The Night Dragon

by Matthew Condon

  ‘There was something about the guy who had gone missing from Warwick years before who was supposed to have been buried in the dam wall. Vince said he had an argument with him … and the guy disappeared just after the argument. The way he said it gave me a chill, because I believed that he did kill him. There were a few conversations with Vince like this. He would tell us that he was under surveillance by the Federal Police, and had been indicted for murder cases, I think he said nine.’

  The woman couldn’t help but notice some of O’Dempsey’s peculiar mannerisms. ‘Vince always had a backpack on in case he had to run into the bush,’ she told police. ‘He would wear white cotton gloves around the house and was conscious of what he touched. He was the only one who wore them and most of us thought it was a bit silly. He would pull back a chair with his elbow, not his hand. I commented once that it seemed like second nature to him and he responded, “No, it’s first nature.”

  ‘Vince had sayings like: “What happens at sea stays at sea”, “loose lips sink ships”, and “a fish that doesn’t open its mouth can’t get caught” … they were all made in reference to keeping quiet about everything.’

  For Warren McDonald, his first crop with O’Dempsey was memorable for another reason. As he grew closer to O’Dempsey, the old man began sharing some of his memories with the young gun. ‘Whilst working on that crop I recall a conversation with Vince about the murder of the McCulkins,’ McDonald would later say in a sworn police statement. ‘It was my job to drive Vince places and to go and collect stuff for the crop site. I remember this day we were in my yellow XF Falcon ute with Vince. We were going back into Warwick … it was while the crop was on and close to harvest time. I think I was dropping Vince off at home in Warwick for his weekend off.’

  McDonald distinctly recalled that it was close to harvest time on the crop and everyone was nervous. ‘Vince was talking about people giving people up, or talking out of school, and how we have to be careful about it and not let anybody have the crop and that’s how the conversation started,’ McDonald said. ‘Vince said to me: “You need a notch on your gun.” I asked him what he meant. He said: “You need a kill, when I was your age I had several notches on my gun.”

  ‘He was talking about me getting experience killing someone. He said that he killed the McCulkins and Shorty was nothing but a rapist. I took that to mean that Vince had killed the McCulkins and Shorty had raped them. I asked him if he was worried and he said: “They will never get me because they will never find the bodies.”

  ‘At the end of that conversation he said: “If you want to live a long and healthy life never repeat anything that would get you or anyone else into trouble.”

  ‘I told him I would never repeat a word of what he said.’

  The pair arrived in Warwick, but McDonald couldn’t shake what he’d heard about the McCulkins from O’Dempsey. ‘I knew that Vince was a suspect for the McCulkins because it had been spoken about generally around the campfire,’ McDonald told police. ‘I believed what Vince told me because of how he said it.

  ‘I also believed the threat at the end of the conversation because Vince doesn’t talk shit.’

  The Pool Shark

  After the death of his wives within weeks of each other, O’Dempsey eventually started socialising, as he had always done, in Warwick’s numerous hotels where he would meet women. While he only occasionally smoked dope, he would never drink to excess.

  ‘In all the years I knew him I never, ever saw him drunk once,’ says one friend. ‘Three light beers would be a big night for him.’

  And O’Dempsey never lost his passion for a good game of pool. Back in his twenties, he would often wind down by playing a few games of pool at The Criterion Hotel in Palmerin Street, Warwick’s main drag. In a strange coincidence it was also in The Criterion, decades later, that his attention was drawn to a young woman, Julie Anne Fenton, who was then in her mid-twenties. She too was an excellent pool player.

  Julie Anne would later tell police about that initial meeting with O’Dempsey and the subsequent months. ‘I was a pretty good pool player and Vince was an absolute “pool shark” and [we] got to know each other playing pool over a few months,’ she said. ‘It soon became a regular thing. I knew from around town that he had a colourful past. I was aware at that time of the rumours about him being involved in killing the men from Warwick and putting them in the dam wall but I didn’t really put much credit in those rumours.

  ‘He was, initially at least, charming, intelligent, funny and good to me. There was a big age gap and he would joke that he had tattoos older than me and that he had been in gaol longer than I had been alive. He had made veiled references to what he had gone to gaol for, but I did not learn much about that for some time.’

  O’Dempsey was still residing at 1 Myall Avenue, where he had lived with his wife Kim and her two daughters before she died. It was just four blocks from the old family home in Stewart Avenue. About 18 months after they met, Julie Anne and her daughters moved in.

  ‘After I had lived with Vince for a while, we had a rocky period,’ she later told police in a statement. ‘I started to see his true colours … he was very selfish and demanding, expecting me to do everything while he seemed to expect to do very little.

  ‘When I first met Vince I knew he was quite comfortable financially … there never seemed to be any shortage of money and [I] noticed he would always use cash for almost everything. Once I had been to the crop I knew why.’

  Julie Anne also began to learn, over time, about his criminal past. ‘He told me little bits and pieces. He was quite guarded in his dealings with people. He was very big on not talking generally and had only passing contact with most people. He had a favourite saying, “loose lips sink ships”,he would kind of coach me about it and say you are fine if you don’t talk but as soon as you open your mouth that’s when you get yourself in trouble. He even asked me about what I would do if I was approached by detectives, and told me to tell them nothing.’

  She implied he was paranoid about the police. ‘Vince was always very cautious and over the years I remember when police … pulled him over, he was extremely uncomfortable and on alert,’ she recalled. ‘Vince would not talk about things he was doing in vehicles or in buildings and would behave as if the police were following, listening …’

  O’Dempsey was also wary of telephones. ‘Vince did not like phones as a general rule,’ she added. ‘He would often lecture me over the years about phones, and I saw him just hang up on people if there was even a hint that they were going up a path of conversation that he wasn’t comfortable with, like about the crops … he would make phone calls from phone boxes, and would use different phone boxes each time.’

  Despite a few hiccups, the relationship continued and the couple often travelled down to the Gold Coast. ‘Vince liked to gamble and when things were going well we would visit the casino every few months,’ Julie Anne later told police. ‘There was about six months when we were going roughly every fortnight. Vince had a system of sorts for blackjack, which he taught me. He gave me a book that he had read on it. He would spend a lot of money at the casino. He would have some good wins but also losses. Sometimes he would blow like $2000 on blackjack and just walk away.

  ‘I remember our room at the Sofitel would cost $300 a night, and it would be in my name. We would do a fair bit of shopping while we were there and [that] would also be in cash. I remember they [the casino] approached him at one stage because he was betting big and winning. They were offering him incentives like free parking and things.

  ‘… Vince liked to go to Hamilton Island. It was one of the things he did to spoil us. It was a bit weird because I know he had taken his previous wife there, too.’

  O’Dempsey’s marriage to Julie Anne Fenton broke down in 2008. They had moved into a new house at Freestone Road, just north of downtown Warwick, but the relationship was over.

 
‘It was a difficult break-up,’ Julie Anne later told police. ‘I left and went back a few times and during that time I met [someone else]. I was still living in the house with the kids but we were technically separated. I did it because I had nowhere to go and no money to go with. Staying in the house proved to be a big mistake.’

  Meanwhile, O’Dempsey was virtually living in a shipping container on his alpaca farm close to town. But he came and went from the Freestone Road house ‘like it was his home’. ‘When he came there I would try my best to just make myself busy and stay out of his way, but he would nit-pick and niggle and just try to start arguments,’ she recalled. ‘I knew that he was trying to goad me, and he knows I can be a pretty fiery person. He had told me he and his ex-wife Kim used to fight physically when they were together … he even told me she stabbed him in the face once during a fight. That was not something that I wanted to happen to me.’

  Julie Anne would not tolerate domestic violence, given she had witnessed it against her mother during her childhood. ‘There were two times that Vince put his hands on me in that way,’ she told police in a statement. ‘The first time was at the Gold Coast. We were on holidays but things were not going well for us. I knew he would never leave the marriage because he had the perfect servant, to cook and clean and look after his kids. We had a huge argument. We had joint rooms and all of the five kids were with us. I told him I would go and see a solicitor.

  ‘He just snapped. He grabbed [me] with one hand up under the throat and started to lift me off the ground. I was terrified and thought I was going to die. He leaned in and said, “You know where you’ll end up.” I knew what it meant. I knew I would be joining the other people he had disposed of.’

  The arguments continued. He allegedly told Julie Anne she had come with nothing and would leave with nothing. Then she threatened to bring in the authorities to sort out the mess.

  ‘He just changed,’ she recalled. ‘I knew it was like threatening him … his existence relies on the authorities knowing very little about what he does. When I said this he called me all sorts of names and said, “Have you ever seen what acid can do to a person’s face? You will never want to leave the house again.” It terrified me and from the way he said it, I believed he had seen it and would do it.’

  She had, in fact, been worried about O’Dempsey’s history of violence for some years. They had occasionally spoken about the murders he had been accused of. She described him as a creature of habit and a ‘hoarder’. He had offices at his various properties. ‘The office is one of two shipping containers contained within a large shed on the property. Vince has books about crimes and criminals and kept some at the storage shed at the alpaca property and some at the house. There were a few times when he would watch crime-type documentaries and tell me he knew them, or was in gaol with them … he would laugh and sometimes say they were lying.

  ‘I know he spoke about the Whiskey Au Go Go in general terms.’

  A trivial argument over a shirt tipped the marriage over the edge. Julie Anne said O’Dempsey was ‘on a rage’ and he ‘kept coming at me’. She retreated to her 14-year-old daughter’s room and stayed awake all night, texting some friends, as O’Dempsey prowled about the house. ‘I could not help thinking about the things I knew he had done to people in the past, as well as things he may have gotten away with doing,’ she told police. ‘I was terrified and knew I had to play it smart. The cold, calculating anger in him that night gave me a chill. In the text to my friends I told them that I was really, really scared and that I thought he might kill me. I told them that if anything happens to me tonight, no matter what you hear, it is him.’

  In the end, they came to a financial settlement. ‘There were a few times when I really started to question what I knew about Vince at all,’ Julie Anne reflected. ‘Once was when he made a truly horrible comment about the age of consent for having sex. We were at the farm doing work and I was carrying two buckets. He commented about little girls … “If they are big enough to carry two buckets of water, they are big enough to fuck.” It made my skin crawl …’

  Around the Campfire

  Throughout the 1990s and well into the 2000s O’Dempsey was successfully growing and selling his bush weed around Warwick without being troubled by authorities. Even after his marriage breakdown with Julie Anne, his vigorous sex life showed no signs of slowing down.

  ‘He told me that after Julie Anne he had been with either 53 or 58 women,’ says one friend. ‘He told me one time he took a cherry, a girl’s virginity. You have to remember the man was then in his seventies. He was still jamming hard.’

  While O’Dempsey may have sworn by the motto, ‘Loose lips sink ships’, he opened up about himself – and some of his sexual conquests – on those many nights sitting around the campfire after a long day working on the cannabis crops.

  His workers would sit around drinking beer and rum, while O’Dempsey filled the night with stories. ‘The tales he told were incredible,’ says one crop worker. ‘He was an expert in explosives. I don’t know where that came from. He probably learned it in the Army. He had one of those old-style Thompson machine guns, the one where you have to wind up the spring. Vince said one day he was on the run and he was up on a hill and the police were down below. The way he described it to me, he was elevated. It must have been scrubby country, and they’re all down there, and they’re having a meeting saying, “Well, how are we going to catch him?” you know? Like, “Where is he? We don’t know where he is.”

  ‘Vince was up above them with a Thompson fully loaded and he took the safety off, and he’s ready to let them have it and then he thought better of it and put the safety back on. He said he laid there until dark and then bolted. He said, “I was that close.” Yeah, he loved that story. He said, “I nearly did it … I nearly bloody wiped out the lot of them.”

  ‘We looked at Vince as the most feared man in the underworld. If he said, “You fucking go over there and jump,” you jumped.’

  The associate said O’Dempsey had confided in the drug crop group about his contact with some of the biggest names in the Australian criminal underworld. He refused to name names for his own safety. ‘Vince told someone he’d had a hand in sorting out the Melbourne gang wars in the early days of those wars,’ the source said. ‘But now we’re opening Pandora’s box. Like, how far are you going to go with this? It depends how far you’re going to go. Yeah, you’ve got to be careful. But I’d swear on 30 Bibles that he was connected to some of the country’s biggest criminals. Yes, no problem.’

  The asscociate said O’Dempsey had talked about contract killings. ‘He didn’t just put an ad in the paper, you know?’ he said. ‘You had to know the right people.’

  How is it that his accomplice Garry ‘Shorty’ Dubois survived the relationship with O’Dempsey, given everything he knew?

  ‘He came very close to being knocked,’ the source adds. ‘He come very, very close there once … because one of Vince’s children got into a bit of trouble and Vince had the child taken up to Shorty’s place, and asked Shorty if he could just put him away for a little bit, until he could get somewhere else for him to stay. And Shorty apparently said no. “No.” He said, “I can’t do anything.” So the kid was brought back and Vince was told that the answer was no.

  ‘And Vince said: “The fucking little rapist arsehole. I should fucking go up and tidy him up … He’s nothing but a fucking rapist.”’

  Sometimes, on the drug crops, talk turned to murder and bodies. One criminal associate said O’Dempsey talked often about the movie, Snowtown, directed by Justin Kurzel. The film was based on real-life killings in and around Snowtown, 145 kilometres north of Adelaide. Eleven people were murdered between 1992 and 1999. Police ultimately found several bodies in barrels that had been stored in a disused bank vault. It was known as the Bodies in the Barrels case.

  ‘Anyway, Vince told me that the Snowtown killers had used the wro
ng acid,’ the associate said. ‘They used hydrochloric acid and all it did was, it didn’t get rid of the sludge or anything. It just got rid of the body, it didn’t do anything to the bones or anything. That’s what Vince told me. He said you’ve got to use sulphuric acid, and you’ve got to grind the teeth, and you’ve got to pour it in tidal waters so it’ll flow away and then you’ve got to cut up the bins to get rid of them so there’s no evidence left.’

  Another time, Vince started talking about the McCulkins and someone asked him if he was worried about getting pinched for the murders. ‘He said, “No they’ll never catch me. They’ll never find the fucking bodies,”’ the associate says. ‘Well, the only thing I can think of is the acid … but according to Peter Hall, they were buried. And Vince, being as smart as he is, he’d go back and dig the bodies up and move them. So now Shorty’s got nothing on him. But it’s also been said that Vince can go and see the people he’s killed any time he likes …’

  According to one source O’Dempsey was cautious about speaking about the Whiskey. Whenever the case was revisited in newspapers, he’d ‘blow up’. It was the same with any stories published on Barbara McCulkin and her two daughters.

  ‘At the campfires and all that we used to have a talk but … it was very hard to get a confession out of him … but he’d put a little snippet into your mind. He’d hurl it into you, to see if you were paying attention or not.’

  Did he mention the Whiskey?

  ‘Yeah, shit yeah … but he never talked about Torino’s much, never, you know? Like it was a given, you know? Torino’s was a given, like it was only a club, you know?’

  At one point it was rumoured that Finch would return to Australia and give evidence against O’Dempsey. A source says a loose plan was hatched for someone armed on a motorbike to shoot Finch if he ever came back. First he was to be blasted with a shotgun in the chest, then the muzzle would be put into his mouth and fired.