The Night Dragon

by Matthew Condon

  Standing at the bar table were the Crown Prosecutor, David Meredith, and counsel for Dubois, Dennis Lynch, QC. Meredith, tall and rangy in his black gown and horsehair wig, had a sharp voice that initiated from the back of his throat. It would remain, during the course of the trial, largely monotonal. His manner was consistently fluid and relaxed. Lynch, although similarly formidable in height, gave off an altogether different vibe. He was voluble, blustering, a hive of movement, energy and, at times, emotion. He was the type who stabbed at desks.

  Also in the gallery, in the final row of three at the far rear right of the courtroom, sat Barbara McCulkin’s brother, an elderly Graham Ogden, with his wife and children. He and his wife commuted from Strathpine station to the CBD each weekday during the trial. They had waited almost 43 years for the trial of Garry Dubois.

  At 10.24 a.m. the jury arrived and took their seats at the front left side of the courtroom. They were empanelled by 10.53 a.m. It wasn’t until 12.19 p.m. that Meredith rose and opened the case for the prosecution.

  ‘Members of the jury, on 25 February 1973, the Torino – a Fortitude Valley nightclub – was burnt down,’ he said in his firm voice. ‘No one was hurt. You may have seen the accused when he was arraigned. He was quite short. His name is – his nickname then and now, is Shorty. He, Peter Hall, Keith Meredith and Thomas (Tommy) Hamilton were hired to burn down the Torino. Hall and Meredith will tell you this is the case. Hall says that Dubois told them that Vince O’Dempsey arranged it.’

  Meredith explained that the gang was paid $500 to do the arson job and that Hall and his fellow members of the so-called Clockwork Orange Gang had been regulation house-breakers before this ‘one and only big job’ came along. ‘Eleven days after the Torino fire, on 8 March 1973, the Whiskey Au Go Go – another Fortitude Valley nightclub – was burnt down and 15 people died … James Finch and John (Andrew) Stuart were arrested a short time after the fire …’

  From the outset, Crown Prosecutor Meredith painted a picture that went to the very dark heart of this saga. The jury could not know that a murderous rampage that had its making in a boy from rural Warwick, and a handful of recalcitrant teenagers from suburban Brisbane, could light the fuse that was the Whiskey tragedy, which in itself would trigger a domino effect of murders to protect those involved in that singular act in the early hours of 8 March 1973.

  After canvassing possible motives of O’Dempsey and Dubois to kill Barbara – in order to silence what she knew about the Whiskey – Meredith told the jury that after four decades of silence, Peter Hall was finally prepared to come forward as a witness.

  On day two of the trial, Peter Hall was called into the modern courtroom to give evidence. He was of average height, stocky, with a shaved head. His only concession to the 1970s and the era of the McCulkin killings was a bushy handlebar moustache. Hall looked uncomfortable sitting in the witness stand.

  ‘Witness, can you tell us your full name, please?’ Meredith asked.

  ‘Peter William Hall.’

  ‘Do you know the accused, Garry Dubois?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘And how do you know … what do you call him?’

  ‘Shorty,’ Hall said.

  ‘Was he known as Shorty back in the early 1970s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And where did you grow up?’ Meredith inquired.

  ‘In Kedron.’

  ‘Did you become friends with him after school?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Meredith asked if he knew Tommy Hamilton and Keith Meredith, and he agreed.

  ‘Now, did you come to know a person called Vince O’Dempsey?’

  ‘Yeah, I met him on a few occasions.’

  ‘And how did you meet him?’

  ‘Through Garry, Shorty,’ Hall replied.

  ‘Did you know what Vince was doing at the time, whether he had a job?’

  ‘Yeah, I think he was a doorman [at the mock auctions in Brisbane].’

  ‘Did you know a person called Billy McCulkin?’ Meredith asked.

  ‘I didn’t know him, but I had seen him on several occasions.’

  Hall told the court he was living with Carolyn Scully, Tommy Hamilton’s sister, in Chermside, just north of the Brisbane CBD, in January 1974. He said he knew Shorty’s girlfriend, Jan Stubbs.

  Hall also said that on the evening that the McCulkins disappeared, Shorty turned up at the Chermside house and told Hall that he was going back to the McCulkins for drinks and ‘to have sex with the girls’ and asked Hall if he wanted to join him and O’Dempsey at Dorchester Street.

  Hall said he declined.

  ‘Now, you mentioned this group of [Keith] Meredith, Hamilton, yourself and Dubois who were engaged in some criminal activity … did you know the Torino nightclub?’

  ‘Well … I knew it, yeah.’

  ‘Right. Tell us about that.’

  ‘We were engaged to torch it,’ Hall admitted.

  ‘Who asked you to do this?’

  ‘It had come from O’Dempsey through Garry.’

  ‘So how did you know O’Dempsey was involved?’

  ‘Garry told us.’

  ‘And what was the plan? It was an insurance job?’ Meredith asked.

  ‘We were to be paid $500.’

  Hall also said the gang feared that they would be put under the spotlight following the inferno at the Whiskey Au Go Go less than a fortnight later.

  He said the following year, just a couple of days after Barbara McCulkin and her daughters vanished, Dubois had allegedly confessed about the fate of the women. Hall said that Dubois and O’Dempsey had taken them for a drive on the night of 16 January 1974 in the bush near Warwick. Hall told the court Dubois told him that O’Dempsey had taken Barbara aside and strangled her, and then ordered him to rape one of the McCulkin girls, which he did reluctantly. He then alleged that O’Dempsey killed them all.

  Just Little Girls

  It turned out to be the very last act of their childhoods – a simple birthday party. Vicki McCulkin, 13, and her little sister, Leanne, 11, had been invited across the road from their home in Dorchester Street to celebrate with their friends Janet and Juneen Gayton. Juneen had turned 10 on that day.

  The girls were close that summer. They played with each other every day and would take their skateboards down to a nearby garage to hang out. They often went rollerskating at the rink on Enoggera Terrace at Red Hill. The last night of their lives they were at a party with gifts, sweets and soft drinks – that staple event of every childhood – the birthday girl’s face illuminated by the candles on the cake and the singing of good wishes. They could not know that within hours they would be violently torn from that childhood idyll and delivered into an adult hell that still hardly bears imagining four decades later.

  By dawn the next morning the girls would be dead, along with their mother, Barbara, just 34. Despite all of the rumour and conjecture surrounding their disappearance – about what Barbara may or may not have known – it was never really understood why the two girls were also murdered. Why take the young McCulkin sisters? Who would kill two innocent children?

  In late November 2016, the Supreme Court jury in the McCulkin case provided an answer to those elusive questions by pronouncing Garry Reginald Dubois, 69, guilty of the murder and rape of the girls, the manslaughter of Barbara and charges of deprivation of liberty.

  Every trial of this magnitude ultimately evolves its own unique characteristics. The jury, the defence lawyers, the public gallery, the families of the victims and the accused enter as separate entities, and become familiar, bound by testimony and the rituals of the court.

  Each day of Dubois’s trial started the same – the gathering outside the court of tribes belonging to the prosecution or the defence, and a scattering of neutral observers. As the evidence unspooled over days, then weeks, Dubois sat staring straight
ahead as if he were made of granite. A person young and vital when the offences were committed, he was now an old man in ill-fitting clothes, the tattoos on one of his forearms so aged they have morphed into a shapeless blur of dark ink.

  During the trial it was difficult not to think of those little girls and their final moments. When sisters Janet and Juneen Gayton gave evidence to the jury during the trial, it was impossible not to look at these two middle-aged women who, as children, had gathered around that birthday cake with their lost friends in 1974, and not wonder what might have happened if the McCulkin girls had lived.

  If so, they too would be in their early to mid-50s now. Barbara would be 76 years old. They might have had their own children, and those children today might be in their twenties or thirties. It was not inconceivable they might have had their own kids by now, too. And in the middle of all that life there would have been many, many birthday parties, strung like jewels of memory on a long necklace.

  But it never happened. Dubois’s sentencing was postponed until after O’Dempsey’s trial, slated for 2017.

  Silent Death in the Dock

  At 10.02 a.m. on Tuesday 2 May 2017, Vince O’Dempsey was led into the dock for the start of his trial, also before Justice Applegarth. He stood charged with three counts of murder and one of deprivation of liberty. At his committal and in other court appearances prior to the trial, O’Dempsey appeared in his customary leather jacket and open-necked shirt. For his trial, he was attired in a charcoal grey suit. He walked to and from the dock with a slight pigeon-toed shuffle.

  The Crown Prosecutor was again David Meredith. O’Dempsey was represented by Tony Glynn and Terry O’Gorman. O’Dempsey, 78, pleaded not guilty.

  As the trial got underway, the court was told O’Dempsey had been charged with the alleged murders of the McCulkins along with Garry Dubois, but the trials had been separated. However, the present O’Dempsey trial, Justice Applegarth instructed, was the only one the jurors needed to be concerned about.

  Meanwhile, O’Dempsey, in the glass and pinewood dock, had a habit throughout the day of rolling his tongue against the inside of his cheeks, or resting a forefinger lightly on his jawline.

  On that first day, as the light faded outside, the court was shown a combination of photographs of the McCulkin rented home at 6 Dorchester Street, Highgate Hill, both recent pictures and black-and-white images taken shortly after the disappearance of Barbara and the girls in 1974. Two of Barbara’s brothers – Graham and Neville – took the witness stand to tell the court when they last saw their sister and nieces. Graham was hard of hearing. Neville was slightly stooped.

  As Meredith underlined in his opening address: ‘This is an old case.’ Subsequently, the jury was taken back to a Brisbane of the early 1970s, to Valiant Chargers, black-and-white television, photographs of pop star Elton John on the wall of one of the girls’ rooms and records by Donny Osmond. It was also reminded of the great Brisbane floods of 1974, and the deluge that was building just as Barbara and the girls were swept away and murdered.

  Throughout the trial O’Dempsey remained impassive behind the green-tinged glass of the dock. Occasionally he waved and joked with members of his family who sat in the public gallery behind him. Outside the court the two police officers most responsible for resurrecting this extraordinary case – Virginia Gray and Mick Dowie – came and went, milling with fellow police officers.

  At one point a surprise witness was presented at the trial. A prison inmate claimed to have heard a gaolhouse confession from O’Dempsey. Prisoner X told police O’Dempsey began talking about the McCulkin murders in gaol while co-accused Garry Dubois was on trial in November the previous year. He claimed that during that time O’Dempsey remarked: ‘I know they’ll never find them, ha ha.’

  The snitch also said he passed messages between O’Dempsey and Dubois in prison. He said he kept notes after having conversations with O’Dempsey, and in one he revealed that O’Dempsey had told him that Barbara McCulkin ‘had to be dealt with’, before she and her daughters went missing. ‘Look, in those days you got a job, you got paid to do a job, you did a job,’ O’Dempsey allegedly said to Prisoner X. ‘I never laid a hand on the two kids, Shorty [Dubois] did.’

  O’Dempsey had also said that historical sites were an ideal place to bury remains ‘because they’d never dig them up’.

  Prisoner X said he wanted no part in the $250,000 reward on offer to solve the McCulkin case. ‘When I saw the picture of the two little girls with the mother, I knew that something wasn’t right,’ he told the court.

  Shortly after midday on 26 May 2017, word was received that the jury in the triple murder trial of Vincent O’Dempsey had reached a verdict. Public observers, the families of both O’Dempsey and Barbara McCulkin, and the press, quickly assembled in Court 4.

  At 12.10 p.m., O’Dempsey was brought into the court by two Queensland Corrective Services officers and took his familiar place in the glass dock. The accused sat quietly with his hands resting in his lap. At 12.27 p.m. the jury entered the court and stood in a single line facing Justice Applegarth. They quickly delivered their verdicts. Guilty on all counts.

  At 12.30 p.m., O’Dempsey was asked to stand. Did he have anything he wished to say? After a short conversation with one of his defence team he said in a high-pitched voice: ‘No.’

  After some brief legal argument, Justice Applegarth adjourned the court. Dubois and O’Dempsey would be jointly sentenced in coming weeks.

  With the court virtually empty, O’Dempsey then grinned broadly at his legal counsel, and turned to face his family who were sitting behind him in the public gallery. Still smiling, he cupped both hands upward and held them at waist height. Then he shrugged. It was a gesture that suggested – what can you do, you win some, you lose some.

  At 1.04 p.m., O’Dempsey – amateur boxer, ballistics expert, farmer, pimp, thief, gunman and now murderer of Warwick, Queensland – was taken from the court.

  A Deathbed Confession

  Around the time of the murder trials of O’Dempsey and Dubois, and their flurry of attendant publicity on television and in the newspapers, police received a tip-off from a member of the public about the McCulkin mystery. The caller said that her elderly uncle had been a dairy farmer off Diggles Road, not far from the historic Glengallan Homestead just outside of Warwick, during the 1970s. Her uncle, now deceased, had decided to share on his deathbed the memory of something he saw early on the morning of Thursday 17 January 1974.

  While out bringing in the cows before dawn, the uncle said he had witnessed a bright orange Charger, parked behind the ruins of the dilapidated Glengallan building. It was the morning after Barbara McCulkin and her two daughters, Vicki and Leanne, went missing in Brisbane. And the uncle knew, as almost everyone did in town, that the orange Charger belonged to Vince O’Dempsey.

  Was this where the McCulkins had been taken?

  Were they buried somewhere off Diggles Road, where the old Sparksman farm had once been? Where Vince’s old school friend Brian Sparksman had grown up, under the guidance of SP bookmaker Jacob Sparksman, Vince’s boss in the bad old days of debt collecting?

  Was this where the McCulkins left this earth?

  Letters from The Dodger

  It appeared a satisfyingly peculiar coincidence that justice would catch up with both Vincent O’Dempsey and corrupt New South Wales detective Roger Rogerson. Both men had lived long lives of crime. The only difference was that for much of his career Rogerson had supposedly operated on the right side of the law. He would later be branded in the press as a ‘psychopath with a badge’. Then in 2014, within months of each other, both old men were arrested for murder.

  Strangely, too, it was Rogerson who had been rushed up to Brisbane with his police sidekick, Noel Morey, to help Queensland police investigate the Whiskey Au Go Go atrocity. And it was Rogerson who was present when Stuart and Finch were interviewed after their c
apture just days after the fire.

  In June 2016 Rogerson, then 75, was found guilty, along with his co-accused, another former copper, Glen McNamara, 57, of murdering 20-year-old Jamie Gao during a drug deal gone wrong in May 2014. Gao was shot to death in a storage unit and his body dumped in the ocean. The jury took less than a week to reach its verdict. Both men were sentenced to life in prison in September 2016.

  Rogerson had, of course, killed before. In 1981, as one of Sydney’s most awarded detectives, he shot dead drug dealer Warren Lanfranchi in a laneway in the inner-Sydney suburb of Chippendale. Lanfranchi’s girlfriend, the prostitute Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, claimed Lanfranchi was unarmed and murdered in cold blood. She demanded answers and accused Rogerson of being corrupt. She was later found dead in a pond in Centennial Park in Sydney.

  Then in 1984, Rogerson was accused of attempting to murder a police colleague, Michael Drury, who said he had declined a bribe from Rogerson to alter evidence in a heroin case before the courts. Drury was shot twice in his home and was lucky to escape with his life. Rogerson was dismissed from the New South Wales police force and later gaoled for trying to pervert the course of justice.

  Rogerson would later earn a quid touring pubs and clubs, telling stories of his life and career. He once did gigs with Melbourne criminal Mark ‘Chopper’ Read. In 2014, Rogerson sat down with Sydney journalist James Phelps and in his gregarious manner shared stories of his often inglorious police work. One of his career highlights, he said, was his involvement in the Whiskey Au Go Go case in Brisbane in March 1973. Rogerson explained to Phelps how he got involved in helping with the Whiskey investigation.

  ‘The boss of the CIB sent me up,’ he told Phelps. ‘We had a Learjet chartered up there just for us. The bodies were still in the club when we got there … anyway, we put surveillance on Stuart and he had a party and Finch turned up. We pinched them both.’