Detective Senior Sergeant Brian Hayes came under fire over the questioning of Finch and the unsigned record of interview. Was it a police verbal?
‘It was not a fabrication. That is how it happened,’ Hayes replied.
Given there were a number of detectives present when the so-called record of interview was generated, did he think that if the record was ever challenged there’d be safety in numbers?
‘No,’ he shot back. ‘If a jury would not believe one detective senior sergeant it wouldn’t believe six. The six men were not there by design. They just happened to be present at that time.’
Syd Atkinson backed up his colleague, Hayes. When asked whether Finch had been bashed by police during his interrogation in the city CIB offices, he emphatically denied it. ‘There were no thumps in that room,’ he told the court. ‘There were certainly shouts and bumps but no one was thumped.’
On 4 October, Justice Lucas heard medical evidence about John Hannay and whether he was fit to appear as a witness. It appeared Hannay had recently fallen from a horse and suffered brain damage. Hannay’s doctor was of the strong opinion that mental tension had aggravated Hannay’s condition and that any cross-examination might permanently damage his health.
In the end, Hannay was brought in to give evidence, accompanied at all times by his doctor. Hannay said he bore no grudges against the Little brothers and denied he had anything to do with the Whiskey fire. He also denied that he had made a phone call from Rockhampton to his Brisbane solicitor at 2 a.m. on 8 March, just minutes before the fatal fire. Hannay would go on to say that it was Johnny Bell and two other men who had bashed him in the alleyway, rendering him unconscious.
Then, in what must go down as one of the most unusual interludes in any major criminal trial in Queensland, more than a month into the trial the jury, legal counsel and others were taken to the Royal Brisbane Hospital to visit defendant John Andrew Stuart, recovering from swallowing the metal pieces at the start of the trial.
The Brisbane Sunday Sun described the bizarre scene. ‘Rarely could there have been a hospital visit more strange,’ it wrote. ‘For five minutes 43 men sat, their eyes glued on the pale, frail figure in the portable bed. For five minutes John Andrew Stuart lay in the bed, silent, almost deathly still. The room at Royal Brisbane Hospital had the air of a death scene.’
Stuart had taken a second bout of wire in hospital while he was recovering from the first, and given it was a very real possibility he would not see the inside of the courtroom for the duration of the trial, Justice Lucas had made the decision to take the court to Stuart.
Stuart remained silent. Finch, watching from the sidelines, was recorded as saying: ‘I thought they only done this in Russia.’
In the end it took the jury just two hours to find Stuart and Finch guilty of the Whiskey atrocity. On 23 October, Stuart was transported from hospital for his sentencing. He was accompanied by his doctor and was under heavy guard.
According to the Brisbane Telegraph he looked ‘wasted, pallid and frail’. Just prior to sentencing he spat in the face of Chief Crown Prosecutor Martin, QC. ‘You’ll never wash that off,’ Stuart said. ‘You’ll have it on your face until the day you die.’
Stuart continued his outburst. ‘The jury’s verdict is wrong,’ he said. ‘I would know that better than any man. I wish to say that because of the evidence presented in this case the jury’s verdict was correct on what they heard. But as I said, only I would know that that was false.’
Justice Lucas, in summing up the trial, told the court that Finch’s theories about this whole thing being a conspiracy concocted by police who were prepared to perjure themselves in court over a false record of interview would amount to a conspiracy of the first order.
‘Finch’s defence is that the unsigned record of interview is a complete fabrication and that a large number of police officers have entered into a conspiracy to defeat the course of justice; thus, the six police officers present at the taking of the record of interview have given perjured evidence … It has always seemed to me that the larger a conspiracy becomes and the more policemen involved in it, the less likely the story of a conspiracy is to be true.’
John Andrew Stuart was sentenced to life imprisonment. As was James Richard Finch.
Mrs Dulcie Day, mother of Whiskey victim, the musician Darcy Day said: ‘I know that boy’s soul is in torment, but I can’t feel sorry for him. I’m not bitter at him [Finch]. I don’t think he meant to do it. I feel sorry for his mother … I think he and his friend John Andrew Stuart are hard boys. They chose that life.’
Stuart’s mother, Edna Watts, said that although her son was ‘no angel’, the family would continue to fight for his freedom and that the trial was ‘a farce’.
Brisbane journalist Mick Barnes attended the next State Parliamentary sitting expecting to hear robust debate about the Whiskey. He didn’t. ‘There will be no Royal Commission into the Whiskey Au Go Go tragedy,’ he wrote:
There will be no judicial inquiry, no Cabinet investigation, not even a Ministerial inquiry. The public demanded and was promised a Royal Commission into whether police were warned of the tragedy and whether it could have been prevented. The Government has since reneged on this promise.
When the matter of the Whiskey was actually raised during the sitting, it was ruled out of order. It was sub judice. Appeals were pending. Barnes concluded:
I was reminded that many years ago Emile Zola, the great French writer, brought a similar government down with an article entitled, “I Accuse”. I do not accuse the Queensland Government. I pity it in its egomania. I pity it that it can put party politics before the death of 15 hapless people. And I pity the people of Queensland that they accept this with equanimity.
Officially, the saga of the Whiskey Au Go Go was over. But it was just the beginning of Barbara McCulkin’s problems.
Where There’s Smoke
Barbara and Billy had reached the point of no return in their marriage. And there was the baggage she carried from what she learned about his and his friends’ criminal enterprises. Particularly the fires at the beginning of the year.
Her brother, Graham Ogden, who lived in Strathpine on Brisbane’s northside, was also getting strange vibes from his sister. ‘We visited her quite a few times over the years [at Dorchester Street],’ he recalls. ‘My wife was always impressed about the sewing, and Barbara looking after the kids and doing a really good job.’
On one visit Ogden says McCulkin pulled up in Dorchester Street driving a white van. This put paid to McCulkin’s curious lifelong insistence that he couldn’t drive a car, let alone a truck. ‘We were standing in the front door facing the street,’ Ogden recalls. ‘Bill drove up in a white Mazda bongo van. A blind van … there were no windows in the side just the front and back ones. And Barbara said, “Where’d you get that from?”
‘“Oh,” he said, “a mate of mine that lives around town.” He did know how to drive and that’s all there is to it.’
Ogden also remembers the last time he ever saw his sister alive. He and his wife paid another visit to the ramshackle Queenslander in Dorchester Street towards the end of 1973.
‘That shocked me – last time I saw her she was terrified,’ he says. ‘We both believe to this day that she stopped saying [to us] what she wanted to about Billy. And we now believe Billy was [involved] in the Whiskey fire. Had she said what she wanted to we could have been in danger. We both feel she stopped there. But she was terrified … He was standing behind her. That old house … is like an old drum inside. It echoes like mad. And he was watching Barbara. I’m sure he heard everything.’
Ogden asked her what was wrong. ‘I can put him away with what I know about him for a long time,’ Barbara told him. Ogden was positive she was referring to McCulkin. ‘And we left them and it was the last we saw of her.’
Barbara was also tired of Billy’s endless philande
ring. (He was seeing another women, Estelle Long, at this time, and was about to move into her flat in Juliette Street, Annerley, just south of the Brisbane CBD.) Barbara was ready to get on with her life. She was booked in for surgery to remove stretch marks around her breasts and stomach. She wanted to meet someone else, and secure some stability for herself and her girls. And to do that, she wanted to look ship-shape. She was also considering leaving the snack bar and getting a new job. Perhaps in one of the big department stores like Myer. It was a beginning, of sorts.
Barbara McCulkin couldn’t know she and her girls had just a few months to live.
Polonia
Only days after Stuart and Finch were sentenced to life imprisonment, Vince O’Dempsey and his de facto wife, Dianne Pritchard, opened their own ‘health studio’ in Lutwyche. The studio was a part of a small clutch of offices at 518 Lutwyche Road. A large office fronted the road, but down a small driveway to the right was another separate cream brick block of three smaller, adjoining office spaces. The front of the offices was all glass and aluminium, illuminated by neon lights. Inside each office was a small waiting room at the front, a large room to the left and a small kitchen with a sink at the back. The décor was painted besser brick and carpet.
The lessee of the space that would become the Polonia Health Studio was Ernest Latima Watkins of 34 Cordelia Street, West End. Watkins in fact managed the Vogue Private Hotel there; a refuge for many of the city’s prostitutes. Pritchard kept a room at the Vogue to store clothes and belongings. As did Margaret Grace Ward, a young woman from the Gympie region who had originally trained as a nurse and arrived in the big smoke of Brisbane to broaden her horizons. Somehow, she had been lured into prostitution. She also worked with Pritchard at the new Polonia. According to police records, Polonia opened its doors on Friday 19 October 1973.
Had O’Dempsey and Pritchard been given the green light by corrupt members of the Licensing Branch to hang out their shingle in the competitive world of prostitution? Were they expected to pay massive kickbacks to police? And where did they get the money to set up the health studio in the first place?
Given that O’Dempsey and Pritchard had failed to register Polonia as a business name, was this a case of a health studio flying completely under the radar of all checks and balances? Was it a coincidence that the brothel had opened its doors for business just after the conclusion of the Stuart and Finch trial? As the Whiskey killers festered in Boggo Road, O’Dempsey was off on a new venture that, if successful, and despite the downside of the tax to corrupt police, could be a licence to print significant amounts of money.
One criminal close to O’Dempsey at the time said the timing of the opening of Polonia was important.
‘The way I saw it, it was Vince’s reward from the corrupt coppers,’ he said. ‘The Whiskey is wrapped up, Finch and Stuart go down, that’s the end of the story. The whole thing is contained. There is no way in the world Vince could have done what he did without being protected by police. He just couldn’t have. He was close to Murphy. The question is, what did Vince have on Murphy that allowed him to do pretty much what he pleased?’
Keith Meredith of the Clockwork Orange Gang remembered being invited over to Vince’s new brothel when it opened. ‘I was with [Garry] Dubois and [Tom] Hamilton when I first saw O’Dempsey, who at the time was working for Paul Meade at an auction house run in Queen Street, Brisbane,’ Meredith later told police. ‘I later saw O’Dempsey when he had the massage parlour on Lutwyche Road. O’Dempsey’s girlfriend, Dianne Pritchard, was running the massage parlour for O’Dempsey. O’Dempsey and Dubois were close and I believe they were both in gaol at the same time [in the 1960s].
‘When the massage parlour first opened up O’Dempsey had invited Dubois to come and have a look. I went with Dubois, [Peter] Hall and Hamilton to the massage parlour. I got a massage and it was the first and only massage I ever had.’
Curiously, Vince’s Polonia was just a block or two north from one of Simone Vogel’s brothels, Napoleon’s Retreat, and both would have operated according to the age-old rules and stipulations of the corrupt system known as The Joke. Those rules ensured that only the Licensing Branch could sanction such an outfit, and they were specific on location and the number of girls working in each parlour. The kickbacks were to be paid on time once a month. Warnings were given on any impending raids, and occasionally one of the girls was ‘written up’ to maintain the facade of vigilant policing.
Parlour proprietors like Vogel and O’Dempsey knew the rules, but events didn’t always go to plan. Despite the optimism surrounding this new venture, O’Dempsey had one of those strokes of ill-fortune. He and his new brothel had come to the attention of CIU Inspector Basil Hicks. Within weeks of Polonia starting its operations Hicks knocked on the door.
‘Part of my duties at the unit was to investigate any organisation behind prostitution in massage parlours,’ Hicks later told a coronial inquest. ‘I would visit the various massage parlours in Brisbane and interview the people working there … I can remember seeing a woman there [at the Polonia] named Dianne Pritchard who also went under the name of Cheryl Evans.’
Hicks proceeded to interview Pritchard. ‘She told me that she was carrying on prostitution at that parlour,’ Hicks said. ‘She said she was living with a man named Vince O’Dempsey … [he] was known to me as a convicted criminal. I can remember seeing the man O’Dempsey in a back room … it was a little kitchenette there. I did not speak to him. He was standing just inside the door and it appeared to me that he was hiding so he couldn’t be seen …’
Hicks also saw someone else at Polonia – a young woman by the name of Margaret Grace Ward. Hicks said: ‘I passed information to the Licensing Branch that Pritchard and Ward were operating as prostitutes at the Polonia and both women were interviewed by the Licensing Branch on 9 November 1973.’
The Licensing Branch acted on Hicks’s information and went out to inspect the so-called health studio. One of the officers involved was Kingsley Fancourt. ‘We went out and did a walk-in on a brothel in Lutwyche,’ he recalls. ‘O’Dempsey was there and I didn’t know him from bloody Adam. Later that night I’m back at the office and Merv Hoppy Hopgood asked me what I’d done during the day. I told him we were out doing a walk-through in this parlour … who was there? Bloody O’Dempsey.
‘He asked, “Do you know about O’Dempsey?”
‘He told me Vince O’Dempsey had buried two people on a fenceline in western NSW, and he had a body in the dam wall at Warwick, that he was a knife man, that he’d swore to kill a copper, and he was warning me to be careful of him.’
Both Pritchard and Ward were charged with prostitution at the brothel on Lutwyche Road. In her statement Ward claimed Pritchard had forced her into prostitution against her will. She claimed she had innocently responded to an advertisement in The Courier-Mail: ‘Masseur required. No experience necessary.’
It was a minor setback for O’Dempsey and his new business venture. Somehow Detective Hicks, the cleanskin in Commissioner Whitrod’s corruption-busting CIU, had slipped past O’Dempsey’s cordon of police buddies. He had, for years, enjoyed the protection of none other than Rat Pack big wheel, Tony Murphy.
One of O’Dempsey’s associates confirms the relationship, and says Murphy once paid a visit to the police in Warwick to set the ground rules – O’Dempsey was not to be touched.
The associate says that years later he was sitting around a campfire one night at a property outside Warwick when Tony Murphy’s name came up. A number of criminal associates were present. One witness said: ‘[criminal] Dennis Ide was carrying on about Murphy, and Vince said, “We don’t have to worry about fucking Murphy. Murphy’s not going to come out here and bring us undone. He’s been to the Warwick coppers and told them to fucking pull up.”
‘It’s like everybody needs someone to do their dirty work, don’t they? Dennis had an issue with Murphy, and Vince just, with a li
ttle cheeky grin on his head, he said, “He’s already been out and told them fucking don’t even touch me and leave me alone.”’
Before the Deluge
The rain seemed to go on forever in the spring of 1973. Billy McCulkin was enjoying his first regular employment in years, working as a dogman on the construction of a high-rise office block at 444 Queen Street. The site was just around the corner from the notorious National Hotel, owned by Jack, Rolly and Max Roberts. The National was the drinking hole of choice for corrupt police. Billy, naturally, spent a lot of time drinking there with his mates after work. As he did in the other ‘copper’s pub’ in Queen Street, the Belfast, which was a regular haunt for Detective Tony Murphy. McCulkin was also a regular patron of the Treasury Hotel, where his girlfriend, Estelle Long, worked.
They had begun a relationship earlier that year but lately things had started getting serious. He decided to move into Long’s flat in Annerley. But first his new mistress laid down some ground rules. She was aware he’d been involved in various crimes in the past. Long told him she wanted him to ‘get away from that’, and she didn’t want his old friends hanging around the flat, just as they had done at 6 Dorchester Street, Highgate Hill.
‘The reason for me leaving the family home was because I could not get on with my wife, and she could not get on with me,’ Billy would reveal in a police statement, ‘… well I don’t think she was sort of overjoyed [at him leaving] but I don’t think she was ready to burst into tears, you know, it was just sort of accepted, I think.’
With Billy out of the house, Vince O’Dempsey – despite living with his de facto, Dianne Pritchard – began showing interest in Barbara McCulkin. He would sometimes drop her off to work at the Milky Way snack bar in his distinctive 1972-model orange and black-striped Valiant Charger (PYM908). Sometimes he’d pick her up after work and drive her back to Dorchester Street.
The Night Dragon Page 15