The Bogeyman

Whooshkaa Studios: Listeners are advised this podcast contains coarse language and adult themes, and is not suitable for younger ears. Whooshkaa Studios

MATTHEW CONDON: This is the story of a man you’ve probably never heard of.

His name is Vince O’Dempsey - psychopath, gangster, convicted murderer, and a man who after more than half a century is only now coming into focus as Australia’s worst serial killer.

And this was his playground - Ghost Gate Road – a reputedly haunted tract of bushland outside the little township of Warwick in South-east Queensland. You can find it on a map and visit it anytime, if you dare.

It’s a real place, but it’s also a state of mind if you let it get to you.

This was Vince’s home, his landscape. He knew every inch of this territory from childhood, and as an adult, he put fear in the soil.

In many ways I wish I’d never heard of him.

Because when you go down the trail of investigating Vince, as I have done for many years, he unknowingly slips quietly into the shadowy recesses of your mind, like a fluke or a virus, and embeds himself there.

In this podcast, we will take you inside the head of a living, breathing psychopath. We will reveal the journey of a sadistic killer, already convicted of the brutal murders of a young mother, Barbara McCulkin, and her two young daughters in the 1970s, a man who has self-confessed to thirty-three murders, but whose criminal associates say may be in excess of 100 people.

We will explore puzzles and questions that have hovered around Vince for decades.

Crucially, you will come with us on the search of that most gruesome of Holy Grails - the so-called private graveyard, somewhere near Ghost Gate Road, where Vince allegedly buried his victims, including the McCulkin girls.

I had been warned of the pathogen that is Vince.

Don’t get involved, I was told. Do not look into his story. It will take hold of you, and you won’t be able escape it. He is that dark shadow that lingers at the back of everybody’s mind. Don’t awaken the shadow. Stay away from him.

I didn’t listen.

The deeper I got into my investigation into Vince, the more I learned about my own family’s distant connections to this story, the collateral damage this man wreaked, with people who had been affected by him taking their own lives, and even a warning from one of Vince’s former colleagues that this murderer had taken note of stories I had published about him over the years, and declared me an enemy.

I was hated by a serial killer.

But I couldn’t stop.

From Whooshkaa Studios, I’m Matthew Condon, and this is Ghost Gate Road, a podcast that will take you inside the mind of one of the most sadistic killers Australia has ever produced.

MATTHEW CONDON: Every city and town in the world has its ghost stories.

And Warwick - a rural agricultural community 130kms south-west of the capital city of Brisbane in the state of Queensland - was no exception.

The difference with Warwick, though, was that its ghost was a living person. Someone everybody feared. And the horrifying stories that surrounded him just grew and grew over the years, then the decades, until he haunted successive generations of people who lived in that town.

The ghost that walked in Warwick was local Vince O’Dempsey, and his terrifying persona was so embedded in the fabric of the town that just the idea of him was used by parents to subdue their naughty children. If you play up, they would say, Vince will come and get you.

Vince was Warwick’s very own bogeyman.

And for much of his so-called career - from local thug to a ruthless killer and the most feared gangster in the Australian underworld - he remained just that. A spectre. A phantom.

When I first started investigating Vince more than a decade ago, he was still something of a fringe-dweller. He left no paper trail. There were few photographs of him in circulation, despite a life of crime. He lived in the shadows.

How could a man, rumoured to have been involved in possibly dozens of murders, stay off the grid?

That all changed in 2014, on the 40th anniversary of the disappearance of three people - suburban mother Barbara McCulkin, 32, and her two daughters, Vicki, 13, and Leanne, 11.

They were last seen on the evening of Wednesday, January 16, 1974, at their modest rented home at 6 Dorchester Street in South Brisbane.

That night, witnesses saw two visitors at the house. Vince O’Dempsey, and his little mate, Garry “Shorty” Dubois. Both Vince and Shorty had extensive criminal records at that point, and we will explore that soon.

But this was a crime that never healed over time.

What happened to Barbara and the girls? Where were their bodies? Who would kill not just this vivacious young mother, but her two innocent daughters? And why?

Then in 2014, Brisbane cold case homicide squad detective Mick Dowie, and his partner, Detective Virginia Gray, resurrected the triple murder investigation.

It worked.

By October, Vince and his accomplice,“Shorty”, were arrested for the brutal rape and murder of the McCulkins all those years ago. The news made headlines around the world.

We will explore the full horror of the McCulkin murders later in this podcast, but what was extraordinary about this development was that it had, for the first time, brought Vince out of the shadows and into the light.

It was like those occasional stories in the news of fishermen who sometimes snag terrifying deep sea creatures that nobody has ever seen before. Monsters drawn up from the watery depths.

At his committal hearing the following year, Vince arrived in court in Brisbane dressed in long pants and a knee-length black leather jacket. His oily hair was slicked back. His eyes were pitch black.

Watching him in the dock, a shudder went up my spine. He was every cliche of the heartless killer. He looked dangerous, cold and emotionless, and he scoured the court with those lifeless eyes as a predator might.

And I sat just a few metres from Vince during his trial for murdering the McCulkins. His total indifference to evidence that he bound the McCulkin girls, took them into dark bushland, then raped and murdered them in cold blood, sent chills through the courtroom.

The way the children died - and how he might have disposed of their bodies - still haunts Vince’s criminal associates who were told the story not long after it happened.

How did Vince, born into innocence, as we all are, turn into a killer?

I spent many months driving around Vince’s hometown of Warwick, trying to make sense of this killer, and years talking to people who knew him throughout his life, who went to school with him and boxed with him in amateur rings and were tackled by him in games of rugby league. I tracked down places where he lived and worked, wandered through hotel bars that he once haunted, and stood at the exact places where he had committed some hideous crimes.

But would I ever get to really know him? To penetrate the mind of a multiple murderer?

He was more complex than I ever imagined.

He adored ancient stories and mythology and relished the fighting spirit of the O’Dempsey clan out of Ireland. In the mid-1850s, his great-grandparents, James and Johannah O’Dempsey, washed up at the end of the earth in Warwick, amongst the ancient spurs and folds of the Great Dividing Range, and started a family that would ultimately produce a murderer.

I would soon learn that with this family, and Vince in particular, it is hard to know where the myths end and reality begins.

But one truth is inescapable. Vince is a psychopath.

He was clinically diagnosed as such back in 1955 when he was a troublesome teenager, terrorizing Warwick.

We know this because in 1980 there was a coronial inquest into the presumed murder of the McCulkin girls - Barbara, Vicki and Leanne – held six years after they disappeared off the face of the earth.

Vince was the number one suspect in those murders, and during the inquest he was handcuffed to the bar table during court proceedings in Brisbane.

The doctor who diagnosed the teenage Vince was called to give evidence.

That doctor was Peter Browne Rowland, and between April 1955 and September 1956, he worked as a medical officer at the Toowoomba Mental Hospital in Toowoomba, about 85kms north of the township of Warwick.

During that time, 16-year-old Vince was brought to the hospital and admitted. He was placed in Ward F.

A valuable source during my investigation into Vince gave me the full transcript of the 1980 inquest. Dr Rowland, from the witness stand, explained the reason for Vince’s admission:

At the inquest, Dr Rowland was quizzed by legal counsel Garry Forno about Vince’s mental state as a teenager.

The hospital was bursting at the seams with more than 1,400 patients. Back then, it had only one registered psychiatrist.

A government report into the hospital’s conditions at the time noted that it was home to “acute inebriates, criminals, mental defectives and chronic mental patients”, it was poorly maintained and was so overcrowded that one female ward contained 10 quote “juvenile mental defective boys”.

Dr Rowland originally viewed Vince as a schizophrenic, but over time he concluded otherwise that Mr O’Dempsey was a psychopath.

Vince was discharged from the hospital in late October 1955. He had just turned 17.

So young Vince went back home to his parents and siblings in Stewart Avenue, Warwick, in the shadow of St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral.

Vince was one of nine O’Dempsey children, many of them intelligent and high-achievers. Although a younger brother would follow his evil trajectory. You’ll learn more about that as we go.

As for Vince, the diagnosed psychopath, he never went back to school after his stay in the mental hospital and returned immediately to his antisocial behavior.

In the course of investigating Vince, I would speak to detectives who had trawled through Vince’s early years and produced evidence that as a youth he enjoyed rounding up stray cats and stabbing them through a hessian bag. He would then disembowel them. These atrocities never made it into the public record.

However, in late 1956, having just turned 18, he was charged with and convicted of stealing. And so began a criminal record that would roll out for decades.

Before we get into that, let’s briefly go back in time to Vince’s early childhood, and paint a picture of his home life.

Sometime during the Second World War the O’Dempsey’s - father Tom and mother Mary - and their nine children, moved from the family farm just outside Warwick to a house in the heart of town.

Tom was a respected real estate and stock agent, and dabbled in side projects like growing vegetables for sale and opening a fish and chip shop. Mother Mary, from one of Warwick’s oldest families, had her hands full with raising so many children. Vince had four brothers and four sisters.

They lived in an old Queenslander-style home, wooden with a corrugated iron roof, which sat on a generous block in Stewart Avenue, behind a car dealership and within sight of St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral.

Parallel to Stewart Avenue was a grid of streets - Palmerin Street, Guy Street, Wantley Street and Dragon Street.

In my research, I discovered the story behind these unusual street names.

They stemmed from the great Medieval myth of Guy of Warwick, the town’s namesake in the UK. Guy, a Palmerin knight, had fallen in love with the Earl of Warwick’s daughter, and to prove his worth, he travelled to Europe, killing dukes and princes and women and children and monsters, as well as a dragon called Wantley.

Palemerin, Guy, Wantley, Dragon. In this ancient tale, Guy, so ashamed of his violent past, becomes a hermit and devotes himself to his Christian faith. Vince lived inside this myth as a boy, became obsessed with it, and later would get a full torso tattoo, front and back, of Guy slaying the dragon.

Perhaps the O’Dempseys moved from the family farm into town to be closer to God.

And perhaps there was good reason to.

According to police investigations, O’Dempsey’s mother Mary noticed there was something decidedly “different” about her son as early as when he was four.

I desperately wanted to see the house where young Vince grew up. Childhood homes tell a story. I wanted to try and imagine Vince inside having dinner in the evening, or bursting out the front door in the mornings, swinging his school bag. Or all dressed up and heading to Mass at St Mary’s.

Vince’s parents were devoted catholics, even today, they are mentioned in the “Pray For” box of names in the St Mary’s parish newsletter, decades after their deaths.

Mary always clutched a set of rosary beads. Vince’s mother was so devoted to the church that she was part of a long-running group called Perpetual Adoration, essentially it involved parishioners sitting and praying inside the church in three 8hour shifts, 24hours a day, effectively guarding the place of worship.

Kerry McGrath went to Mass at St Mary’s as a young man.

You could never say enough good things about Mary and Tom O’Dempsey. But where did that dormant, evil seed finally germinate in Vince? Did it flourish in Stewart Avenue, sustained by stories of knights and dragons and mass murder?

It was where a teenage Vince was living when he was diagnosed as a psychopath.

When I finally arrive at Vince’s home address I’m stunned. It’s no longer here. It’s gone.

Vince lived in this now vanished house, when he went to the nearby St Mary’s primary school, then across the road to St Joseph’s Christian Brothers College in Pratten Street.

The school is still a curious amalgam of red brick buildings, and wooden Queenslander-style structures, all adorned with white crucifixes.

Vince was curious too. He stood out from the beginning.

A former classmate, Kevin, who still lives in Warwick, remembers Vince as a disturbing element.

But in his early years it went unrecognised and for his teachers cast him as a troublemaker.

Discipline at the school was paramount, and corporal punishment was dealt out liberally.

What Vince’s mates remembered about him most was indifference to the most severe of floggings. Remember Dr Peter Browne Rowland’s assessment;

Kevin recalls the whacks across the hand, and Vince’s total indifference to the floggings;

Another famous story about the schoolboy Vince was that he deliberately cut a hole in his trouser pocket so that in class he could tug, without detection, at his penis.

According to classmates, one day one of the Christian Brothers actually did notice, and demanded to know what was in Vince’s pocket that was so interesting.

The brother then shoved his own hand in, to discover Vince’s genitals.

Vince’s older brother, Darcy O’Dempsey, who would go on in life to be a respected figure in the Australian Labor Party and prominent in the banking sector, lives in a bayside suburb of Brisbane and talked to me about his troubled brother. I spoke to Darcy, on the telephone. Initially he didn’t want to talk about Vince, then he opened up for more than an hour about the life of the O’Dempsey family.

Darcy said of Vince, “He was like two people in one body. The Christian Brothers turned him bad. They were always flogging him. He was intelligent at school. He didn’t have to go to school, he was that smart. When he was 14, 15 years old the teachers were bashing him and it turned him nasty.”

If Darcy’s recollections are accurate, it was around the time of these bashings that Vince was taken to the Toowoomba psychiatric hospital.

Could Darcy be right? That the Christian Brothers “turned him bad”? Did the school floggings flick the switch within Vince?

In January 1952 a Brother Aloyisius Innocent Schofield took over as the new principal of St Joseph’s. Brothers took on saint’s names when they were ordained, and Schofield was clearly partial to the 19th Century Russian Orthodox missionary priest, Saint Innocent of Alaska.

Decades later, the Broken Rites organisation, a non-profit group that advocates for the rights of the victims of abusers in the Catholic Church, published an entry about Brother Schofield.

Classmates say Vince was often flogged by headmaster Schofield.

But was there more to the punishment than just a strapping?

Was his brother Darcy’s notion that the Christian Brothers had turned Vince bad truer than anyone knew? Was their sexual abuse involved? The only person who can really answer that question is Vince himself.

But was there more than meets the eye when it came to the perfect, God-fearing O’Dempsey family, with devoted Mary and the hard-working real estate and stock agent Tom?

In time Vince’s younger sibling Damien, who went on to become a Christian Brother, would be charged and imprisoned twice for sexually assaulting small boys.

One of Vince’s oldest friends and criminal acquaintances is Gary Lawrence. They say that Lawrence still holds the Queensland record for the most number of years served behind bars for someone never charged with murder.

I met Gary at his cattle farm deep in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland north of Brisbane, and he greeted me with a broad grin. He was wearing his uniform - a faded blue Jackie Howe singlet and shorts - and his bare arms were covered in blurred and faded tattoos from another era.

He always had his suspicions about Vince and the source of his friend’s violence and sexual sadism.

Vince’s legendary toughness was seen in full flight in the boxing ring and on the football field. And while observers at the time said he was competent enough in both sports, the quality that shone in the gym and on the footy paddock was Vince’s total reluctance to concede defeat.

Warwick local Les Cutmore knew Vince in the 1950s. He was four years younger than Vince, though they crossed paths through boxing and rugby league.

Les didn’t think much of Vince as a classic pugilist who stuck by the rules.

By now, Vince was starting to understand the power of violence. Through boxing and football, he was developing an iron-hard physique. Those who knew him said he had a neck as thick as a bull’s, and that he was freakishly strong.

Combined with his mental inability to know the difference between right and wrong, he was by then a ticking time bomb.

Kerry McGrath, whose father was the local policeman, Jack McGrath, observed Vince in the ring. He said in that raw environment, Vince’s true psychopathic nature was on display.

And Vince’s police record was slowly building, starting with charges for trespass and using threatening language.

It was something his parents, Tom and Mary, were getting used to.

I spoke to another local from Warwick, who was a family friend of the O’Dempsey’s and also didn’t want to be named or identified in any way. He remembers Vince’s slow but steady slide into criminality, or as he put it, the bad crowd.

Warwick was a small town, and nothing went unnoticed.

One shocking incident, however, went unreported to authorities.

I know this because I have copies of Vince’s confidential official criminal records for Queensland, NSW and the Australian Federal Police, and this appalling crime went under the radar.

It made me wonder how many other similar acts had escaped notice.

Here was a young man who had been diagnosed as a psychopath, enjoyed killing and disemboweling animals, showed absolutely no normal response to extreme pain, enjoyed dishing out physical violence and was building a criminal record.

Then one Saturday in summer, around 1956 – not long after Vince was discharged from the Toowoomba psychiatric hospital – 14-year-old Les Cutmore and his mate Bob Murdoch were cycling back from the Warwick public pool when they decided to drop into Mrs Dare’s little convenience store for a malted milk.

I would learn of this incident when I visited Les and his wife, Lynne, at their home on a quiet street not far from downtown Warwick. Les, in his 70s, was welcoming in the way of country people, and still has the nuggety physique of a boxer. As we sat around their kitchen table, Lynne immediately showered me with sandwiches and pizza and cups of tea.

It was warm hospitality that was completely at odds with the nasty story Les was about to tell me.

Les and Vince knew each other well. Les’ Dad used to drive Vince and his son to out-of-town boxing tournaments. Indeed, Les’ father, a car dealer in town, would soon sell Vince his first car – a 1957 cherry and cream Holden sedan.

But on this Saturday, Vince showed that darker side to his personality.

In short, Vince penetrated a 14-year-old boy with an ice cream. In public. Les may not have fully appreciated that he’d been sexually assaulted by Vince then, and even the gravity of that act today.

Recall the words of Dr Peter Browne Rowland, Vince’s doctor at the Toowoomba hospital;

A couple of years after raping Les Cutmore with the ice cream, Vince was charged with the aggravated assault of a sexual nature on a female child.

There are no details of the charge. The age of the girl. The acts Vince committed on her. He had sexually assaulted Les, and now another child. It never made the newspapers.

Vince was convicted and fined 25 pounds and put on a six- month good behaviour bond.

Think of that crime in today’s terms. An adult charged with sexually assaulting a child now would not receive a fine and a slap on the wrist. If convicted, as Vince was, he would undoubtedly face jail time. And he would be put on the Child Protection Offender Register for the rest of his life.

But not then.

Everything the doctors at the Toowoomba said about Vince’s psychopathic behaviour was coming true. By the end of his teens he had matured into a sexual predator.

Looking at the ice cream rape, when he was 18 years old, and the child assault, when he was 20, it made me rethink the long arc of Vince’s offending. When it came to sexual assault and murder, the official record and the testimony of others appeared to reveal that he offended in clusters. That there would be an explosion of sexual violence, followed by a period of calm, and then another eruption, sometimes years apart.

Were these offences in Warwick in the late 1950s Vince’s first cluster? What he did next, just three months after assaulting the girl, supports this ugly theory.

As you put yourself to bed tonight, wherever you are, be assured that there really is a Ghost Gate Road, just outside of Warwick, Queensland, Australia, where a serial killer’s victims rest, and where spirits come out to play.

Without exaggeration, I just have to recall my drive along that twisted dirt track, the landscape nothing but a vista of dead trees and dry earth, and goosebumps rash my arms. You just know something bad has happened there, and that evil has leached into the soil.

In the next episode, we will see how Vince’s violence entered a whole new level on the road to him becoming Australia’s most feared gangster. How he made the transition from child psychopath to a remorseless serial killer.

If you think this man’s story has been frightening so far, a warning. Nothing I can say, or do, can prepare you for what this creature did, and got away with, over the next five decades.

END