst, just east of Sydney’s CBD – where about 130 prostitutes worked in shifts. They would rent rooms off the landlord.

  When Norma went to work for Borg, he had about 20 houses under his control. Off the game, she found that she had a striking head for business. ‘Actually, a lot of people used to say she was a business woman,’ her brother Bob Beniston says. ‘She really had her brains on the business. And yeah, she did make a lot of money, for sure.’

  She was also living the high life. Beniston remembers heading over to her home in Newport, on Sydney’s northern beaches. ‘We used to go over there for a weekend,’ he says. ‘You know, I’d finish work and my partner would finish work and then we’d drive over there and stay the whole weekend and go out on a boat and just party with the people that she knew. It was the life of luxury for me, being 17 years old.’

  For Norma, the party didn’t last. Late morning on 28 May 1968, Borg, 35, left his house in Brighton Boulevard, North Bondi, and hopped into his Holden utility parked in the street out front. He had wit
h him one of his treasured Alsatians. Borg turned the ignition and a huge bomb planted beneath the car exploded, throwing him onto the footpath. Both his legs had been almost completely severed. The murder was thought to be related to a factional turf war over Sydney’s prostitution rackets. Three men were later arrested over the killing.

  As for Norma, who was using the alias Yvonne Miller when working for Borg, her job vanished. According to a Queensland CIU report on Norma, she opened her own brothel with Baptiste on Barrenjoey Road at Newport after Borg’s death, but soon headed north to Brisbane.

  ‘When Joe Borg got blown up … I can actually remember the headlines and I can remember when that happened … there was a big argument between Mum and Dad,’ Beniston says. ‘And I think Norma came around and told Mum and Dad that she knew him or something like that, you know? And that’s when she left Sydney. Because I think she might have been the next on the list, you know?’

  By the end of 1971, Norma and Baptiste were renting a house in Mount Ommaney, 14 kilometres west of the Brisbane CBD, under the fake names of Louise and Ron Shepherd. Norma also opened her first Brisbane brothel – the Costa Brava at 491 Stanley Street, South Brisbane. It was the start of a new life, and the beginnings of an extremely lucrative business empire. With her Sydney experience she would revolutionise the sex industry in Brisbane, dragging it from a disorganised cottage industry to a huge money-making network. Her great innovation was disguising brothels as health clinics and massage outlets.

  When she arrived in Brisbane she was likely aware of corruption within the Queensland police force, but perhaps not its depth and breadth. She would become known in police, criminal and social circles as the brothel madam Simone Vogel.

  Her business savvy repaid her with immediate success, and she soon lived the life of a wealthy socialite. Her brother, Bob Beniston, remembers frequent trips to Brisbane and later the Gold Coast where Vogel moved to in 1976 following her divorce from Baptiste. ‘The whole lifestyle, to me now looking back, is mind-boggling,’ Beniston says. ‘I used to see the diamonds and you know, the cars … and I’ll tell you …’

  In February 1976 Vogel purchased a house on a canal at 13 Alma Street, Coral Gables, on the Gold Coast. She also continued to expand her business. By now she was in a long-term relationship with Steven Pavich. They would marry in August 1976, in a civil ceremony at their Coral Gables home.

  In early 1977, however, despite her wealth and power as Brisbane’s leading brothel owner, she was starting to tire of the game. It turned out Vogel was not immune to crooked police and the system of corruption known as The Joke – a vast system of kickbacks from prostitution, SP bookmaking and illegal gambling. And she would have been acutely aware of how Sydney and Brisbane corruption worked. In her old home town, gangsters did their own thing with the assistance of corrupt police, but in Brisbane, the corrupt police ran the show. To open a massage parlour required permission from police, in particular the shady Licensing Branch, and it meant monthly kickbacks to stay in business. Vogel loathed the entire set-up.

  ‘I know that she promised Mum, because Mum knew what she was doing, that she wouldn’t be in it much longer,’ says Beniston. ‘That was possibly early ’77. She might have just had enough and decided, bugger it, I’m not going to give them [corrupt police] any more money. I’m getting out of this.’

  Investigating Officer Keith Smith had a similar theory. He was convinced Vogel was fed up with her businesses being so entangled with corrupt police. ‘She was frustrated with the whole deal and drugs were creeping into the parlours by then,’ Smith recalls. ‘But the main thing with her was her business and she was just being blatantly ripped off by the bloody [Licensing Branch] detectives. She was stood over by those rotten corrupt detectives and it would be on a weekly basis, every week handing out $3000. She must have thought, “They’re getting more out of it than me. This has got to come to a stop.” Why would you want to stay in a business like that?’

  Bob Beniston confirms he discussed the corrupt payments with his sister. ‘I don’t know how it came up but she was telling me she was paying $3000 a week to them,’ he says. Police records revealed that Vogel was earning in excess of $4000 a week from the brothel empire, so the police cut was more than substantial.

  After seven years in Queensland, there was little Vogel didn’t know about corrupt police and The Joke. She was a central cog in the machine. With all that dangerous knowledge, what if she did want to extricate herself from the system? What if she decided to blow the whistle like brothel madam Shirley Brifman just five years earlier, a decision that cost Brifman her life?

  Undercover Licensing Branch officer Kingsley Fancourt interviewed Vogel in the mid-1970s. ‘She was a very, very attractive woman, a $2000 a night job,’ he recalls. ‘She was well-spoken. She conducted herself in a very stately manner. I was starting to … get information. It was well known she was going to start name-dropping and all the rest of it. The heat was on her.’

  Bob Beniston remembers one of the last conversations he ever had face to face with his sister. ‘I was plumbing,’ he says. ‘I was a plumber [like his father]. And I just wanted to be a cop. I joined the Commonwealth Police in March 1977. She [Norma] looked at me and she said, “Do not ever be corrupt.” And I said, “No, I won’t be, I won’t be.” And she said, “Well just make sure you never accept a penny and do everything right.” I won’t say it hit me in the face. But I always remember that last talk with her.’

  Yet Another Missing Person

  After Vogel was reported missing on Sunday 18 September 1977, Smith and Cassidy telephoned their superior, Detective Inspector Ron Redmond, who was in charge of the Homicide Squad. He summoned the young officers to the Breakfast Creek Hotel where they explained the scenario. Redmond said ‘this could be serious’, and he ordered them to investigate immediately.

  Early in the investigation the officers learned from Pavich that when his wife had gone missing on the Friday he had engaged the services of a private investigator – former Gold Coast detective Greg Bignell. Pavich believed the Gold Coast police lacked interest in her disappearance and had hired Bignell to get some answers.

  On the Saturday, Bignell discovered Vogel’s Mercedes SLC convertible in the car park at Brisbane Airport. The car was unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. Presumably at Pavich’s request, the car was towed back to Coral Gables. ‘Bignell’s finding of the vehicle and the removal of it from the airport aroused our suspicions but after speaking with Bignell and Pavich our suspicions were allayed a little,’ Smith later noted.

  Smith travelled to Sydney and interviewed Vogel’s family, friends and former associates. ‘Whilst they believed that [her] marriage was on shaky ground they were adamant that Simone would not have planned her disappearance and just vanish without letting her mother, sister, or her son, Mark, know,’ Smith later wrote.

  While Smith chipped away at his investigation, Vogel was also never far from the thoughts of her younger brother, Bob Beniston. Then, about six months after Vogel vanished, Beniston received a phone call at home.

  ‘Is that First Constable Robert Beniston?’ the caller asked.

  ‘Yeah, yep,’ Beniston replied, thinking it was a mate making a prank call.

  ‘I’m going to tell you this once and once only.’

  ‘Oh yeah, yep, no worries,’ Beniston said.

  ‘Don’t ever set foot in Queensland again.’

  ‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

  ‘Superintendent Syd Atkinson,’ the caller answered.

  Still thinking the call was a hoax, Beniston made light of the situation.

  ‘Do you understand what I said?’ the caller asked. ‘It’s Superintendent Syd Atkinson here. I just told you don’t ever set foot in Queensland again or you’re dead.’

  Atkinson had been superintendent of the Gold Coast region since February 1977. He was close friends with then commissioner Terry Lewis
as well as other senior police of that era including Tony Murphy. (More than a decade later, allegations of corruption would be levelled at Atkinson during the Fitzgerald inquiry.)

  Beniston, still not convinced of the caller’s legitimacy, said he would phone Atkinson back, which he did. He was put through to Atkinson’s phone.

  ‘I … told you,’ Atkinson allegedly replied. ‘Don’t set foot in Queensland again or you’re dead.’

  Eighteen months after his sister vanished, Beniston was called into Commonwealth Police headquarters in Canberra and interviewed about Simone. ‘These two dudes sat me down and did the full-on interview,’ Beniston says. ‘I asked them what the statement was for. They said [Queensland Police] Commissioner Lewis has asked for this statement … they want to know what you know about it all. Of course, looking back now, I was an idiot to even open my mouth.’

  At about that time Beniston compiled his own report into Vogel’s disappearance and concluded that there may have been Queensland police involvement in her disappearance and likely murder. He had interviewed many of Vogel’s employees and came up with the names of four Queensland police officers. He submitted his report to his own commissioner at the Commonwealth Police and heard nothing further.

  After more than two years, Smith, in Queensland, compiled an official report of his investigation. He too concluded, in part, that there may have been police involvement in Simone Vogel’s disappearance.

  Superintendent Tony Murphy, in charge of the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB), read the report and called Smith and Cassidy into his office. ‘He told us we were on the wrong track,’ Smith remembers. ‘He said we weren’t putting enough effort into Pavich as the main suspect. Murphy always wanted Pavich. Murphy said we couldn’t see the woods for the trees.’