The Night Dragon

by Matthew Condon

  There is no honour among thieves, and McCulkin’s credibility and character were being severely tested. If he was involved in the Whiskey mass murder, and had sexually assaulted his own children, how could anything he said about O’Dempsey and Dubois be believed?

  It appeared his former friends in crime, O’Dempsey and Dubois, were happy to tip the bucket on him to protect themselves.

  Then again, if Billy McCulkin had been part of the crew that torched the Whiskey, he could hardly implicate himself in 15 murders. In many ways, McCulkin was snookered. He believed he knew that Vince and Shorty had killed his family. But how far could he go before his possible connection to the Whiskey was exposed?

  After McCulkin gave his evidence Boujoure adjourned the inquest until 10 a.m. the following day.

  Mad Dog

  As the presumed murders of the McCulkins and others were being picked over in a Brisbane court, Detective Senior Constable John Attwood and Detective Sergeant James Munro of the Major Crime Squad in Adelaide were staking out a house in the suburb of Christies Beach, south of the South Australian capital.

  Police had information that Garry Dubois, a wanted fugitive from Queensland, had been sighted at a house in Ramsgate Avenue. Attwood, Munro, other members of the Major Crime Squad and uniformed police approached the house at about 6.30 a.m. on Monday 7 July 1980. Munro and Attwood rapped on the front door and received no response. ‘I then heard the sound of a person running through the house,’ Attwood later recalled. ‘The front glass door was then broken … and I could see Dubois and a uniform policeman Rogers wrestling on the floor of the lounge room. I could see that Dubois was trying to take a shotgun away from Rogers.’

  Dubois was subdued, handcuffed and taken to Adelaide police headquarters. At 8.45 a.m. he was transferred to the city watchhouse where he was searched and charged. He was briefly interviewed by Munro at the CIB. ‘Now that we’re alone can I do some business with you?’ Dubois allegedly asked Munro.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not going real well at the moment,’ Dubois said. ‘I could get five grand. Yes, five grand.’

  ‘Don’t come that rubbish with me,’ Munro said. ‘You’re talking to the wrong fellow.’

  ‘Well, do you blame me for trying?’

  Attwood entered the interview room and they continued the interview. ‘Do you know the McCulkins?’ Munro asked.

  ‘I knew Billy.’

  ‘Is he the husband?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dubois. ‘He knocks around Queensland. He fancies himself as some sort of gangster.’

  ‘Did you know his wife and kids?’

  ‘Aw, not really. I’d met them but I hardly knew them.’

  ‘As I understand it,’ Munro continued, ‘both Mrs McCulkin and her children have been murdered. Where were you back in that particular time in 1974?’

  ‘I don’t know. I could have been anywhere.’

  ‘Were you responsible for their deaths?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ Dubois said. ‘Anyway, you know me. I don’t talk.’

  Early the next afternoon, Attwood went to the watchhouse and handcuffed himself to Dubois in preparation for his court appearance. They sat in an interview room. ‘Fucking hell, man, this is stupid, murder, I don’t believe it,’ Dubois supposedly said to Attwood.

  ‘What do you mean?’ the officer asked.

  ‘What’s the use, no one can help me.’

  ‘You know what you are saying and who you are saying it to, so remember anything you do say may be taken down and later used as evidence,’ Attwood reminded him. ‘Do you understand that?’

  Dubois said: ‘Man, I know all about that … I’m guilty by association, that’s it, because I know O’Dempsey, that’s it, I hardly knew them.’

  ‘Do you want to talk to me about it?’

  ‘If I blab I’m dead and I’m dead if I don’t,’ said the prisoner. ‘Man, I’ll be an old man when I get out ... they throw away the key for murder … I’m guilty because I know him.’

  ‘There is a lot of difference between a charge for drugs and a charge for murder.’

  ‘Difference … fucking life, man,’ Dubois supposedly said to Attwood. ‘If I talk I’m dead. I’ve [got] to cop it. I’ll have to live with him in gaol and he’ll get me there if I talk.’ Dubois said his situation was ‘hopeless’.

  In court, orders were issued to extradite Dubois back to Queensland. According to Attwood, Dubois was agitated and close to tears. They both went into the court holding cell after the hearing.

  ‘Fucking murder, I can’t believe it, I’m guilty because I know O’Dempsey …’ he remarked. ‘He’s fucking mad, you know … I think he likes doing it … he’s a mad fucking dog, man. Jesus Christ, I’ll never see Jan and the kid again. When I get back there [to Brisbane], it’s goodbye world. Jesus, I wish you’d taken me out at the house.’

  Dubois was on a roll: ‘You know, every time I get with crims, I cop it. Eight years for rape, I served seven and a half, everyone else got bonds and a few months. They reckon I’m a sex deviate because I like young girls. Christ, I met Jan when she was at school and I married her. Not this. Guilty by association, that’s that.’

  Attwood said there had to have been some evidence if a warrant had been issued.

  ‘I hardly knew the McCulkins,’ Dubois continued. ‘Fucking hell, man. A bit of dope to make ends meet, but fucking hell, murder, it’s not my bag, man.’

  When Dubois was extradited back to Queensland, his loyal mother, Hilma, was there to support her boy. His older sister Gail later told police: ‘I remember one day Garry was on the TV. He had been brought back from South Australia for the McCulkins. I was horrified because I saw my mother on the camera when they were filming Garry. Garry was kicking the camera.’

  Gail later tried to get clarification on the situation from their mother. ‘I went and tackled Mum about what was going on,’ she said. ‘She told me that Garry was suspected of being involved in the disappearance of the McCulkins. I had seen on the news and in the papers about the McCulkins disappearing and I knew it was about a mother and two little girls. Mum told me that she had asked Garry about it and asked if he had done it and he told her that he didn’t do it, but he was in the vicinity when it happened. Mum accepted that from him.’

  As the inquest progressed in Brisbane, Billy Stokes, in gaol for murdering Tommy Hamilton, was subpoenaed to the Coroners Court hearing but told the magistrate he didn’t think the hearing was ‘fair dinkum’ and refused to answer questions.

  Stokes later said: ‘Earlier in the prison I had spoken to O’Dempsey and Dubois about the McCulkin family murders and when I criticised Dubois for killing kids he snapped … he just went off. Then when I … mentioned that it had been rumoured that the girls were sexually slain, O’Dempsey held up his hand in a stop sign and said, “We only did what …”

  ‘He never finished the sentence. During the Coroners Court inquiry, Dubois told me that the matter would be committed for trial and then No Billed, which was more or less what eventually happened.’

  In the end, Coroner Boujoure recommended that O’Dempsey and Dubois be arrested and charged with murder in relation to the McCulkins. ‘I consider there is a body of circumstantial evidence upon which, taken as a whole, and I emphasise as a whole, a jury could reasonably infer that O’Dempsey and Dubois are responsible for the deaths of Mrs McCulkin and her two daughters,’ Boujoure said.

  But the case never proceeded.

  In December 1980, senior Crown legal officer Angelo Vasta recommended that the charges against O’Dempsey and Dubois be dropped. The recommendation was made after the Solicitor General sought a legal opinion on the charges. ‘In my opinion,’ Vasta concluded, ‘the state of evidence against O’Dempsey and Dubois is such that it is incapable of establishing a prima facie case of murder against either of them … In
all the circumstances I am of the opinion that this is a proper case for the filing of No True Bill, and I respectfully recommend accordingly.’

  Vasta’s opinion received the support of prominent barrister Cedric Hampson QC. Two months later, Attorney-General Sam Doumany announced that the Crown would drop its case against both men.

  ‘Looking back in hindsight,’ detective Marshall reflected, ‘we did the best job we possibly could at the time. It was a big disappointment. But I suppose you’ve got to respect the referee’s decision.’

  The former criminal who in late 1979 had escaped from prison to bring a message to O’Dempsey from Inspector Ron Redmond – that in effect O’Dempsey would be charged with the McCulkin murders but the charges would not make it to court – said in a statement: ‘On my release from solitary confinement I learned that an inquest into the disappearance of the McCulkins had been convened and that Garry Dubois and Vincent O’Dempsey had been committed for trial. I also learned that the prosecution against them had been discontinued.’

  The ex-con added in his statement that he was later threatened by Queensland police and told to keep his mouth shut. Ron Redmond’s prediction had come true. And with that, the McCulkin case went stone cold for another 34 years.

  While O’Dempsey and Dubois may have been relieved to put the inquest behind them, Billy McCulkin was not happy about the outcome. For him, the killer or killers of his entire family were still untried and unpunished. He returned to working as a dogman on cranes and on city construction sites.

  A co-worker at the time says McCulkin was a quiet person in those years. ‘He’d been a pretty hard man, yeah, because he had that tattoo on his old fellow and you know, [he used to] get in the pubs and when he was half-full of piss he’d flash it out in the earlier days …’ the co-worker says.

  Following the 1980 inquest into Barbara and the kids, McCulkin seemed like a different person. The co-worker says: ‘I’ll tell you one thing, Billy, he was a very, very quiet sort of bloke, very quiet when I knew him … I don’t know if he could drive a car or not, but his wife used to drop him off and then she used to come and pick him up in the afternoon every day. When I knew him he didn’t go to the pub.’

  He says McCulkin was haunted by the death of Barbara and the girls. ‘Well, he mentioned it and everyone was talking, you know. I got the impression that he knew more about it than what he let on. I wouldn’t be surprised that he actually set things up to get his wife killed but not his kids. But yeah, he never said anything like that but he was out to get bloody Vince. He was going to fix him up, but I think everyone was scared of Vince O’Dempsey.’

  Domestic Entanglements

  When Kerri-Ann Scully was growing up in various suburbs across Brisbane’s inner-north – Wavell Heights, Geebung, Chermside – the great and painful shadow across her family was the disappearance and presumed murder of her Uncle Tommy Hamilton in January 1975.

  Her mother, Carolyn Scully – Tommy’s sister – had never gotten over the loss, despite the fact that Billy Stokes had been tried and convicted of Tommy’s murder. What the Scully family shared with the McCulkin family was that neither crimes perpetrated against their family members had produced bodies. The McCulkin girls and Hamilton had vanished off the face of the earth.

  ‘Even though he died before I was born, Uncle Tom has been a significant part of my life,’ Kerri-Ann would later tell police. ‘He was a famous boxer and helped my mum provide for her kids. My mother has been obsessed with finding out what happened to his remains so she can bury him …’

  The Scullys were well acquainted with the Clockwork Orange Gang. Peter Hall had been in a relationship with Carolyn Scully at the time of the McCulkin disappearances in 1974.

  In the early to mid-1980s, however, there was a steadying influence around the house when Kerri-Ann was a kid, and that was a man called Vince O’Dempsey. ‘I don’t recall the first time I met Vince, but recall him being part of our lives as I grew up and he was often spoken about by my mother and our friends … I recall when I was about ten years old my mother and Vince were in a short relationship. I remember him coming around to our place a lot. He always had lots of money and would buy things for us, he taught us self-defence, like how to flip people. He would always tell us to stay away from drugs. Vince was the only man our mother had around us, she didn’t really have boyfriends.’

  Kerri-Ann said she knew her mother and Vince had a sexual relationship at one point but they’d had ‘a big fight’. Kerri-Ann thought it might have had something to do with Vince sleeping with another woman. ‘My mother has since told me that Vince asked her to move with him to Warwick but she did not want her children raised on drug money and refused him,’ Kerri-Ann said. ‘I remember a time when Vince stopped coming around and I was told he had gone on a long holiday. I knew that meant he had gone to gaol.’

  In fact, in March 1985 O’Dempsey was charged in Tweed Heads, just south of the Queensland border, with supplying prohibited drugs and supplying heroin, and was granted bail. On 16 September in the Lismore District Court he was found guilty and sentenced to ten years in prison with a non-parole period of seven years. During the six months between him being on remand and being convicted, criminal associates noticed a different man. One said that he believed O’Dempsey had tried to set him up with police. Other acquaintances were suddenly being arrested and charged. The associate said: ‘It was the first time I felt that Vince might have been acting as an informant to police, and helping them out,’ he said.

  Early in his sentence, O’Dempsey successfully argued for a one-year reduction in his prison sentence. He was due out in 1991.

  During this stretch, O’Dempsey would miss the police and political corruption scandal that would become the Fitzgerald inquiry in 1987, the fall of police commissioner Sir Terence Lewis, and the collapse of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s premiership. There’s no doubt, however, that O’Dempsey would have been aware of many of the corrupt police who got caught in the inquiry net, and many who evaded it. He may have even tipped his hat to retired Assistant Commissioner Tony Murphy, who while he was named repeatedly during the inquiry, was never charged with corruption or any other malfeasance. Nor, indeed, would O’Dempsey himself feature in any substantive evidence before the inquiry, the terms of reference only reaching back to 1977.

  And while the Fitzgerald inquiry didn’t specifically touch the Whiskey Au Go Go tragedy, Finch would piggyback off the relentless evidence of corrupt Queensland police and the practice of verballing, to continue to cry out his innocence. In the years after John Stuart’s death, Finch had become the focus of any matters relating to the Whiskey firebombing, and he had been revelling in a strange celebrity status whereby he, a reviled mass killer, simultaneously possessed a lurid attraction. First there was his romance with a woman called Cheryl Cole, wheelchair-bound with a debilitating, and terminal, disease. They would become engaged in 1984. During this well-publicised romance, there was a parallel narrative playing out in the press.

  Enter Scottish language expert Reverend A.Q. Morton, who used his language-tracing technique – sylometry – on Finch’s unsigned record of interview from 1974. Morton concluded that there was one chance in 236,742 that the confession was made by him. Out of Morton’s findings came a push to either reopen the Whiskey investigation, give Finch another trial, or secure him a pardon.

  The heartbreaking story of the terminally ill fiancée and the move to free Finch somehow got tangled together, giving the story even more power. Suddenly this was a tale of possible redemption. Of forgiveness. Of admitting even the slightest possibility that Finch may have been verballed by police after all, and may or may not have been involved in the Whiskey.

  What remained immovable throughout all of this was the roll call of the Whiskey dead, and the grief of the families and friends of the victims. Tom and Dulcie Day, who lost their teenage son Darcy in the Whiskey all those years earlier, posed the simpl
e question: ‘Why won’t the Whiskey go away?’

  In mid-1985 the Days said the State Government owed it to the families of the Whiskey victims to hold an inquiry that might answer some of the questions that kept haunting them. ‘We watched it on television last week and it brought it all back,’ Mr Day said. ‘We still don’t know why no real investigation was followed up into the firebombing of the Torino … shortly before the Whiskey Au Go Go fire. These things don’t fit in.

  ‘I’m confused. Why can’t they try and give people like us some answers?’

  As for the McCulkin murders in 1974, it was as if they had slipped off the map and been forgotten.

  Flight of the Birdman of Boggo Road

  The years of campaigning for the release of James Richard Finch produced little until, at the beginning of 1988, the narrative of his police verballing, by a sheer twist of fate, was given some solid context. In late January, State Cabinet revealed that it would at last consider parole for Finch. This about-face had come, however, following more than six months of damning evidence that had been produced at the Fitzgerald inquiry into police and political corruption.

  Queensland was reeling from the daily revelations of the inquiry, and the exposition of a dangerously corrupt police force under Commissioner Terence Lewis. Evidence before the inquiry also pointed to a State government wracked with cronyism and corruption under Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who had been punted as Premier just a couple of months earlier, in late 1987.

  In this light, the police verbal supposedly inflicted on Finch in a small room in CIB headquarters on a Sunday night in March 1973 could no longer be seen as simply a convicted mass murderer’s ruse to be released from prison. Queensland now had a new Premier with integrity – Mike Ahern – and the reformative winds of change could already be detected across government and the community as a whole.