Bodgie

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MATTHEW CONDON: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them….”

You’re probably familiar with that famous quote. Yes, it’s Shakespeare, from his play Julius Caesar.

It’s a speech loved and adored by actors through the generations. And by Vince O’Dempsey who, in the late 1950s, on a warm night in a park in Warwick, hopped up onto a tree stump and dramatically recited those lines to a group of strangers.

Vince was celebrating. He had just raped a teenage girl in front of shocked onlookers, and now asked his audience to lend him their ears.

Everyone in his hometown of Warwick knew that Vince was trouble. He was scary and unpredictable. But over time he was growing into something far worse.

At the dawn of the 1960s he would be involved in drug dealing, rapes, and police bashings, all on the path to murder.

But Shakespeare? Why Shakespeare?

I think I’ve just figured out why.

From Whooshkaa Studios, I’m Matthew Condon and this is Ghost Gate Road…in this episode I continue my quest to uncover the truth about Vince O’Dempsey, one of the most sadistic killers Australia has ever produced.

I’m driving around Warwick and it just struck me as interesting how there are so many touchstones to O’Dempsey’s past still here, still so well defined, almost to the point where you can see back fifty years in time, to the movements of this man. This creature of habit who kept coming back here to Warwick, the call of Warwick, and the myths he made for himself en route.

Every time I visit the township of Warwick, with its rowdy pubs and beds of thorny rose bushes down the centre of Palmerin Street, the rumours about Vince are as pungent as the flowers. Like the day I visited Les Cutmore and learned about the time he was sexually assaulted by Vince in the milk bar all those years ago, Les and his wife Lynne rattled off a string of long-held Vince rumours.

The most persistent gossip was that Vince had killed a man and buried him in the wall of the dam.

It was the stuff of the movies. Straight out of Hollywood and onto the big silver screen at Kings’ Theatre in Warwick.

It’s August 1954 and the film The Wild One has premiered at Kings’, literally a block away from where Vince lived in Stewart Avenue.

The movie is all about outlaw motorcycle gangs, hooliganism and lawlessness and stars Marlon Brando. It causes controversy around the world.

Local authorities fretted that the film might trigger gang violence and juvenile delinquency.

As it happens, The Wild One depicts anti-social gangs of disaffected teenagers at the time, who in Australia called themselves “bodgies”, for the males, and “widgies” for their female counterparts. There were similar subcultures around the globe such as the ‘American greaser’ and ‘UK rocker’. They were aggressive and cared little for rules.

Their philosophy was everything that Vince embodied. Violent. Without conscience. A rebel. A grenade with a loose pin.

It’s eerie to think that if you stood outside Vince’s childhood house in Stewart Avenue, you would have been able to see the rear of Kings Theatre, just a couple of hundred metres away, and its red neon sign.

You can almost see him passing through the foyer of the theatre, settling into the stalls, and hearing a woman ask Brando’s character - what was he rebelling against?

I’m thinking this is the moment, hypnotised by the silver screen teeming with motorcycles and fist fights, that Vince began to idolise Marlon Brando.

A few short years after Brando thundered into Warwick, Vince had been charged with several offences, including the indecent dealing of a young girl, and as we learned in episode one, he had raped a 14-year-old boy with an ice cream in a totally unprovoked attack.

In Warwick, Vince relished in his reputation as someone to fear.

But he attracted attention for other reasons.

Vince became a full-blown bodgie.

The growth of this American-inspired subculture caused fear and alarm in conservative post-war Australia.

As the subculture grew, reports into their anti-social attitude and peculiar way of dressing began appearing on Australian television.

Here is one example from the 1950s:

Vince loved this culture. It was as if it had been created just for him.

But this was Warwick, as rural and conservative as they come. It was cattle and rodeos and farms. It was work trousers and boots. And a pressed shirt and thin tie for church.

Vince’s new look certainly shocked the locals, as I discovered during my investigation.

There was Les, who had boxed with Vince.

Then there was retired Queensland police detective Alan Marshall, who spent more than two years sifting through every aspect of Vince’s life in the late 1970s, when he thought he had Vince cold for the McCulkin murders.

I visited Alan in his small, neat home not far from the Queensland border at Tweed Heads. He made coffee, and sitting at the kitchen table he remembered details of Vince and his Bodgie crew back in the day - Raymond Vincent Tommy Allen, Dessy Locke - all prowling about town in their Bodgie gear.

He’d gathered a few of the local toughs around him, and everywhere they went there was disruption.

He hung out in a dim pool hall in Grafton Street. It was known as Mutch’s Saloon, not far from the town post office, and in a few short years had gone from a respectable billiard room with high, metal-pressed ceilings and bright lights, to a dim hang-out for degenerates. Few women entered. To locals, it was dangerous. It became Vince’s lair.

Vince was also the resident pool shark at the majestic Criterion Hotel in Palmerin Street, a two-storey brick pub with bars downstairs and accommodation upstairs.

I visited the Criterion with Ron Smith, who knew Vince through the Catholic church, school, and later socialising in pubs like these.

Ron witnessed Vince’s prowess with a pool cue.

Later, over coffee, as we go through Ron and Vince’s shared history, Ron starts talking about the drug scene in Warwick in the early 1960s and I learn something I’d never heard before.

Ron tells the story:

This extraordinary claim is later confirmed by Warren “Wazza” McDonald, a long-time associate of Vince’s.

Wazza was known as Vince’s “apprentice” and close confidante for almost 20 years, and in his younger days was the picture of a gangster on trainer wheels, with his guns and rolls of money. But he moved out of the game and built a new life for himself.

I asked him about Vince’s early years and drugs.

These anecdotes from Ron and Wazza offer a far richer insight than I’d ever imagined into Vince’s depravity as he moved out of his teens and into his early 20s.

As for his development as a sexual predator, it erupted in his Bodgie period.

Not only was he dealing dope, but he was trying his hand as a pimp.

According to locals, Vince was running a couple of prostitutes out of rooms upstairs in the Mayfair Hotel, not far from the Criterion.

It was a bold entrepreneurial move in a town as small as Warwick.

During our stroll downtown, Ron’s memories came flooding back.

Vince was dealing drugs. He was bludging off hookers. It was just the beginning. He got worse. A lot worse.

Small towns like to keep their secrets close to their chest.

In the case of Vince, though, almost everybody who crossed paths with him has a story.

And none were more shocking than the one told to me by a former Warwick local who would like to be known as Richard. Richard was several years younger than Vince, but certainly knew of him and his reputation.

Richard vividly remembers attending a dance at the little village of Yangan, outside Warwick, when Vince rocked up in his Bodgie gear. Richard says he looked ridiculous, but nobody dared laugh.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears the famous speech goes…

Less than a year before the screening of Marlon Brando’s The Wild One at Kings picture theatre in 1954, the movie house had also screened a film version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It of course featured Marc Antony’s famous speech.

And wouldn’t you know it? None other than Marlon Brando played Mark Antony.

Is it a coincidence, that Vince is quoting a famous speech uttered up on the silver screen by Brando? Had he taken on Brando’s persona in some weird act of idol worship?

Richard only knows what he saw.

At this point Vince is clearly out of control.

And still he found another level of debauchery and violence.

It was a cold Saturday night on June 6, 1959, an off-duty Warwick police sergeant, Frances Joseph Toohill, was wandering down Grafton Street near the centre of town.

Just around the corner from the seedy pool hall Vince hung out in…

It was Vince and his mate Dessy Locke.

Toohill asked them what they were up to and was told: “Keep your fucking nose out of our business.”

Toohill kept walking and soon heard footsteps behind him. He suffered a blow to the back of his head and fell to his knees. Kicked in the back of the skull and the back.

Toohill begged them to stop. They didn’t.

Vince and Dessy were soon picked up by the cops and charged.

It was big news in Warwick. A merciless attack on a police officer.

But it was hardly a surprise to those who knew Vince.

Wazza McDonald says Vince often brought up the incident.

Vince and Dessy’s trial was held in the Criminal Court in Brisbane before Justice Hanger.

To defend their son, Vince’s parents hired legendary criminal barrister Dan Casey. Casey was a devout Catholic and loved rugby league and boxing, so he was a good fit for Vince.

It did little good.

Vince and Dessy, described in court as “standover men”, were found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison. They would have to serve at least two and a half years before being eligible for parole.

Vince had been pushing the limits for years.

Now he was off to the big house – Boggo Road Gaol – in Brisbane.

His apprenticeship was complete.

Vince was now a serious criminal, and he was going to spend a few years with some of the most vile and hardened criminals that the state of Queensland had to offer.

When you talk about Boggo Road in the 1960s, all roads lead back to a juvenile detention centre called the Westbrook Farm Home for Boys in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane up on the Great Dividing Range.

Westbrook, or the Brook, took in truants, thieves, delinquents, and held them until they were 18 years old.

But instead of reforming them, it became the living embodiment of hell.

Over the years, survivors of Westbrook have shared their horror stories in books and television documentaries. Westbrook wasn’t shut down until 2012.

Westbrook’s unique quality was that it became a nursery for a generation of future criminals. And many of those friendships forged in the nightmare of Westbrook continued on the outside.

Many notorious criminals – and you will meet them as we go on with this story – first met in Westbrook. Then once they were out they graduated to Brisbane’s Boggo Road Gaol.

Vince, sentenced to five years in Boggo, was about to meet a bunch of former Westbrook boys, all with their own skills in robbery, safe-cracking, shoplifting, sexual assault and worse.

One long-term criminal, Gary Lawrence, knew all about the Westbrook boys. Lawrence was a legend in Boggo. He held the Queensland record for the most number of years spent behind bars by someone who had never been charged with murder.

I had been intrigued by the character of Lawrence for years.

I admit I felt a bit intimidated by Lawrence given everything I’d heard about him, but one day I telephoned him on his farm on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and he invited me to visit.

It’s a beautiful property tucked away in the hills and Gary has done a great job with the upkeep, the fencing, and has a few houses on his land. He occasionally runs some cattle.

He appears in his working shorts and blue Jackie Howe singlet, and has a larrikin grin on his face. For all the trouble he’s seen, he is kindly and generous and great company.

He told me about the Brook boys and how they ended up in Boggo Road.

In the cell you had a bed without sheets, and a shit tin.

And then there was the food.

If you didn’t understand everything Gary said, don’t worry. He speaks in what is known as Australian strine, or language filled with slang and sayings picked up through experiences we can’t begin to imagine.

But his meaning is clear. Boggo Road Gaol was a nightmare, cold in winter, hot in summer, the food inedible, the conditions atrocious, and the treatment of prisoners subhuman.

In Boggo, Vince was assigned to the boot shop.

On the weekends, prisoners could mingle with other inmates, play cards and have a yarn.

For Vince, his jail stint for bashing the Warwick copper was the opposite of time wasted. In fact, those who knew him in Boggo Road during those two and a half years attested that he used his time to almost completely reinvent himself.

Gone was the brash, violent Bodgie lairing about in leopard-skin pants and mesh T-shirts, bringing attention to himself with his dress and his disdain for authority.

By the time Vince got out of jail in late 1962, he was a fit, hardened, wised-up gangster ready to kill at will. He had shed his skin. Again.

In late 1962 Vince returned home to Warwick a very different animal.

Broke and with a burgeoning criminal record, he got a job on the construction of the Leslie Dam out at Sandy Creek, about 11kms from downtown Warwick.

For all the dam workers, it was tough, back-breaking work out in the middle of nowhere, and a lot of them lived on site. But at least it was honest money.

At the dam, Vince met Raymond Vincent Tommy Allen, 22, who had been partial to the Bodgie lifestyle himself. He was short – five foot six – but had a larrikin streak. Like Vince, he wore leopard skin pants when he went out on the town. Like Vince, he played recreational rugby league on the weekends.

He even set Vince up on a blind date.

That’s when Vince met Margaret, a local girl, who would go on to become his first wife.

Margaret soon learned a few things about Vince. Over time, she grew to fear him.

This is Margaret, being cross-examined by lawyer Garry Forno, who you met in episode one, at a coronial inquest many years later.

Vince had been locked away in prison for more than two years, his psychopathic nature bottled up and controlled by the routines of jail. A cluster of his madness was gathering a head of steam.

That broke on the first weekend of March, 1964, when police discovered that the Piggott & Co store in Palmerin Street and Creighton & Co., auctioneers and real estate agents, had been broken into and robbed. Watches, clocks and jewellery had been taken from Piggott’s. Three safes were lifted from Creighton’s.

Piggott’s had been in Palmerin Street forever and was known and loved by generations of locals. Were the thieves men from out of town? Who would violate a Warwick institution?

I have stood in front of what was the old store. The Piggott’s name is still there, high up near the roof of the building.

It was a decent heist for a small town.

Through some excellent police work, detectives traced tyre marks at the scene to the vehicle of a worker at Leslie Dam by the name of Gunther Janke.

Janke shot through to Sydney in Vince’s 1957 Holden Special sedan, taking some of the proceeds of the robbery with him. He left Vince’s car at the wharves at The Rocks, near the southern end of the Harbour Bridge.

Vince managed to hitchhike to Sydney where he found his car. In it, he discovered one of the watches from the Piggott’s heist, so he mailed it back to himself in Stewart Avenue, Warwick, just in case police pulled him over and discovered him with the incriminating evidence.

He then drove back to Warwick.

But people had been talking, and suspicions over the robbery fell on Vince. He was rounded up by police and questioned.

How do we know so much about this long-forgotten case?

Well, I can tell you, because long investigations like this one into Vince sometimes produce surprising finds. And if I hadn’t done a public event for a book up on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast a few years ago I would never have met Kerry McGrath.

Because as it turned out, Kerry’s father was Jack McGrath, the Warwick detective who investigated the Piggott’s robbery, and we wouldn’t have known any of the details of this smalltown crime if Kerry hadn’t stumbled across a copy of official case files in his father’s papers.

I called Kerry on the phone and asked him why his Dad held onto the old documents.

Police charged Vince with the robberies. And some locals were going to have to appear as a witness against him in court.

As it stood, Vince was not going to go back to jail if he could help it.

Vince’s committal hearing was set down for June 30.

And the witnesses? They never showed up in court.

So the case against Vince evaporated.

That Vince got away with the robberies did not change officer Jack McGrath’s opinion of a young Vince. Jack often talked to his son Kerry about the Warwick hooligan.

Vince had dodged a bullet and this close shave unsettled him.

He quit his job at the dam and went to live briefly in Brisbane with Margaret near the end of 1964.

They then moved briefly to Sydney, where Vince established his links with Sydney organised crime and became a gun for hire.

He earned the admiration of one gangster in particular – Frederick “Paddles” Anderson - the unofficial Godfather of Sydney organised crime. If you needed a job done, you could rely on Vince. And as Vince himself always said – business is business.

Wazza McDonald says of Vince’s friendship with Paddles:

That work was contract killing.

I’m not sure even Paddles Anderson knew what he had on his hands with the likes of Vince O’Dempsey.

But his days as a Sydney gangster didn’t last long. In November 1965 - just as Margaret gave birth to their first child, Sharon - Vince was arrested and charged with being in possession of a firearm. As a convicted felon, he was sentenced to one year in jail. He would serve about six months.

Shortly after his release from prison Vince struck up a friendship with Brisbane crook Billy McCulkin, who was kicking around in Sydney at the time, and back in Brisbane in 1966 they hatched a plan to rob a safe from the Waltons department store in Fortitude Valley.

Vince had learned the safe-cracking trade from the best in the business when he was in Boggo Road, and was applying his new skills on the outside.

They did the job, but someone ratted them out to then corrupt Queensland detective Glen Hallahan.

Vince was sentenced to five years in Boggo Road. McCulkin spent one month on remand and was released.

It was during his second tour of duty in Boggo, however, that Vince established relationships that would last the rest of his criminal career.

It is where he met, and became very close to, Gary Lawrence.

I asked Gary when he first met Vince, and he takes me back to Boggo Road Gaol in Brisbane in 1966. Lawrence was already serving time there when Vince went in on the safe job conviction.

Gary was in his early 20s. He’d been in and out of jail before being charged for a gang assault on a young male university student in a Brisbane park. The case, investigated by Detective Tony Murphy, was a front-page scandal.

Here is Gary talking about when he first met Vince…

Inside, they gasbagged and played cards.

As Lawrence recalls…

Gary Lawrence also recalls a horrifying conversation he had with Vince during their time together in Two Jail.

It was a passing chat that Garry has never been able to get out of his head.

Vince told Gary that the devil had visited him in his cell, and had spoken to him, but Vince couldn’t work out what the Devil was saying.

So Gary and Vince become close friends. Then convicted rapist “Shorty” Dubois gets on with Vince. And through Shorty, Vince gets to know Tommy Hamilton and Peter Hall and Keith Meredith. These men would form the nucleus of the notorious Clockwork Orange Gang. We’ll learn more of their criminal activities soon.

But Vince had joined a powerful alliance that would serve him well decades into the future. And when it came to Shorty, they would be bound for life by murder.

Vince served his time and was released from prison in late 1970.

By chance Vince’s friend Bob was released at exactly the same hour, on exactly the same day as Vince.

Both men walked out of jail together.

This is what Bob told me about that haunting moment.

Bob told me that at this moment, Vince turned to him and said: Today is a black day for society.

A monster had been unchained.

END