A Black Day For Society

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

For years, this has been Ground Zero in my investigation into the killer, Vince O’Dempsey.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve come to this street and studied the shabby little workers’ cottage at Number 6, Dorchester Street, Highgate Hill. South Brisbane.

It was from here, on the night of Wednesday, January 16, 1974, that young mother Barbara McCulkin, and her two daughters, Vicki, who was 13, and Leanne, who was just 11, were taken by family friend Vince for a joyride in his snappy orange Valiant Charger.

A quick cruise around the city with Vince and his mate Shorty Dubois. What harm could that do? Barbara left the lights on in the house and her purse on the fridge. She was wearing her slippers.

She couldn’t know that she and the girls were about to be driven to their deaths.

It was here they were last seen alive.

What was going through Vince’s deranged mind that night? At the invitation of his mate, Billy McCulkin - Barbara’s husband - he had stayed in the house for six weeks after he was released from Boggo Road Jail in early 1971. He knew Barbara and the girls well. What possessed him to take them all the way to bushland outside Warwick and rape and slaughter them?

Why?

I had never been inside the house in Dorchester Street. I had pored over the old crime scene photographs of the interior- the cheap furniture, the aquarium, the make-up and perfume on Barbara’s dresser, the girls’ bedrooms with roller skates by the door and pictures of rock stars pinned to the walls.

I had always wanted to get in there, into that haunted house. To try and get a feel for the McCulkins’ last moments on earth. To stand where their killer, Vince, had stood.

And on my last visit, I noticed that the front door was open.

From Whooshkaa Studios, I’m Matthew Condon and this is Ghost Gate Road - In this episode, Vince shifts from country town thug to a life of big city gangs, underworld heavies and entrenched police corruption.

In the last week of December 1970 two prisoners inside Brisbane’s Boggo Road Jail were woken at 4am.

It was already warm, even at that hour, and the men washed up, had a cup of tea, dressed into civilian clothing, and were ordered to wait in the holding area.

Both were set to be released from jail after lengthy sentences.

One was Bob - that’s not his real name - who was 24, a car thief and rouseabout, and still bitter at having to spend almost five years in prison for a crime he says he did not commit. Wrong place, wrong time.

The other man was Vince . He was 32. He’d served five years for stealing a safe from a department store. And he was about to be set free.

I was put in touch with Bob through a good source. I was told Bob was a man of few words, and that the odds of him talking to me were next to zero.

Loose lips sink ships.

Bob had an extensive criminal history, and had been in and out of jail up and down Australia’s eatsern seaboard. And while he was cautious when I called, we ended up meeting for coffee in northern New South Wales, and he grew to trust me.

Then he started to open up about Vince, and the day they were sprung from jail - or as Bob calls it, “the boob” - on the same day in 1970.

Vince thought that was funny.

It’s a black day for society today.

Seven words that Bob has thought about now for exactly fifty years.

Bob and Vince had become friends in Boggo Road. Both were hard men. Both were career criminals. And here they were, about to step out into a new decade.

The sixties were dead and with new decade heralded a new life for Vince O’Dempsey.

Bob is an extraordinary storyteller. He’s witty. He has a thousand tales about a lost generation of Australian criminals.

And he will never forget what Vince told him in the holding yard in 1970.

It’s a black day for society today.

At exactly 6am, Vince walked out the front gates of Boggo Road jail and was a free man.

A monster was on the loose.

On that morning Bob was met by his relatives outside the jail’s front gates and taken home. One of Vince’s brothers was waiting for him.

The records show, however, that Vince did not go home to Warwick – where he had a de facto wife, Margaret, and a five-year-old daughter, Sharon , waiting - but to a house at 6 Dorchester Street at Highgate Hill, less than two kilometers from Boggo Road.

Why didn’t he go home straight away to his loved ones? He’d been locked up with hard men for years. Did he hesitate at the family responsibilities that awaited him?

The small wooden workers’ cottage in Dorchester Street–the house I visited at the beginning of this episode – was rented by Billy McCulkin and his family.

Billy, a local petty gangster, thug and alcoholic, had stolen the safe from the Fortitude Valley department store in 1966 with Vince. Someone dobbed them into the police. Vince was jailed. Billy served a month on remand.

But they were clearly close enough for Billy to invite Vince, when he got out of jail, to stay for several weeks at his home until Vince got back on his feet.

Billy was married to Barbara, then in her late 20s. They had two young daughters, Vicki and Leanne.

Did Billy know that he had a sexual predator under his roof for those six weeks? Billy would later tell police that Vince was a model lodger. That he was quiet and went to bed early.

The other visitors to the house were not so well behaved. Dorchester Street became a bit of a clubhouse for Billy’s criminal mates. And they were an eclectic crew.

They included John Andrew Stuart, a wild and violent Westbrook graduate with movie star good looks who’d built his reputation on stabbing a man when he was just a teenager.

There was Billy Phillips, a tattoist, stolen goods fence and weapons dealer who’d ink women in exchange for sex.

Then there was the Clockwork Orange Gang, named after the classic Stanley Kubrick film about a psychopath, Alex, and his gang of droogs who went on crime sprees where they raped and pillaged.

In the film, Alex wears a bowler hat.

The local Clockwork gangers, however, all came from the rough, tough suburb of Chermside in Brisbane’s inner-north.

The gang members were obsessed with American cars, particularly Studebakers, and had a couple in loud colours. At one stage they also owned a hearse which they called the party car.

There was Tommy “Clockwork Orange” Hamilton - a feisty redhead and aspiring boxer who sometimes affected the bowler hat of his delinquent movie hero.

Keith “Jimmy” Meredith - he sported a monstrous afro and was nicknamed after his twin, guitar hero Jimmy Hendrix.

Peter Hall - the prankster.

And Gary “Shorty” Dubois - short, with long hair, a handlebar moustache, who had a passion for young girls and a mouse tattooed on his penis. He was obsessed with American cult killer Charles Manson.

Years later, Peter Hall told me about Shorty and the strange hold Vince had over him.

Shorty became obsessed with cult killer Manson. He grew a Manson-like handlebar moustache and read about his hero in news magazines in prison. Friends said when he read about Manson, he whooped in admiration.

At Dorchester Street, crimes were planned.

And Billy and his mates discussed at length their peculiar dance with the corrupt police of the day, mainly Detective Glendon Patrick Hallahan and Detective Tony Murphy. Both men were feared officers who, at a whim, could frame you for anything from murder to shoplifting, and fit you with a quote “present”, like a gun or drugs.

If you can’t beat them, the crooks reasoned, join them.

Hallahan was like Fagan, out of Charles Dickens’ famous novel about street urchin Oliver Twist, in control of his little band of Artful Dodgers.

Criminal Gary Lawrence, who we’ve already met - trust me, you’ll remember his voice when you hear it again - had countless run-ins with Hallahan and Murphy. He says both were extremely violent and corrupt to the core. While Murphy was the boss, Hallahan was often the muscle.

Lawrence thought Hallahan was a thug. But that Murphy was pure evil.

This was the deal in early 1971, with Vince out of jail.

Corrupt police like Murphy, Hallahan and their underlings controlled the crime. And the criminals played along, as best they could, to survive. You will hear a lot more about police corruption as we go along.

In the meantime, the Clockwork Orange Gang was cruising through Brisbane, looking for trouble.

And the gang ramped up its illegal activities in the early 70s.

As for Vince, the lodger of Dorchester Street, he received a surprise visit from his de facto wife, Margaret. She was trying to understand why he hadn’t come home to Warwick.

So in late February, 1971, Vince went back to his hometown and tried to play the responsible husband and father.

And he even got a job. A job he was perfectly suited for. He was employed as a slaughter man on a poultry farm.

By a strange coincidence, the family of a colleague of mine when I worked at the Courier Mail Newspaper in Brisbane once owned a chicken factory in Warwick where Vince, fresh out of jail, took some work late in the summer of 1971. After following some leads I managed to find a woman who actually worked there at the same time as Vince. She told me…

Vince’s period as a “square head”, or straight, law abiding citizen, didn’t last long. The poultry farm records show that he ceased employment on April 23, 1971. He’d managed nine weeks of gainful employment.

It was a mug’s game. He had bigger fish to fry. It was time to move back to the Big Smoke of Brisbane.

Vince, his de facto Margaret and their child, Sharon, moved into a rental in Harcourt Street in New Farm in Brisbane, abutting Fortitude Valley in the city’s inner-north-east with its brothels, illegal casinos, dive bars and rowdy pubs.

Vince needed some money coming in, so he called on his old mate Billy McCulkin, who secured him a job as bouncer and general dog’s body at a shonky mock auctions shop in Queen Street, the city.

The mock auction was a con that stretched back to Victorian England. Punters would enter the auction room and bid for wrapped packages. Unaware of the contents, they might pay peanuts for something genuinely valuable, or good money from items that were worthless.

Usually, they did their money.

The scam, run by local horse racing identity and businessman Paul Meade, was financed by Sydney mob boss Frederick “Paddles” Anderson. Anderson supplied the auction goods. All stolen, and shipped up from New South Wales.

Vince, you might remember from a previous episode, did some work for Paddles in Sydney in 1965 before he was charged with carrying an unlicensed pistol.

Now, at the mock auction, Vince fitted right in.

He was connected again to the Sydney mob. And he could flex his muscle and indulge in his love of violence on the door of the mock auction.

Meade’s longtime assistant, and lover, Estelle Long, would later admit to police:

Brisbane’s main drag is more gentrified these days. Today, not far from the old auction house, is Tiffany’s, Louis Vuitton, and other elite shopping destinations.

But some places can’t shake their history.

But let’s go all the way back to 1971 for a moment. Through the auction, Vince had returned to working in the criminal underworld. And by complete chance, a young police constable by the name of Alan Marshall remembers Vince working in Queen Street. A few years later Marshall would be ordered to investigate Vince for the murder of the McCulkins.

He clearly recalls seeing Vince at 154 Queen Street.

A young Peter Hall from the Clockwork Orange Gang also remembers Vince at the Mock Auctions. It was the first time Peter had ever laid eyes on him.

Let’s just take stock here for a moment.

Vince has now had three stretches in jail. The first in the early 1960s for nearly kicking a police officer to death in Warwick. The second for carrying an illegal handgun in Sydney in 1965. And third, for stealing a safe in Brisbane in 1966.

He has a history of sexual assault.

He has already been involved in dealing drugs.

And Vince is a diagnosed psychopath.

He is living with his de facto wife Margaret and child in one of the seediest parts of Brisbane. And he is earning a quid working for criminal identities in both Brisbane and Sydney.

Vince’s gangster mates going back to the 1960s will always tell you that Vince had an almost pathological hatred of the police, or the squiggly tails as he used to call them. Hadn’t he nearly beaten one to death?

But that doesn’t tell the true story.

In fact, the reality is the opposite.

When Vince settled in Brisbane in 1971, he committed one of the great cardinal sins of the criminal underworld. He began secretly working for the police as an informant.

And he hooked up with not just any police officer, but none other than detective, Tony Murphy, a man both feared and admired. Murphy was widely known as a member of the corrupt Rat Pack, along with detectives Glen Hallahan and Terry Lewis.

All three had been mentored by corrupt former police commissioner Frank Bischof during the 1950s and 60s.

So here was Queensland’s top detective getting into bed with Queensland’s top criminal.

I asked former Queensland police intelligence officer and undercover operative, Jim Slade, who worked closely with Murphy for years, how Murphy’s unique partnership with O’Dempsey may have come about.

Brisbane was rife with police corruption. It was also home to a burgeoning prostitution industry, still disorganised, ad hoc, a cottage industry in the early 70s, before the big madams came up from Sydney and revolutionised the business in the Queensland capital a few years later.

But in 1971, the coppers needed an organising principle to make sure they received regular kickbacks. And that organising principle was Vince.

Warren “Wazza” McDonald worked for Vince for more than 20 years. He became known as Vince’s “apprentice”. And there was very little Vince didn’t confide in Wazza.

I met McDonald a few years ago and immediately enjoyed his company. He has a hilarious turn of phrase. A sharp memory. A big laugh.

And he remembers like it was yesterday Vince talking about those days in Brisbane in the early 1970s.

Then into 1972, Vince suddenly appears flush with cash. He buys a bright orange Valiant Charger – one of the most popular and eye-catching vehicles of its day.

He paid $4,500 for it.

The two-door, six-cylinder car was extremely popular in Australia in the early 1970s, helped by a string of television advertisements promoting the vehicle and its “masculine” chassis as sexy and an object of seduction and lust. The soft porn movie star Alvin Purple, played by the actor Graeme Blundell, featured in one of the ads in 1973, trailed by a gaggle of females hoping to get a lift with him in his new Charger.

The ads showed young women, men and even children crying out to the car and its drivers, “Hey Charger!” while gesturing a “V” peace sign with their hands. “Hey Charger” virtually entered the language.

Vince had even driven his distinctive car out to his hometown of Warwick on a few occasions to show it off. Everyone in Warwick knew about Vince’s hot car.

Next, he bought a part-share in a block of land in Warwick with his new boss, Paul Meade.

Where was the cash coming from?

Wazza has a pretty good idea.

Even at this early stage, however, Vince was tied up with corrupt police, especially Tony Murphy.

Peter Hall didn’t want to believe Vince had been a police informant. Only in recent years has he joined the dots.

Vince had committed the unthinkable. He went into business with corrupt police. It’s a secret he’s tried to keep to this day.

Only now have his criminal mates begun to air their suspicions.

Wazza, however, has no doubts.

By early 1973, Vince was flying high.

He’d settled in Brisbane. He’d dumped Margaret, and his daughter, Sharon, and taken up with a new woman - prostitute and alcoholic by the name of Diane Pritchard.

He had his beloved Valiant Charger, and his fingers in several illicit pies.

And then a business opportunity came up.

Vince was asked to organise an arson attack on Torino’s, a restaurant in Fortitude Valley owned by the Ponticelli brothers, for insurance purposes. Vince jumped at the chance, and with Billy McCulkin, he planned the firebombing.

They asked the Clockwork Orange boys to do the dirty work.

This crime remained unsolved for almost forty-five years. Only recently did Peter Hall, one of the crew tapped to blow up Torino’s that night in February, 1973, confess to the arson.

The gang got out of there with their lives, and after the explosion they were pumped with adrenaline.

It was the biggest job of their criminal careers. Forget nicking electrical goods. This was fire and brimstone. This is what real gangsters did.

Back in Dorchester Street, Barbara knew in advance about the Torino’s job. How couldn’t she? Her husband and Vince had planned it in the family home.

Nobody was harmed in the blast. It was an insurance scam. And Billy got paid his share in cash.

But Barbara was also picking up plans for another firebombing. This time a nightclub in Fortitude Valley called the Whiskey Au Go Go, a late night dive in St Paul’s Terrace run by crooks and bash merchants.

How much did Barbara know? How could she have foreseen that eleven days after the Torino’s blast, someone would torch the Whiskey and within minutes lay claim to Australia’s worst mass murder?

Fifteen dead in just minutes.

And after almost fifty years, big questions remain unanswered.

Did Barbara know enough about the Whiskey to have unwittingly signed her own death warrant? This innocent woman in her shabby cottage in Dorchester Street, trying to raise two kids, sewing their clothes, taking them to the local roller skating rink every weekend, doing absolutely everything in her power to give them a decent future.

And on that terrible night - March 8, 1973 - at 2:08am, when fire raced up the staircase of the nightclub and met its victims. Where was Vince O’Dempsey?

Where was Vince when the Whiskey blew?

END