The Night Dragon

by Matthew Condon

  ‘As for the Whiskey, he talked about a bloke called Hannay. He said Hannay wouldn’t pay, whatever that means.’

  Decades later, when asked about the Whiskey fire, former manager of the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub, John Hannay, said he couldn’t remember a lot of the past, adding that, ‘You know some things but you don’t know the whole thing.’ When pushed for a more specific answer he said, ‘It was so long in the past.’

  Loose Lips Sink Ships

  Life had been difficult for the Scully family of Chermside in north Brisbane since Tommy Hamilton had been abducted and murdered in 1975. His disappearance effectively pulled the pin on the so-called Clockwork Orange Gang and a raft of strong, childhood friendships between himself and Peter Hall, Shorty Dubois and Keith Meredith. Nothing was ever the same again.

  Carolyn Scully, Tommy’s sister, carried the burden of grief over her brother for years, then decades. Why couldn’t she give her brother a decent burial? Where was his body? Why had her children been robbed of their uncle?

  Around 2011, one of the Scully girls, Carolyn’s daughter Kim, got badly beaten in the watchhouse in Brisbane and sustained serious head injuries. The family tried to get in to see her but were disallowed. They sought legal help. Kerri-Ann Scully, another of Carolyn’s daughters, later told police she had contacted Terry O’Gorman – Vince O’Dempsey’s solicitor – for assistance. In the end, Kerri-Ann ended up phoning O’Dempsey at his alpaca farm in Warwick. They had not seen each other or spoken for many years.

  ‘I explained that we needed money and he said he would come down and see me,’ Kerri-Ann said in a police statement. ‘I met him at Chermside Shopping Centre and then he asked me to go to the Gold Coast with him. It was obvious that he was attracted to me and it just went from there.

  ‘When I first met him he talked to me about working on his drug crop. He told me I could work there for about six months and make good money, about $20,000, but I had to live there. He told me I could make this money soliciting because I would be the only girl. He later on decided he didn’t want me to do that and he wanted us to be together.’

  She said that while they were on the Gold Coast they went to the casino at Broadbeach. ‘We had a good time and then I went back to his room with him,’ Kerri-Ann remembered. ‘He was staying at the Sofitel, but I remember he used a different name because he said he was not allowed in the casino. He told me he would give me half the money he won while he was there. He had a numbers thing he had memorised for blackjack and he did pretty well; he gave me a couple of grand in the end.’

  Kerri-Ann said that on their way back to Brisbane she and Vince started talking about her addiction to heroin. He suggested she go to Warwick with him for a couple of weeks to ‘detox’. He gave her a further $5000 and said he’d give her more if she came and lived with him.

  Two weeks later, O’Dempsey travelled to Brisbane and picked up Kerri-Ann and her children and took them back to Warwick for the school holidays. Meanwhile, O’Dempsey agreed to pay for treatment for her heroin addiction. Scully was determined to get off the drug, and could see a potential new life for herself and her children with O’Dempsey.

  ‘Over time the relationship between Vince and myself developed and we were going to be married and Vince told me he wanted us to have a baby,’ Kerri-Ann told police. ‘I thought Vince was too old to have a baby but he didn’t think so … I grew fond of him and was willing to marry him because of the financial security it would give me and my children, which is something me and my kids have never had.’

  She found O’Dempsey ‘very intelligent’ and a big reader. He knew a lot of facts. She presumed he was in his seventies and knew he had been married several times and had at least six children. He told her he had 26 children. Others close to O’Dempsey said he had ‘kids all over the place’. Scully said she was fully aware that he was ‘doing something criminal’ to get his money.

  ‘I knew his reputation,’ she added. ‘I knew the crazy names he was known as, Angel of Death and stuff. I knew that if you did the wrong thing by him and he got hold of you, no one would ever find you. I had heard it from Mum and other people. I figured some of it was probably true. There were even times I wondered if he might know how to find out what happened to Uncle Tom, and if I was good to him he might help me find out. I even wondered if he was involved in Uncle Tom’s disappearance.’

  Scully said their conversation would occasionally turn to O’Dempsey’s criminal past. ‘One day … we were outside the back of the house,’ she recalled to police. ‘I would smoke out there at the sitting area near the pool table and the bar. We were talking about Uncle Tom and what had happened to him. We were talking about Bill Stokes, the man who killed him [Tom Hamilton]. Vince told me how Stokes used to write this thing for the Painters and Dockers called the Port News. He said that Stokes was just a clown, and would antagonise him all the time in his writings, and in one of them Stokes said Vince was right for so many murders. The article said 15 or 18 I think. Vince turned around and laughed and said, “He doesn’t have a clue. He doesn’t know anything. I’m good for this many”. He held up three fingers on one hand, and reopened it and made out like the number 33.

  ‘I said, “What, 33? Really?”

  ‘And he said “Yep.”

  ‘All I could think of was what a lot of people to have killed. I thought of Uncle Tom and the families of those people.’

  She said O’Dempsey’s claim to having murdered 33 people wasn’t a boast. ‘[It was] just like stating it matter of fact … He was cold about it, like he was just used to it, it was second nature to him and there was nothing wrong with it.’

  Scully revealed that O’Dempsey enjoyed true crime books, particularly ‘the ones he’s in’. One of those in particular was Shotgun and Standover: The Story of the Painters and Dockers, by James Morton and Russell Robinson, first published in 2011. The book outlines the history of the notorious union from its early days at the beginning of the 20th century and beyond. It mentions a cast of infamous criminals who were also part of the Painters and Dockers, from Squizzy Taylor to the Moran brothers, who gained national attention during modern Melbourne’s gangland wars. The book also mentions the murder of Barbara McCulkin and her daughters in 1974. Scully said O’Dempsey asked her to buy a copy of the book – he didn’t want to be seen purchasing it himself – and that he had obviously read it before because ‘he knew the page numbers and everything by memory’.

  One night in bed, O’Dempsey, with the book in hand, told Scully: ‘I’ll show you what they wrote about me.’ He then proceeded to read her the chapter aloud in bed. ‘He would read bits and tell me the bits that were wrong, and then added stuff about what was written. He told me that he had been handcuffed to the table during the inquest [into the McCulkins et al in 1980], and I remember he told me that Garry [Dubois] took off on bail before the inquest and that he wished that Garry was there with him for the inquest.

  ‘I remember the book talked about both Shorty and Vince being right for the murder of the McCulkins.’

  O’Dempsey told Scully that he had answered ‘no comment’ to every question put to him at the inquest, and that he had earned the nickname ‘Mr No Comment’.

  ‘There was mention of Barbara McCulkin, and that she was going to dob in her husband for the Torino’s nightclub fire,’ Scully continued. ‘He told me that Billy McCulkin was molesting his daughters, and I remember I had heard that from someone else before.’

  The book proposed theories about where the McCulkins’ bodies might be buried – including beneath a high-rise office tower in Brisbane’s CBD – but Scully said O’Dempsey laughed them all off, saying ‘it was crazy’.

  ‘Vince was adamant that McCulkin was interfering with his kids and said he had lived there at the house for a while and knew it was true,’ Scully added. ‘He said Billy was his friend and that he [Vince] had slept with Barbara McCulkin …’

&nb
sp; ‘The book talked about Stokes refusing to give evidence at the inquest and Vince said that was because Stokes was terrified of him. It also said that Vince was serving a ten-year sentence at the time for drug offences and continued to claim privilege. It said that the murder charges recommended by the coroner were dropped. It was then that Vince said, “I’m good for it, but they’ll never get me on these murders.” Then he laughed.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ Scully remembered of that moment. ‘I was too scared to and what do you say? I was thinking, “What the fuck?” They were two little girls not too different from the age of my kids. I never thought he did it, and I had grown up being told he didn’t. I had just found out he was a child killer and my kids were in the next room.’

  Scully said the smirk on O’Dempsey’s face when he told her about the McCulkin murders showed, in her mind, that he was ‘proud of himself’.

  ‘I knew who he was, and what he was, I knew how he got his money. I knew he had killed people but didn’t think he could kill two little girls. He didn’t say why and I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to get in too deep. I didn’t want my kids to get killed or hurt hanging around someone capable of doing that. What scared me more than anything was that he was proud of himself, he had this smug smile on his face. He didn’t see anything wrong with it. He wasn’t joking, he wasn’t drunk or on drugs, he was deadly serious.

  ‘That night I did not sleep at all. I was afraid by what Vince had told me. I didn’t know why he told me. I had always been told as I was growing up that he had been wrongly accused of the murder of the McCulkins so it was a shock when he told me.

  ‘The next morning I told him I was going back on the bus.’

  According to Scully, O’Dempsey sensed something was wrong. She placated him and told him she’d be back. She took the bus to Brisbane with her children and never returned.

  Return to Dorchester Street

  Not a year would go by without Barbara’s brother Graham Ogden religiously telephoning police on 16 January – a date etched in the family’s annual calendar and as important as any anniversary – and asking if there had been any developments in the case of his missing sibling and his two nieces, Vicki and Leanne.

  As Graham’s nephew, Brian Ogden, would later reportedly say: ‘You can feel very alone when you have members of the family missing and don’t know what’s happened to them. Every time someone else goes missing, you feel for them. It’s a very dark and lonely place. It’s a part of family history that’s just blank and that’s wrong.’

  Meanwhile, that rundown cottage at 6 Dorchester Street sat there virtually unchanged since Barbara and the girls had vanished. There was a newish fence, installed decades later, but by and large the place had remained eerily the same since that long, wet summer of 1974.

  On 16 January 2014, however, Graham Ogden would receive news he’d always hoped for but never anticipated. In the lead-up to the 40th anniversary of the disappearance and presumed murders of Barbara and her girls, the State Crime Command’s Homicide Squad Cold Case Unit decided to revisit the case. It was, at the very least, a gesture to the McCulkin women and their family that they had not been forgotten. It was also an opportunity to appeal for new witnesses and information after the case had lain dormant for so long.

  Homicide Detective Mick Dowie reportedly appealed to members of the public who might know something of the murders. ‘If you are sitting at home trying to justify your silence to protect this gang, your ethics and morals are not worth considering,’ Dowie said. ‘The thing that goes to the heart of this is the children. It is a major threat to murder two innocent children and someone, anyone who has got information that could solve that would have to have had that weighing on their conscience for 40 years.

  ‘These are two young girls who were murdered for nothing … what you believe happened may not be the case, you may be protecting people for all the wrong reasons.’

  The public was reminded that a $250,000 reward was still active. In fact, Dowie and Detective Virginia Gray had begun Operation Avow – the reinvestigation into the McCulkin murders – on 3 January and had already set about the laborious task of interviewing potential surviving witnesses and key players, and tracking documents. They followed a similar trail to that of detectives Marshall and Menary more than 30 years earlier. The Cold Case Unit would also work in tandem with the Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) to extract as much new evidence as possible. Many witnesses were called before the CCC with its coercive powers throughout 2014.

  Within a month of leaving O’Dempsey, Kerri-Ann Scully was back on heroin and was gaoled in June 2013 for breaching her probation, and also charged with stealing. She had been writing to O’Dempsey while she was in gaol, and he replied, professing his love for her. In March 2014, having been released from prison, she returned with her children to her home in Chermside.

  ‘I recall being at my mother’s house one day … when police came and gave her [Mum, Carolyn Scully] paperwork to attend an inquest into the death of the McCulkins,’ Kerri-Ann Scully later said in a statement to police.

  ‘I heard the police talking on the verandah to my mother and she showed me the paperwork after they’d left. Mum was spinning and arranged to see a solicitor. Vince had previously arranged to visit me the next day, which was the day before Mum had to go to the inquest. Vince came to my place at Chermside. When he arrived I told him I needed to talk to him about something and that we needed to go to the park to talk.’

  They went to a public park behind the Chermside Shopping Centre on Gympie Road. ‘When we got to the park I told Vince about the paperwork that Mum had received the day before, and that she had to go to the inquest the next day,’ she said. ‘He looked really shocked and went quiet, with this worried look on his face.’

  Scully asked: ‘Is this going to fuck us up? Do we have anything to worry about?’

  He assured her it would be alright and everything would ‘blow over’.

  ‘I could tell from how he looked that it was not fine,’ she said. ‘I was not used to Vince being worried like that. He is usually very confident, even cocky.’

  Back in Warwick, the tremors of the new McCulkin investigation were also being felt.

  ‘I remember seeing stuff on the news about the McCulkins in early 2014 and later police doing raids on Vince’s place in Warwick,’ Warren McDonald told police. ‘On 11 August 2014 police came to my place with a search warrant. They seized some documents.

  ‘I was in the main street of Warwick a few days later and I ran into Vince. Vince asked, “Is it true they raided your house?” And I said, “Yes.” Vince said. “The CCC is rounding everybody up and you need to keep your mouth shut or else.”

  ‘When he said this to me he was deadly serious. I assured him, “There is no need to worry about me, I am solid.” I had already received a notice to attend the Crime and Corruption Commission.’

  From September 2014 McDonald, on his way to work, would ‘run into’ O’Dempsey regularly. It was McDonald’s habit to pull into the Caltex service station on the road into Warwick at around 4 a.m. and have breakfast and coffee. One morning O’Dempsey was waiting for him. ‘Vince was checking in with me to see if I had heard anything,’ he recalled in his police statement. ‘I brought up [a fellow associate]. I said he is 60-odd and has a young wife and child … do you think he has rolled?

  ‘I told Vince that I had heard around town that the associate had rolled on him. Vince said, “No, he knows the rules.”’ McDonald understood that to mean that Martin knew, if he spoke to the police about Vince and his associates, that he would be killed.

  His last early morning meeting with O’Dempsey was just prior to O’Dempsey’s arrest in October 2014. He alleged Vince told him: ‘The police aren’t too far off and I have to hit the toe and people will stop talking if they don’t know where I am.’

  McDonald said, ‘I took that to m
ean that if people didn’t know where he was they would be more scared of him.’

  This time around, too, the passage of time gave police an advantage. One key witness eventually made a decision to tell what he knew of the era and the fate of the McCulkins, and that was former Clockwork Orange Gang member Peter Hall. He would later tell the court he was a different person now from the one he had been in the 1970s. That he had his own family, and in essence concluded that the old adage of silence among thieves no longer applied.

  Other key witnesses followed, and in late 2014 O’Dempsey, then 76, and Dubois, 67, were arrested and charged with the murders of Barbara and the two girls. The long shadow of this crime had finally caught up with both men.

  Shorty’s Trial

  At 9.53 a.m. on Monday 7 November 2016, Garry Reginald ‘Shorty’ Dubois was brought into Court 7 of the Queen Elizabeth II Courts of Law precinct in George Street in Brisbane. The Correctional Services officers, in their pale blue shirts, directed him towards the glassed-in dock at the rear left of the pale wood courtroom on level four, and secured him inside. He turned and smiled at his wife, Jan, sitting in the public gallery. Compact and fit-looking, with a blunted crop of grey hair, Jan Stubbs, also known as The Pelican, smiled back.

  Justice Peter Applegarth took his seat shortly after 10 a.m. Born in Brisbane in 1958, Applegarth attended Brisbane State High and graduated from The University of Queensland (UQ) with a Bachelor of Laws (first class honours) in 1980. He would win a UQ travelling scholarship and completed two years of postgraduate studies at Magdalen College, Oxford. On his return to Brisbane he was an associate to Justice Spender of the Federal Court of Australia, and was admitted as a barrister of the Supreme Court of Queensland in 1986. He took silk in 2000, and was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court in 2008. He was well known in Brisbane circles for his work with Legal Aid Queensland and the Queensland Law Reform Commission.