The Night Dragon

by Matthew Condon

  Murphy took both Smith and Cassidy off the investigation and appointed two other detectives to the job. Smith knew Murphy’s decision couldn’t be overturned, so he produced another report along the same lines as the first and gave it to a friend and fellow officer he believed he could trust.

  ‘At some stage or other there was going to be a coronial inquest … or a breakthrough on this investigation one way or another … and I wanted to secure this report of mine and I wanted it to remain, naturally, confidential,’ says Smith. ‘Then, I forget how much later it was … they decided to have an inquest. So I thought to myself, I’ll go and get that report. I thought it was safe where it was. I didn’t even tell Ron Redmond I was doing it … if that report got out I was in bloody serious trouble.

  ‘I rang my friend up and asked him about my report which he had secured in a safe. He said my report came up in discussions with Commissioner [Lewis] and Tony Murphy somewhere along the line about that investigation. He said somehow or other my name came up … it must have come up about my suspicions … he said what I put in that report was discussed at length by the Commissioner and Murphy and they decided none of it could be substantiated, there was nothing there by way of solid evidence. He told me it was decided that that report would be shredded.’

  In 1980, the Vogel case earned a mention at the inquest into the disappearances of Brisbane mother Barbara McCulkin and her two daughters in 1974, and the disappearance and suspected murder of prostitute Margaret Grace Ward in late 1973. Ward had worked briefly for Vogel at the Coronet parlour in South Brisbane.

  The formal inquest into Vogel’s disappearance began on 24 August 1981. It ran over 26 court days and concluded that Vogel had disappeared under circumstances which showed she had not vanished of her own free will. The coroner, Mr C.E. Webster, declared Norma Jean Beniston, also known as Norma Jean Baptiste, Norma Jean Pavich and Simone Vogel, officially dead.

  Her murder occurred at the heart of a volatile period in Queensland criminal and police history. Corruption was rampant. A dozen prostitutes, madams, associates to criminals and criminals themselves were killed or went missing in the 1970s, many of the cases suspected to have been linked to corrupt police.

  At the time of Vogel’s disappearance, O’Dempsey’s partner, Dianne Pritchard, was working occasional shifts for Vogel, hitchhiking down the highway from the Christian compound where they sometimes stayed, near Mount Tuchekoi (about 150 kilometres from Brisbane). ‘Vince was so tight he made her hitch,’ says one associate. ‘He told me the woman Dianne was working for was giving her some trouble.’

  It was well known during the 1970s that O’Dempsey was the strong arm for the Brisbane vice scene. ‘He used to drive through [Brisbane] and he’d say, “Oh there was a brothel there years ago. I closed it down”, and, “Oh yeah, there was a brothel over there. There used to be, but I closed that one down, too,”’ an associate says. ‘He ran the scene with an iron fist … what O’Dempsey used to do is, anyone who was fucking playing up, he’d go and sort them out.’ The associate says O’Dempsey was in charge of who ran what brothel businesses and where. ‘You had to get his permission.’

  At one point the associate decided to get into the prostitution game. ‘I told a mate that I had these two women and I was going to take them down to Brisbane and get started,’ he said. ‘I was arrogant. I decided I didn’t have to go through Vince. I’d just do it myself. My mate said, “You’ll end up in the fucking Brisbane River. You can’t do that mate. You’re not allowed to. You keep your head out of it, you don’t know what you’re doing. You should go to Vince and get him to help you, or don’t do it at all.” That was the advice I was given. I talked to Vince about it and he said he knew someone in Brisbane and he’d help set it up, but I didn’t end up doing it.’

  He said he was discussing guns with O’Dempsey one day and the discussion prompted another story from the past. ‘I wanted to put a silencer on a .357 Magnum and O’Dempsey said, “You can’t do that … you need a low velocity bullet … a .357’s got too much punch”,’ the acquaintance recalls.

  ‘And he said, “I let a shot go in Queen Street [Brisbane], and nobody heard a fucking thing. Nobody heard a thing, and we dropped her.”

  ‘He said, “We put her on a mattress … you’ve got to burn the mattress … make sure you don’t leave any blood.”

  ‘Now we’ve gone complete somersault from … all I’m talking about is a silencer to he’s just knocked a sheila. That’s what I’ve got in my head. He’s let a shot go in the main street, in Queen Street, and dropped her on the mattress … and nobody heard or saw a thing. So … like today it’d be difficult, with cameras and everything. But back in them days, there was nothing like that there.’

  Could this have been Simone Vogel, who had been giving Vince’s partner, Dianne Pritchard, grief before she disappeared for good?

  Another close acquaintance recalled: ‘There’s something in the back of my head that that murder had something to do with cash and a lot of jewellery.’

  Either way, Vogel had joined the ranks of several other unsolved cold case murders.

  Innocent

  On Saturday 26 November 1977, John Andrew Stuart was given a pass to the reception store of Boggo Road Gaol, having complained that some of his personal property had been stolen, namely, photographs of his mother and a personal diary. It was 8.20 a.m. and Stuart was not accompanied by a guard. Returning to his wing of the gaol, he scaled the partially demolished brick wall of the prison’s old A Wing – it was unused and due to be pulled down – and onto an awning before he shimmied up an external drainpipe and onto the roof.

  Once up there, he began tearing off sheets of corrugated iron and prised out bricks with a crowbar. He then spelt out in bricks the message – INNOCENT VICTIMS OF POLICE VERBAL. F + S (Finch and Stuart).

  During his protest, which could be seen from Brisbane’s south-east freeway, Stuart became something of a local attraction, with sightseers gathering outside the gaol. The Comptroller-General of Prisons, Allen Whitney, said: ‘He can stop there as far as I’m concerned. He got up there by himself. He can get down that way too. He can’t get anywhere from where he is.’

  The Prisons Minister, John Herbert, ordered warders to leave Stuart where he was. He lasted 52 hours. At 12.45 p.m. on the Monday, an exhausted Stuart was having a rest near one of the cavities he’d created by removing the roof iron, and was snatched by two warders. In the melee, Stuart yelled out for his fellow prisoners to riot.

  They didn’t.

  ‘After a brief, violent struggle, he was brought to the ground as fellow prisoners cheered,’ the Courier-Mail reported. Stuart was locked up in solitary confinement for five days as punishment. He was given just bread and water.

  His mother, Edna Watts, berated him for his ‘silly’ stunt. ‘I went really crook at him,’ she said. She prayed that he wouldn’t get extra gaol time for his rooftop protest, and was elated that he was only given days in solitary. ‘I’ve heard it’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta,’ she told reporters. ‘You can’t see your hand in front of your face. Next they’ll be cutting off hands for thieving and splitting tongues for lying. I think it’s terrible.’

  Years later, his friend and criminal accomplice James Finch revealed the true nature of the missing ‘personal diary’ and why Stuart had reacted so strongly to its theft. The coded black book was in fact stolen by a corrupt prison warder who had befriended Stuart. He managed to con Stuart into deciphering the code before he lifted the small black book.

  Sun journalist Dennis Watt would later write: ‘The book, in which Stuart used tiny cryptic writing, detailed the planning and execution of the nightclub firebombing. It named the police mastermind who ordered the firebombing, known criminal Vincent O’Dempsey as that officer’s partner in a protection racket, torchman Tom Hamilton and Bill McCulkin as Finch’s accomplices.

  ‘Finch said the book also lis
ted the names and activities of corrupt senior police and prison officers. Stuart … had worked for a secret group of dissident police known as the “Committee of Eight”. One of the Committee’s leading figures was CIU detective Basil Hicks, who had worked with Stuart on and off for years. Stuart’s so-called codename was Emu.

  ‘The Emu file was one of 400 missing when … commissioner Terry Lewis took office after the resignation of Ray Whitrod in November 1976,’ Watt further wrote. ‘All details contained in the missing [Emu] file, some of which related to police involvement in vice and gambling rackets and armed robberies were duplicated in Stuart’s black book.’

  Hicks would later confirm that on the orders of Whitrod, he had destroyed ‘about six sacks full’ of files when Lewis got the top job. He said Whitrod was trying to protect police informants by getting rid of the documents and Whitrod feared that former assistant commissioner Tony Murphy would try to secure the files. ‘He wanted anything destroyed that could be used to sue anybody, or to be used to the detriment of anybody at all. He told me to destroy them …’

  Two years later, at 8.45 p.m. on Monday 1 January 1979 Stuart was found dead in cell 317, in maximum security C-wing. His body was discovered during a routine cell check. The Government Medical Officer and police were immediately notified. Prison sources told a newspaper that Stuart’s face ‘had a contorted expression’. He was found face down on his prison bed, with his left hand holding a pillow behind his head, and his right arm tucked under his body.

  Prison authorities stated categorically that no unauthorised person could have had access to Stuart. And despite the fact that Stuart was on yet another hunger strike at the time of his death, an autopsy would discover traces of digested food, and traces of a prohibited drug. Bowel samples suggested Stuart may have eaten the day before his death.

  The official cause of death was later given as an inflammation of the heart caused by some virus. Pathologist Dr A.J. Ansford said there were numerous surgical scars on Stuart’s body, but no evidence of any recent injury. At the coronial inquest into Stuart’s death a few months later, his mother, Edna Watts, said that she had received a series of telephone calls leading up to her son’s passing, telling her his death was imminent, and that a man could be poisoned with dingo bait given over a long period of time, and no traces of the chemical could later be detected. Mrs Watts said she told nobody about the calls because she didn’t think she’d be believed.

  Others also held on to theories that Stuart had been murdered or committed suicide. Carolyn Scully, sister to the missing Tommy Hamilton, says Stuart was poisoned in gaol. ‘Johnny Stuart killed himself because he couldn’t handle gaol any longer,’ says Scully. ‘And it was McCulkin who took the poison up there that he took. He killed himself and I know that for a fact because Vince told me.’

  At the time of Stuart’s death, Scully was living in a house on Turner Road that ran across the back of the Lutwyche Cemetery in Lutwyche. ‘We were standing in my yard watching [Stuart’s funeral],’ she recalls. ‘Vince got out of gaol that day. It was really funny. Vince said, “Oh, I’m trying to keep a low profile and I walked through the cemetery so nobody will see me, and here’s all these people, the police, the cameras.” He was laughing.

  ‘He said, and this is coming straight from the horse’s mouth, he said it was McCulkin took the poison up the gaol and Stuart took it, because they bashed him shitless. Two of them [prison guards] got demoted and the rest of them just got a slap over the knuckles. And they gave him a hell of a hiding, that’s why he was in the hospital.’

  However, one senior prison officer who was working at Boggo Road at the time of Stuart’s death said any talk of poison being smuggled into the prison was impossible. ‘I wouldn’t believe that,’ he said. ‘Stuart had abused his body so badly over the years and there’s no way in the world a prison officer would risk everything to do that. There’s no way in the world Stuart met with foul play in the end.’

  John Andrew Stuart was buried in a narrow grave in a portion of the cemetery close to Kitchener Road and not far from the cemetery’s honoured war graves. The humble marble plaque simply read:

  DAVID J. STUART / Died 21-11-56 / Aged 49 years. JOHN A. STUART / Died 1-1-79 / Aged 38 years. AT PEACE WITH THEIR SAVIOUR.

  Onward Christian Soldiers

  For many, it must have been a measure of relief that the bloody 1970s were drawing to a close. The decade had seen unprecedented violence and bloodshed in Queensland that had left dozens of bodies in its wake. Many of those murder cases remained stone cold, and some would stay that way for decades to come.

  Although the McCulkins had been missing now for more than five years, the police tasked to reinvestigate the triple murders had collated an enormous quantity of material and were getting close to bringing the case to court through a coronial inquest. In fact, Detective Sergeant Trevor Menary had interviewed O’Dempsey about the disappearance of Margaret Grace Ward at the Gympie police station on 29 June 1979.

  He had put to O’Dempsey: ‘I suggest that you murdered the girl Ward to prevent her giving evidence against your de facto, Pritchard.’

  The noose appeared to be tightening around O’Dempsey.

  On 5 July, Queensland police announced that they would be seeking an inquest into the deaths of Barbara McCulkin and her two daughetrs, along with Margaret Grace Ward and Raymond Vincent ‘Tommy’ Allen, and were hoping to bring charges against a ‘strong suspect’.

  Incredibly, the next day the Brisbane Telegraph published an interview with O’Dempsey written by reporter Peter Hansen. The headline was: ‘I’M NO KILLER’. The story did not mention O’Dempsey by name. ‘The man, aged about 40, works near Gympie,’ the report said. ‘A clergyman who sees him regularly fiercely defended the man yesterday. “He has seen the light,” the clergyman said. “He and his wife have made God their partner.”’

  O’Dempsey was described as ‘bearded, fit and muscular in work clothes’.

  Extraordinarily, O’Dempsey also issued a typed statement to the newspaper:

  Recently … I was asked certain questions in relation to certain matters by the State police. I gave my name, age, birthplace, address and type of work. I was asked would I read the statement of interview through. I said no.

  I was asked questions in relation to the five people named – Mrs Barbara McCulkin, Vicki Maree McCulkin, Barbara Leanne McCulkin, Margaret Grace Ward and Raymond Vincent Allen.

  The questions were all relevant to that. They were trying to ascertain their whereabouts. I made no comments to any of these questions. This was in conformance with a legal directive which has been sent by my solicitor some years ago to the Police Commissioner in Queensland. I shall not be making any further comment to the police regarding these matters.

  O’Dempsey wrote that police had a search warrant ‘purporting to be looking for a firearm at my residence’, and that he possessed no firearm. He then provided brief summations of the circumstances surrounding the five victims, as far as he knew it.

  The only comment I’ll make on these matters is that Raymond Vincent Allen to my knowledge at the time of his alleged disappearance had to appear in court about a matter with which he was charged. Whether this is the reason for his disappearance I do not know.

  Margaret Grace Ward – she also had to make an appearance in court about a matter with which she was charged and she also failed to do so as far as I know.

  Regarding Mrs McCulkin, I am not fully aware of what the set up is but there was disenchantment with her husband because of alleged irregularities of his appearance on the home scene and the fact that he was keeping company with a hotel proprietress. He was living with her around the time that Mrs McCulkin left the matrimonial home. There was also another defacto wife, but Billy McCulkin could elaborate on that.

  It was interesting that O’Dempsey had summarised Barbara McCulkin’s disappearance as her leaving ‘the matrimoni
al home’.

  O’Dempsey continued:

  I will not be making any further comment to the police nor to other members of the media. If it had not been for the fact that I had contravened some of society’s laws in the past I doubt very much if these suggestions regarding these matters would have ever been made.

  I have given away my former lifestyle and have become an active Christian and I don’t wish to be bothered with this matter again.

  The clergyman added his further support to O’Dempsey and his partner, Dianne Pritchard. ‘I don’t care what a man has done in his past,’ the clergyman said. ‘God is his life from now on and the future for him and his wife. He has been an inspiring and untiring worker here. He is often trusted with our cars to do jobs well away from here. No one could say he has been in hiding. I think everyone should get a fair deal.’

  Since he was a boy, O’Dempsey had had a peculiar relationship with religion, steeped in Catholicism from a young age, he was also immersed in the family’s ancient Irish roots, replete with great warriors and a clan at war with any authorities that challenged it.

  He could quote any passage in the Bible, yet vowed to those around him that he hated the church, and yet he had brothers and other relatives who went on to serve God as priests and Christian Brothers. It was a constant internal struggle, this question of faith.

  Even so, throughout his life O’Dempsey did not hesitate to use the church and disappear into its fold when he was in a pinch. Such was the case in the late 1970s when he and de facto, Dianne Pritchard, were still moving from place to place following the disappearance of the McCulkins in January 1974.

  As the cold case police investigation into the deaths of the McCulkins, Ward and Allen gathered pace from 1978, O’Dempsey and Pritchard spent considerable time at the Christian Outreach Centre at remote Mount Tuchekoi. O’Dempsey would give occasional sermons, and committed to manual labour and fixing machinery around the centre.