Knives, Guns and God

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

It’s a cloudy winter’s morning and I’m back in Farmer *’s battered ute driving through bushland on the outskirts of Warwick.

The ute is shuddering across a potholed dirt track.

You’ll remember Farmer *. He was fossicking a few years ago through a public reserve called Morgan Park, outside town, and believes he may have stumbled across killer Vince O’Dempsey’s private graveyard.

Morgan Park - a tract of thick bushland just outside Vince’s hometown, like Ghost Gate Road, with the same hollow deadness and eerie remoteness. The same hardwood trees, granite outcrops, caves and tall grass.

A place with an identical type of atmosphere that puts all your senses on alert and whispers to you - stay sharp, something terrible has happened here.

We’re getting closer.

And this time I’ve come back with a singular purpose - to see if the story we know about the McCulkins, and their last horrifying moments, matches this landscape.

All we know from Peter Hall, who was told the story of the murders by Vince’s accomplice and his then friend, Shorty Dubois, the day after the killings, is this: Vince parked the orange Charger close to bushland so the car wouldn’t get scratched; Barbara and the girls, Vicki and Leanne, had their hands bound and were marched through a shallow creek; along the banks of the creek were some willow trees; then the murder party proceeded up a hill for some time. They reached the graveyard. Then the McCulkin girls were raped and killed.

I need to know if there was a back road to the Morgan Park reserve. Vince would not risk being seen by driving the bright Charger, with three women tied up in the backseat, through the main entrance.

We drive around the perimeter fence of Morgan Park, and true to his word, Farmer * takes me to the rear entrance to this tract of bush. He knows this place. He says the dirt road into the rear of this bushland has been there for decades.

Farmer * identifies a decent road where a car might be parked without getting damaged. Then the creek. And the willow trees.

All that remains is the final journey up a rise to the gravesite.

Creek. Willows. A track and steady ascent through the bush to the graves.

Farmer * and I get back into his ute. And for a while, we say nothing.

This just might be it.

The map to Vince’s best-kept secret.

From Whooshkaa Studios, I’m Matthew Condon and this is Ghost Gate Road. In this episode, Vince and Dianne, on the run, spend years trying to keep one step ahead of the police. People around Vince continue to go missing. Even a coroner’s recommendation that he be charged with the murder of the McCulkins fails to stick. And he looks home free, until two modern-day cold case detectives set their crosshairs on this relentless killer.

Vince, on the run, might logically decide to keep a low profile. To draw no attention to himself. To damp down his wildest instincts and disappear into the crowd.

He had police looking for him. Then two Queensland detectives would launch the most serious investigation ever conducted into his life and crimes.

You’d think, being the chief murder suspect in a triple murder involving innocent children, it would have been sensible for Vince to have gone off grid.

But the opposite happened.

In the almost six years between the murder of the McCulkins outside Warwick and Vince’s arrest and appearance at a Coronial Inquest in Brisbane in 1980, he wandered the east coast of Australia, shacking up with criminal associates, taking refuge in Catholic presbyteries and remote Christian camps, sometimes hiding out in a caravan.

He learned, during those lost years, to bury what might be called “escape kits” off highways and byways if he ever got caught in a jam - bundles of drugs, cash and weapons. Just in case.

And during that time frame, Brisbane brothel madam Simone Vogel, who had strong links to both Vince and Dianne, disappeared. Hitchhikers on roads and highways familiar to Vince vanished without trace. There were murders, including that of a child linked to Vince’s psychopath mate, gangster Stuart John Regan, and a petty thief who was involved in rebirthing stolen cars with corrupt police in Brisbane.

Vince allegedly raped both men and women, his mates having either witnessed or been told about the atrocities by Vince himself, and brutal assaults on his long-suffering de facto partner, Dianne Pritchard.

One of those who had a firsthand view of Vince on the run was his old mate Garry Lawrence. Lawrence lived and worked with Vince on and off during that time, and saw things he’d rather forget.

Almost six years of total madness, before police finally had their man. Six years of blood and violence and fraud and an ever-rising count of missing persons.

What happened to Margaret Grace Ward, the country girl who ended up working in Vince’s massage parlour - Polonia’s - and vanished before she could testify in court against Dianne Pritchard? Did Vince have anything to do with the vanishing of brothel madam Simone Vogel, who was having problems with corrupt police? And had been having arguments with Dianne, who occasionally worked in Vogel’s Brisbane brothels during this period?

Murphy was desperate to find Vince and have a word with him. He’d lost control of his prized informant, his Frankenstein was on the loose.

Within days of the murders, Vince and his de facto Dianne fled Queensland and slipped over the border into NSW. They headed straight to a place called Hawks Nest, a small coastal village just north of Newcastle, a couple of hours drive from Sydney.

Vince knew Clockwork Orange ganger Peter Hall was staying there with a mate, Bob. You might remember Bob. He was the prisoner released from Boggo Road the same day as Vince at the end of 1970, and heard Vince say: “It’s a black day for society today.”

Shorty had given Vince Peter’s phone number down south.

Hall remembers Vince and Di turning up.

Hall said he suspected Vince had killed the McCulkins. He still didn’t want to believe that Shorty was involved.

Peter and Bob remember one startling thing about Vince when they first saw him. He had shaved his hair an inch or two back from his actual hairline. They assumed this was a partial disguise. That Vince was trying to create the illusion that he was balding or that his hair was receding.

Peter recalled that Vince was more peculiar than usual at that time.

Peter and Bob tolerated Vince’s bizarre behaviour.

Vince talked about robbing banks. About shoot-outs with police. How you used a 303 rifle for long-range work, and .45 pistols for close killing.

Then one day, Bob took Vince surf fishing. Bob loved to fish and was an experienced angler. Vince was not.

For decades, keen fishermen had thrown a line in around the twin villages of Hawkes Nest and Tea Gardens, separated by the Myall River on the northern shore of Port Stephens. You could almost guarantee catching blackfish off the Tea Gardens jetty, bream and flathead from the Hawkes Nest boat ramp, and plenty of tailor, dart and jewfish off Hawkes Nest’s Bennetts Beach, or The Main Beach as locals called it.

Bob’s favourite spot was up the beach.

Vince and Di tagged along.

At some point, Bob reached into his fishing bag and realised he’d mislaid the paring knife he used to cut up bait.

That’s when Vince said to him - here, you can use my knife.

The knife itself resembled a Scout’s knife. It had some weight to it but the blade wasn’t overly long.

They fished.

Vince could hardly get the hook and bait in the water. He’d cast and the line would tangle behind him. Dianne made jokes about how hopeless he was.

Then they all went back home.

When Vince asked for his knife back, Bob couldn’t find it in the tackle bag. He’d lost Vince’s knife too.

And Vince went off his brain.

I’ll buy you another knife, Bob said.

But Vince was beside himself. I trusted you to keep it safe, Vince went on.

Vince was so distraught about the lost knife that he went back to the beach to search for it. But it was gone for good.

Peter Hall remembers the blow up.

Did Vince lose his mind over the knife because it was actually the weapon that had ended the lives of the McCulkins less than a week earlier? Was it a serial killer’s trophy, now lost forever to the tides of Port Stephens?

It was not the only drama involving Vince in Hawkes Nest.

There was the issue of his pathological fascination with female hitchhikers.

One day Peter, Bob and Vince planned to steal a safe from a business in a nearby country town.

They drove to the job. Vince sat in the backseat, heavily armed.

Bob tells the story.

Then there was the incident with Dianne and the gun.

Vince had never had a problem attracting women with his intelligence and charm, but over time his true nature leeched to the surface - the physical violence, the sexual objectifying - and Dianne was no exception.

Bob, for the life of him, couldn’t understand why she stayed in a relationship with Vince. What he witnessed at Hawkes Nest was just a glimpse into what must have been a relentless nightmare for Dianne.

But everyone had their limits. And Dianne seemed to have reached hers when they were hiding out in Hawke’s Nest.

Bob saw the moment with his own eyes.

Both Peter and Bob witnessed the altercation, and hear Di say to Vince as she held the gun: “You took my friend away.” She was talking about the young country girl, Margaret Grace Ward, who had worked with Di in Vince’s Brisbane massage parlour, Polonia’s, and had mysteriously vanished in late 1973.

After a few weeks, Peter and Bob saw enough of Vince’s unhinged and erratic behaviour to prepare themselves for the worst. They both bought new shotguns. To kill Vince if they had to. YB

After several weeks in Hawkes Nest, Vince and Dianne were on the move again. They had resolved their feud despite Dianne pulling a pistol on Vince and pulling the trigger.

They dropped into Sydney, a city that had always had plenty of work for a gunman like Vince, but this time around the rules had changed.

The underworld was aware that Vince may have been involved in the disappearance and murder of the McCulkins. He had broken the sacred code - women and children were off limits. Vince had violated both.

So Sydney’s big mobsters and its criminal gangs wiped their hands of Vince O’Dempsey. His work dried up to nothing.

He was forced to live off the earnings of Dianne who was back on the streets as a prostitute.

Maybe the underworld had had enough of psychopaths in its ranks.

In September 1974, when Vince was in Sydney, his doppleganger friend, gangster Stuart John Regan, was gunned down on the evening of Sunday, September 22, 1974, in the streets of Marrickville. He was shot once in the back and fell to the ground, before being shot another seven times in the back of the head and chest. The bullets came from three different .38 calibre revolvers.

Around this time, Vince and Di headed north again, and crossed into Queensland, near Warwick, to meet up briefly with Shorty.

Vince had suggested to Di they disappear into the bush and live in a dugout, surviving off the land. Returning to a primal existence.

She didn’t go for it.

They were back in Sydney in the first half of 1975 where, as we know, Vince was charged with possession of a sawn-off shotgun and living off the earnings of prostitution, and it was at this time that he was interviewed extensively by Detective White from Brisbane.

He served a year in jail on those charges, then felt comfortable enough to return to Queensland where, stoney broke, he secured one of the few legitimate jobs in his lifetime.

He worked, along with his mate Garry Lawrence, painting houses up and down the Queensland coast. Vince turned up each day in immaculate white overalls. And at the end of a day’s work an obsessive Vince would completely dismantle, clean and rebuild the spray-painting guns.

Once, Vince helped a customer pick the colour scheme for her house, with disastrous results. It wasn’t the sort of job to give someone who was completely colour blind.

One member of the painting crew who worked alongside Vince remembered:

At one point, around 1977, Vince and Di moved in with Garry Lawrence and his then wife Deidre at their house in Brisbane’s Holland Park, on the city’s southside. Vince was still painting houses with Garry’s crew in Brisbane.

That’s when Vince and Di had a big fight.

What he did to Di was an act that shocked even hardened-crim Garry. And it terrified Deidre.

She would later tell police:

Garry Lawrence remembers a night when all hell broke loose.

What happened next gave Gary a deeply disturbing snapshot of Vince’s psychopathology.

Vince and Di had been a couple for about five years, and during that time he had pimped her out as a prostitute, slept with other women, verbally and physically abused her and left her tied up and alone for days at a time.

She was surely aware that he was a rapist and now a woman and child killer.

What kept Di in Vince’s orbit?

Friends and colleagues who knew them both uniformly shake their head over the partnership, even today. They said Di was a hopeless drunk. A woman trapped in a cycle impossible to escape.

Bob remembers her with sadness.

It’s a Friday night in early 1977 and police of all ranks have gathered for drinks after work in the Queensland Police Club, on the top floor of a building in Makerston Street in Brisbane.

The club was famous for its conviviality and one specific item on the menu. Crab pot lunches. It was said some senior police regularly flew up from Sydney under the guise of business, but really came for the meaty Moreton Bay crabs.

And the club tradition had always been that if senior officers had a few too many, young police would be tasked with getting their superiors home safely.

On this particular Friday night, Queensland police constables Alan Marshall and Trevor Menary were asked just that - to chauffeur home a boss. This time it was none other than Detective Tony Murphy, head of the Brisbane CIB, who had recently been promoted to Assistant Commissioner.

Marshall recalls the moment that changed his and his partner’s careers.

Finally, more than three years after the McCulkins vanished, two honest police officers were asked by Murphy to solve the suspected triple murder cold case.

But why, especially as Vince, the prime suspect, was Murphy’s star informant? Why would Murphy try and bring down Vince?

Or was that really what he was doing?

On the surface, Murphy had two good men looking to solve an horrific presumed triple murder. As head of the CIB, it appeared that Murphy was acting responsibly. Marshall and Menary reported directly to him.

But let’s play the Devil’s Advocate for a minute. Murphy was solely in charge of the new investigation. And ultimately it gave him control of the narrative, should anything surprising be uncovered.

Murphy had a second agenda. He was trying to find his loose cannon. Vince was of no fixed address, a psychopath without anchor.

What Murphy didn’t know at that moment, however, was that Vince had taken refuge in the arms of Jesus.

That’s Pastor Clark Taylor, son of a Queensland farmer and Australia’s first tele-evangelist. He helped found the Christian Outreach Centre ministry which, by the late 1970s, had several churches and a special Bible College at the foot of Mount Tuchekoi outside Gympie, north of Brisbane.

It’s where killer Vince and his partner Dianne Pritchard turned up while on the run from authorities. Vince had quit the house painting trade with his mate Garry Lawrence, and had moved north to the christian compound, helping with manual labour and maintenance around the property, and occasionally ran some Bible courses.

As for Dianne, she continued to earn money by hitchhiking to Brisbane and working shifts for brothel madam Simone Vogel, who had taken over Vince’s massage parlour, Polonia’s, after he was forced to abandon it following the McCulkin murders.

The Bible college suited Vince. He knew the Good Book back to front.

And this is one of the more curious contradictions about him.

He had been raised a good Catholic boy in Warwick, to parents who were devoted to the church and worshipped every day.

At the same time, Vince had criticised the Church and was certain that the decorative markings on the Pope’s tall hat, or mitre, was the 666 mark of the devil.

Hadn’t he been visited by the devil in his cell in Boggo Road Jail in Brisbane in the 1960s?

Still, during his years on the run after the McCulkin murders, according to police investigations and criminal associates, he often sought shelter with religious groups.

He and Di had been taken in variously by the Church of the Latter Day Saints in Mullumbimby in far northern NSW, in Catholic quarters in Brisbane, and now by Pastor Clark and his spiritual family at the foot of Mount Tuchekoi.

Pastor Clark had even formally married Vince and Di in early 1979.

But Detectives Marshall and Menary were on Vince’s tail.

In mid-1979, he and other police went to pay Vince a visit at the Bible College. Also present were two Federal police officers who wanted to interview Vince about a scam linked to the national health insurer, then called Medibank, that he’d been involved in with Gary Lawrence.

The scam had been cooked up a couple of years earlier, when Vince and Gary were working together as house painters.

Gary and others were arrested, charged and jailed for the fraud. But no authorities came near Vince. Until now.

Somehow Vince had managed to use the Federal Police and their petty charges to blindside the Queensland police, who were desperate to interview him about the McCulkins.

Then they pulled Dianne Pritchard aside.

According to a record of that interview by Marshall, and later repeated in court, Marshall found Di in a caravan on the Mount Tuchekoi property. Police went to search the van. The exchange went like this:

As for Vince, he could feel the noose tightening.

In an act of supreme arrogance, he issued a press release.

He said of being questioned by Detectives Marshall and Menary:

He protested his innocence. And Vince said Barbara McCulkin had left the family home in Dorchester Street because of Billy’s philandering.

Vince added:

Despite their setbacks, Detectives Marshall and Menary believed they had enough evidence and witnesses to get Vince and Shorty Dubois charged with the McCulkin murders.

On a humid February day in 1980 the Brisbane suburb of Holland Park, 6kms south-east of the Brisbane CBD, hosted the biggest show in town in its dour magistrates’ court - the inquest into the disappearance and suspected murders of the McCulkins, massage parlour worker Margaret Grace Ward and Tommy Allen.

Why a case of such importance was shoved into a suburban courthouse is a mystery, but the inquest, held before coroner Robert William Boujoure, saw a daily parade of the city’s criminal underclass, dodging newspaper and television journalists and their cameras out front.

Chief suspect Vince O’Dempsey, who happened to be in custody on minor cannabis charges. You will hear more about his drug operations later in the podcast. - was brought from the cells and into the court, guarded by eight police officers. He was manacled to the bar table with two sets of handcuffs.

In Boggo Road the screws had nicknamed him Silent Death.

He was the first witness.

And these are the initial exchanges between Vince and counsel assisting the Coroner, Garry Forno:

And so it went on.

In the end, Vince answered “no comment” thirty-nine times before the Coroner, counsellor Forno temporarily abandoned his cross-examination.

In the end, on April 2, 1980 - after almost two months of evidence - Forno and Vince’s legal counsel, Mr Claire, gave their final submissions. And Coroner Boujoure announced his findings.

The Coroner didn’t believe there was sufficient evidence to place anyone on trial for the deaths of Allen and Ward.

As for the McCulkins, that was a different story.

Boujoure concluded:

He was also charged with the murders of Vicki and Leanne.

An arrest warrant was issued for Dubois.

On hearing this, Vince finally spoke.

Vince was committed for trial in the Supreme Court.

Did he seem worried?

He didn’t need to be.

Vince had been charged with three murders.

But he knew he wouldn’t spend a minute in jail for those crimes.

Because the fix was already in.

Incredibly, while in custody on triple murder charges, Vince received a message from the corrupt elements of the Queensland police hierarchy his case would never reach trial.

And that message was that Vince might be charged with the McCulkin murders as a result of the inquest, but “he would not be convicted”.

It begs the question: was the system so venal, so corrupt, and Vince such a protected species, that he could literally get away with murder?

In late 1980, several months after Coroner Bougoure’s recommendations that Vince and Shorty be tried for the triple murders, Queensland Crown legal officer Angelo Vasta recommended that the charges against both men be dropped. The evidence, he concluded, was incapable of establishing a prima facie case for murder.

A No True Bill was filed. There was insufficient evidence to proceed to trial. Although that didn’t mean that Vince and Shorty could never be charged with the same offences in the future.

Vince had slipped the noose.

Again.

Just as the little cottage in Dorchester Street has, for years, drawn me back time and again, I have developed a more recent obsession with Morgan Park outside Warwick, and those haunting depressions in the earth that just might be human graves.

The police always said: Vince’s private graveyard will be located somewhere where he feels comfortable.

But right now, there’s an important matter of business to attend to.