At about 11.30am on Wednesday, January 16, 1974, she telephoned her good friend, Carole Quiller, who lived out at Yeronga, and they discussed one of Quiller’s children visiting the McCulkin’s house. Quiller told Barbara she’d bring her over either the next day or Friday.

Barbara told her friend she was heading into town to see the Medical Benefits Fund about her $200 refund for the operation.

She also said she was popping into Myers to see about getting a new job. (She was interviewed and told they’d call her when they had a vacancy.)

CHAPTER 1: The gangsters wife

CHAPTER 2: Mass murder at Whiskey Au Go Go

CHAPTER 4: The murder of Mrs X and her children

CHAPTER 5: Return to Dorchester Street

During the middle of all this activity, her bus, by chance, passed the building construction site at 444 Queen St, where Billy was working, and they had their brief exchange.

Later that afternoon, Barbara was hard at work at her sewing machine making clothes for herself and the girls.

Billy McCulkin never came to the house that night. Instead, he got drunk after work and ended up back at Estelle Long’s flat.

At about 6.30pm, the Gayton girls were on the veranda of their house at 7 Dorchester St when they saw two men entering the McCulkin property across the road. One of the men was carrying a half-carton of XXXX tallies.

The sisters then crossed the road to get the McCulkin girls. They were having a 10th birthday party for Juneen and the cake and candles were all ready.

“While I was standing near the front gate of their home I saw a man playing with Ginger Meggs,” Janet Gayton would tell police less than three months after Barbara McCulkin and her daughters vanished.

“Ginger Meggs is a cat owned by the McCulkin family.

“I also saw another man standing near the stove in the kitchen and he was talking to Mrs McCulkin. I knew that man as Vince because I had seen him there before.”

Janet whistled for her friends and Vicki and Leanne came out of the house.

Juneen asked: “Are you coming over? The cake’s on the table.”

“Yes,” Vicki said. “Vince and Shorty are here.”

“What’s Shorty’s real name?” Janet asked.

Vicki told her.

“Shorty is a mate of my father,” she added.

Vicki was wearing blue jeans with yellow stars on the flared cuffs, a tight-fitting red jumper with a zipper up the front and a zodiac chain around her neck – she was a Scorpio.

Leanne was dressed in a pink smock decorated with flowers and stripes and pink stretch shorts.

The McCulkin girls then crossed the road with the Gayton sisters for the party, leaving Barbara alone with “Vince and Shorty”.

Clockwork Orange Gang member and Torino arsonist Peter Hall later said in a statement to police that sometime after this Shorty Dubois had turned up at his house at 24 Neilson St, Chermside, where Hall said he was living with Carolyn Scully, the sister of Tommy Hamilton.

“On this day Carol and Jan Stubbs, Shorty’s partner, were out at the gym,” Hall alleged.

“I was babysitting the kids at the house, and Keithy (Meredith) was with me.

“Shorty came back in Vince’s car to pick up Jan and take her home to his mum’s place.

“When he got to the house it was dark; Shorty told me that he and Vince were at the McCulkin’s on the piss and were going back to McCulkin’s to have sex. He didn’t say who with specifically but he asked me and Keith if we wanted to come along for the fun.

“He told me that O’Dempsey was still back at the McCulkin house and he was going back there after he dropped Jan off home.

“I told him I was not interested and Keith didn’t want to go either.”

Back at Dorchester St, Leanne left the party at around 7.30pm, feeling unwell. Her older sister, Vicki, got home at around 10.15pm. Both respectively told the Gayton girls, when they left the party, that they would see them the next day.

As promised, Janet and Juneen popped over the road to the McCulkin house the next day – Thursday – but found no one at home. They checked repeatedly throughout the day but failed to make contact with the McCulkin girls or their mother Barbara.

It wasn’t until about 6pm on Friday, January 18, that Billy McCulkin arrived at 6 Dorchester St, having worked all day at 444 Queen St.

“On arrival at the house, I found that it was locked up and I could not rouse anybody,” Billy McCulkin told police in a statement just weeks after the disappearances.

“I then went to the shop on the corner of Dorchester St and Gladstone Rd, where I spoke to the storekeeper, Mrs Swanston, and I asked if she had seen my wife and children, of if she knew where they were.”

Mrs Swanston did not, so he returned to the house and sat on the front steps waiting for his family until nightfall.

Later, he saw Janet Gayton walking to the shop.

“Have you seen Vicki or Leanne?” Billy asked her.

“No, they haven’t been there all day,” Janet said. “They weren’t there yesterday either.”

Worried, Billy smashed the glass on the front door and gained entry to the house. The scene was described by one eyewitness as “eerie”.

Billy immediately made a chilling inventory.

None of Barbara’s clothes or personal effects were taken except for the blue dress with white and yellow spots she was wearing when Billy saw her on the council bus two days earlier. Her cosmetics and the sunglasses she always wore were still in the house.

None of the children’s clothes were missing except those they wore on the Wednesday.

Barbara’s change purse containing $8 and personal papers was found on the top of the refrigerator.

The children’s two pet Siamese cats – gifts to the girls from Estelle Long – had been locked in the house with no food.

A dress Barbara was making was still in the sewing machine and the machine’s light was still on.

None of the beds in the house had been slept in. There was food in the fridge as well as bottles of beer.

Billy found in the letterbox a letter from Medical Benefits of Australia. Inside was a cheque for $210 and another for $170 made payable to St Andrew’s Hospital.

It was as if the house was frozen in time.

Billy McCulkin then began a frenzied search for them. He hailed a taxi on Gladstone Rd and went to Barbara’s friend Carolyn Quiller’s house in Yeronga. She had not seen or heard from Barbara and the kids. Having kept the taxi running, he then headed to his sister’s partner’s house at Wynnum.

“What is wrong?” they asked him.

“Well, she (Barbara) has just disappeared or something, because she hasn’t been there for a couple of days,” Billy informed them.

His sister Eilenn and her boyfriend volunteered to help him search. Billy left in the taxi and they promised to meet him in Dorchester St.

Later, the three of them drove to the Red Hill Skate Arena for a look around. They weren’t there.

Billy McCulkin then entered the phone box outside the skating rink and called Vince O’Dempsey’s brothel, the Polonia, at Lutwyche. Dianne Pritchard answered the phone.

“Do you know where Barbara is?” Billy asked. “She hasn’t been home for a couple of days, her money purse and everything is left there.”

“No I haven’t,” Pritchard replied.

“Is Vince there?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“I’m worried about her.”

The trio travelled to Barbara’s brother Graham Ogden’s place at Strathpine, north of the city. Nobody had seen Barbara and the girls.

Billy then headed back into the city and reported his wife and the children missing to the CI Branch in the CBD and the Woolloongabba police station.

It was now late in the evening and Billy was dropped off at the Federal Hotel in Spring Hill where he waited for Estelle Long to finish work. She then drove Billy back to Dorchester St.

The search continued into the early hours of Saturday morning. Billy was due to work at the Queen St construction site that day but he called in and arranged to have the day off.

Billy caught a taxi to the Carina home of a friend, Norman Wild, and asked if he’d help him search for his missing family. Given Wild had a car, he agreed, and they returned to Dorchester St.

Frustrated and tired, Billy McCulkin again saw his daughters’ friend Janet Gayton across the road. He went over to talk to her again.

“Are you sure they weren’t here?” he pleaded with her.

“No,” Janet said.

“Was there anybody else here?”

“Yes,” the young girl said, “Vince and Shorty were here. They were here on Wednesday night.”

WHEN THE SUN CAME UP

Billy McCulkin and Norman Wild immediately raced over to Garry Dubois’ mother’s home at 19 Allan St, Kedron. The property was a raised housing commission-style home set well back from the street. Norman Wild went around the back of the house while Billy knocked on the front door.

Shorty answered the door.

“Have you seen my wife?” Billy asked.

“No, why?” he said.

“The kid across the road told me that you were there on Wednesday night.”

“I don’t know your wife,” Dubois supposedly replied. “I’m surprised you asked me.”

“Alright, fair enough,” Billy said.

He got back in the car with Wild and they headed back into the city on Lutwyche Rd. By chance he saw O’Dempsey’s orange Charger parked outside the shopping arcade where he ran Polonias. Soon after he saw O’Dempsey walking across Lutwyche Rd and approached him.

“Have you seen Barbara?” Billy asked.

“No, why?”

“She hasn’t been home for a couple of days. The kid across the road said you were there on Wednesday night with Dubois.”

O’Dempsey supposedly hesitated.

“Was Shorty with you?” Billy pressed him.

“Have you seen Shorty?” O’Dempsey asked.

“Yes, I’ve just come from his place. Was Shorty with you?”

O’Dempsey again supposedly hesitated.

“Well was he with you or wasn’t he?” Billy insisted. “If he wasn’t with you, then who was?”

“I forget,” O’Dempsey said. He suggested they both go back and see Shorty.

Back in Allan St, McCulkin sat down with O’Dempsey and Dubois in the kitchen of the house. It was time to get down to tin tacks.

Billy had known O’Dempsey for about eight years and they’d had some criminal adventures together. Billy was also aware that O’Dempsey’s reputation was not a savoury one. Allegations that he murdered people who got in his way or threatened his freedom swirled around him. He had briefly lived in their household when he got out of jail in late 1970 and word had been coming back to Billy in recent weeks that O’Dempsey was showing some physical interest in his wife, Barbara.

As for Dubois, he was largely an unknown quantity who had served a long prison stretch for rape, even though, according to Hall’s testimony, Shorty had helped Vince and himself pull off the Torino insurance scam bombing.

Billy went on about his missing family.

“Well, they are missing,” Billy said of Barbara and the kids.

“If you know anything about it, tell me. I’ve had to go to the bobbies about it. I’m worried about them.”

Both Vince and Shorty assured him they would like to help him.

Then Billy turned to Vince and asked: “What were you doing there?”

“I wasn’t there,” O’Dempsey said, according to McCulkin’s statement to police.

“Well I don’t care if she’s run off with anybody or anything like that, all I want to do is find out if she’s alright.”

“We don’t know anything,” O’Dempsey and Dubois told him.

“Well look,” Billy said, “if anything has happened to them, I’ll just blow the heads off the person whoever done it.”

The next day – Sunday, January 20 – Detective Basil Hicks was telephoned by his informant, Billy McCulkin, who asked to see him urgently.

“I met him at the Ampol Service Station at The Gap (in the city’s west),” Hicks said in a statement.

“At the time, McCulkin was very upset. He told me that his wife and two children were missing and that he feared that they may have been murdered.”

Hicks met McCulkin at Dorchester St the following day. McCulkin informed him that the girls across the road had seen a “Vince and Shorty” at the house the previous Wednesday night.

“He (Billy) said that he was sure that they were responsible for his wife’s and children’s disappearance,” Hicks added in his statement.

“McCulkin said that he knew O’Dempsey as a vicious criminal and that he was capable of committing any offence, including murder. He said that he knew Dubois as a sexual pervert who was always talking about having sex with very young girls.

“He said he was convinced that they had gone to the house to rape his wife and two children either there or away from the house, and afterwards murder them.”

McCulkin reiterated to Hicks that if he found out that Vince and Shorty were definitely responsible, he would “shoot them both”.

“I am telling you now, I don’t want it to go any further than you,” Billy told Hicks.

“If I find out that Vince and Shorty have done anything to Barbara and the kids I will f---in’ blow them both apart.

“I won’t do them one at a time, I will f---in’ blow them both apart at one time.”

Hicks concluded, in his Crime Intelligence Unit report, that he believed if Billy found any evidence that Vince and Shorty had something to do with the disappearances he would “murder them without any hesitation”.

On Monday, O’Dempsey telephoned McCulkin and told him not to worry about his wife and children – he was sure they would all be back in time for the children to begin the school year.

He also asked McCulkin if he had a gun. Perhaps someone was trying to “square up” with Billy McCulkin over something that happened in the past, O’Dempsey suggested. McCulkin was positive O’Dempsey was just sounding him out to see if he had an available weapon. McCulkin assured him that he had a shotgun ready.

McCulkin confided in Detective Hicks that he in fact feared that O’Dempsey might harm him.

What Billy McCulkin – frantic about his missing family – did not know about were the conversations that were going on between members of the Clockwork Orange Gang.

It was the morning habit of Peter Hall, living in Chermside with Carolyn Scully, to cruise by Shorty Dubois’ mother’s house in Kedron, where Shorty was living, pick him up and then sort out “what jobs we could find” that day, namely break and enters and general theft.

But Shorty was nowhere to be found on the morning of Thursday, January 17, the day after the disappearance of the McCulkins.

Hall told police in a statement decades after the event: “When we got there (at Allan St, Kedron) Shorty was not there and we were told he had not come home the night before; neither his Mum or Jan (Stubbs, Shorty’s partner) knew where he was.

“It was unusual for him not to come home, but more so for us not to know what we were all up to.

“We checked all the usual places, we checked in the Tom (Hamilton). We did not know where O’Dempsey lived so we could not go there to see if Shorty was with him.

“This was unusual and Keith (Meredith) and I went to try and find him.”

As it transpired, Dubois turned up at Scully’s house later that day, according to Hall.

“He initially wouldn’t say where he had been the night before, he said he got tied up with something, he was pretty vague, but I could tell something wasn’t right,” Hall alleged.

“He didn’t even want to come out cruising. It was also strange that he didn’t want to talk about the night before. Shorty was not himself after (that) night. He could not settle down.”

Either that day or the next, O’Dempsey turned up at Allan St and sat in his parked car. Dubois went outside to talk to him, then O’Dempsey left.

Hall told the court he was convinced “something had gone on” with the two men but Shorty said nothing.

On that weekend the gang convened in the kitchen at Allan St with O’Dempsey and Dubois. Tommy Hamilton asked O’Dempsey directly if he had anything to do with the disappearance of the McCulkins.

“He denied it saying that he was being set up by the coppers for things he’d done in the past,” Hall recalled in his statement.

Then, as Billy McCulkin was racing around Brisbane looking for his family, and sought help from Detective Basil Hicks, the gang – Peter Hall, Tommy Hamilton, Keith Meredith and Shorty Dubois – were in one of their cars just shooting the breeze when Dubois allegedly opened up

about what had really happened on the night of Wednesday, January 16.

“He told us they took the girls for a drive,” Hall said in his statement. “He said he didn’t know what was in O’Dempsey’s head at first, but Vince tied them up.

“He said he drove them to the bush and that’s where it happened.

“He said Vince took Barbara away into the dark and strangled her. He said that Barbara was not raped; he thought that’s what it was going to be but he just killed her.

“He said he couldn’t see it but he could hear the gurgling sound. He said he felt sick and it seemed to take forever. He said he knew then that the kids were going to be killed.”

According to Hall, O’Dempsey raped one of the children and told Dubois to rape the other.

“He said he didn’t want to but was not game to refuse,” Hall alleged. “He said that Vince then killed the girls. He said O’Dempsey asked him to kill the other one but he couldn’t do it.

“He didn’t say specifically how the girls were killed but he was clear he didn’t kill anyone. Vince killed them all.

“He said they were buried. He said that they had both been digging. Shorty said he felt even worse when the sun came up and he had to look at them, they were laying there.”

Shorty now feared O’Dempsey, Hall said, and the gang kept a keen eye on O’Dempsey.

“…we knew what he was capable of, and were wary of him having some strange thoughts and that he might want to tie up loose ends,” Hall said.

On Monday, January 21, as Billy was giving Detective Hicks a tour of the empty house at 6 Dorchester St, O’Dempsey telephoned Ross Stephens Car Sales at Newstead and arranged for a salesman to come to the flat in Rosalie and make an offer on his beloved Valiant Charger.

As Detective Hicks pointed out in his official investigation into the McCulkin disappearances in 1974, O’Dempsey treated that car “like a baby”.

“It is suggested that if O’Dempsey could possibly love anything it was this car,” Hicks noted. “He would cover it each night with a sheet of silk and it was a standing joke with all persons who knew him that it was the only thing he really cared for.”

O’Dempsey sold the car on the spot for $2900.

The next day his defacto Dianne Pritchard turned up at the Polonia massage parlour. A co-worker reported that she “appeared to be particularly worried at this time”.

Soon after she headed over to the Vogue Private Hotel in South Brisbane and picked up some belongings she had stored there.

That evening, a couple living in the flat next door to O’Dempsey and Pritchard in Rosalie observed men taking household goods and personal items to a car parked outside.

“Shorty asked us to help Vince leave town (and) we agreed to help,” Peter Hall later told police in a statement.

“Shortly after we went to Vince’s unit …Vince was not there when we got there, but his partner Dianne let us in … I recall we were carrying heavy stuff down some stairs and putting it in the car.

“We transported it all to a relative of Dianne’s, maybe her parents. I remember Dianne was really upset and angry that she had to move. She was pretty drunk at the time and was blowing up because everything was in turmoil.”

Hall said he knew they were leaving town because of the McCulkin investigation.

On Wednesday, January 23, Adrian Burton, the owner of the Nethercote Court block of flats, called in on flat 8 and discovered that O’Dempsey and Pritchard had moved out. At that moment they were heading for picturesque Hawks Nest, north of Newcastle in NSW.

Peter Hall also fled Brisbane and met up with a friend, also at Hawks Nest.

“While I was there O’Dempsey and Dianne turned up…,” Hall told police. “They had their own place…there was no discussion or conversation with Vince while we were in NSW about the McCulkins other than that he was laying low for a while.

“Nothing was ever said to him about what Shorty had told us.”

Meanwhile, Shorty Dubois took off to the property of a friend north of Fernvale, north-west of Brisbane city.

On Sunday, after weeks of heavy rain, a catastrophic flood would inundate Brisbane. Fourteen people would lose their lives. Almost 8000 homes would be destroyed. And the great flood would, seemingly, sweep away any further interest in the disappearance of Barbara, Vicki and Leanne McCulkin.

When the sun came out again in Brisbane, it was as if they had never existed.

CHAPTER 1: The gangsters wife

CHAPTER 2: Mass murder at Whiskey Au Go Go

CHAPTER 4: The murder of Mrs X and her children

CHAPTER 5: Return to Dorchester Street