However whispers followed the elusive O’Dempsey for decades. He was named in Queensland Parliament as a man who had his own private graveyard. The joke for years around his hometown of Warwick, southwest of Brisbane, was that there were so many victims buried in the graveyard that they had to be laid to rest vertically to save space.

O’Dempsey’s name was also perennially attached to a string of unsolved cold case murders throughout the 1960s and ’70s. But no cases attracted more conjecture and scrutiny than the disappearances of a criminal associate of O’Dempsey’s called Tommy Allen, and a young, naïve woman – Margaret Grace Ward – who came to work as a prostitute at a massage parlour owned and run by O’Dempsey in Brisbane in late 1973.

EXTRACT from The Night Dragon by Matthew Condon (published by University of Queensland Press, $32.95):

BY EARLY 1964 O’Dempsey, now 25, was finally out of jail for assaulting an off-duty police officer. He immediately took a job working on the construction of the Leslie Dam in Warwick. There was work to be had there for fit young men, and word got around as far away as Brisbane that if you needed to earn a quick quid, the Leslie Dam site was the place to be.

One criminal, who would later become an associate of O’Dempsey’s, drifted up to Warwick with some mates and headed to the dam site ‘for a change of scene’. But when they saw the workers’ dongers and experienced ‘the bloody flies all over your face all the time’, they swiftly hightailed it back to Brisbane.

As for O’Dempsey, securing a legitimate job straight after incarceration would fit a pattern he’d use time and again in the future. Invariably, a brief sojourn as a ‘square head’ would then see him slide back into the underworld and darker pastimes.

At the Leslie Dam, O’Dempsey befriended a co-worker named Raymond Vincent ‘Tommy’ Allen. The 22-year-old Allen then assisted O’Dempsey in the burglary and arson of the Pigott & Co. jewellery store in Warwick. They also stole the store safe.

Queensland retired detective Alan Marshall remembered clearly the Tommy Allen investigation. ‘We dug deeper with Allen and we found out that O’Dempsey used to drive Tommy back to Fortitude Valley in Brisbane where Tommy saw his mother, and used to spend the weekend there,’ Marshall said.

In 1964, investigating officers made a breakthrough on the Pigott & Co. case when they stopped one of O’Dempsey’s associates driving his distinctive cream and cherry 1957 Holden. Marshall said: ‘The police came along and got this German fellow who was driving the car and they matched up the paintwork from the safe that was stolen out of the jeweller’s, and it matched the paint in the back of the car.

‘Then they found other things like a hacksaw blade… with a hacksaw blade, they’re nicely painted, and when you use them the paint comes off. And the amount of paint that was missing was from the leading edge of the hacksaw blade, just happened to be the distance going backwards and forwards through the bars at the back of Pigotts. So they had a fairly substantial case.’

The German decided to leave town and drove O’Dempsey’s car to Sydney. ‘He left the car at number one wharf and pissed off overseas,’ said Marshall.

Before the German left he called O’Dempsey and told him where he’d left the car. So Vince and Tommy Allen hitchhiked by truck down to Sydney to pick it up. As Marshall recalled: ‘While they were searching through the car little Tommy Allen finds a watch and O’Dempsey grabs hold of the watch and says, “Give me that. That come out of the Pigotts jewellery robbery.” So they jump in the car … they couldn’t find the keys to it (but) they finished up getting the car started and drove back to Warwick.’

The dust settled but it wasn’t long before Tommy Allen was brought in by police on suspicion of sexually assaulting a young woman.

‘And he spilt the beans,’ recalled Marshall. ‘He agreed to give evidence against O’Dempsey. Allen said, “Look, I’ve just been down to Sydney with O’Dempsey. And I found this watch. And he’s posted it back to himself in an (empty) pack of Kool cigarettes”.’

‘Back in those days the Post Office actually worked on the Saturday. The police came around to O’Dempsey’s place after the delivery of the mail to catch O’Dempsey with the stolen watch. And then of course he came back to the police station and during the formal questioning all that O’Dempsey would say (is): “You’re the detective … that’s for you to f---ing well find out.”

After O’Dempsey was charged over the robbery, local police actually secured Tommy Allen a job with the railways, but his tenure didn’t last long. ‘The police got him that job and he went out to a little place called Karara,’ one investigating detective remembers.

Karara was a little one-horse town on the southwestern railway line, 208km west-southwest of Brisbane and not far from Warwick. It boasted a tiny wooden station and a stationmaster’s house replete with corrugated water tank. The population of the town was in the low hundreds. ‘Tommy was working there and he was a bit of a lairy sort of bloke,’ the detective says. ‘He had leopard skin trousers. So you imagine, leopard skin trousers … they stood out like the proverbial.’

Tommy Allen’s mother, Ena Clarke, lived in Baxter St, Fortitude Valley, and her son would often travel down from the Warwick region to see her. A few weeks before her son and O’Dempsey were due to appear in court on the theft charges, Tommy was with his mother when three men in a black car drove up to her house and threatened her son.

She thought one of them might have been Vince O’Dempsey, but she couldn’t be sure. The three men got out of the car and picked on Allen. But his mother told them to be fair and fight him one at a time if they had to. Her son was young, strong, and a trained boxer. He held a broomstick across the doorway in order to let them in one at a time.

The first person through was knocked out by Tommy. The second swung at Tommy, missed, and struck Ena’s husband. He was out cold. The third, who Ena Clarke thought was O’Dempsey, hopped into the black car and drove off. Tom chased the car and managed to grab the steering wheel through the open driver’s window before falling on to the road. The driver then did a U-turn and tried to run Tommy down, missing him by a metre. The car drove off.

A few weeks later, when O’Dempsey appeared before the court on robbery charges, his mate Tommy Allen was nowhere to be seen at the courthouse. It didn’t take long for Vince to work out that Tommy had ratted on him.

Marshall says: ‘O’Dempsey went into court on the Monday. O’Dempsey’s parents were held in high repute there. And the next thing O’Dempsey’s out on bail and young Tommy and Vince are driving around in the car. They go up the main street there near the Post Office and O’Dempsey said to someone, “Oh, I’m just taking young Tommy to Sydney”. Young Tommy’s never been seen since.’

Without Tommy’s evidence, the case against O’Dempsey collapsed. Marshall recalls: ‘When we checked with the railways there was five pound, ten pence and tuppence uncollected from his wages. That was the last he was ever heard of. That money was never collected and was still held by the railways.’

A missing-person report was completed on Vincent Raymond ‘Tommy’ Allen. And that was the end of that.

‘Now, Vincent O’Dempsey was the last one seen with Tommy Allen,’ Marshall says. ‘O’Dempsey was told about Tommy Allen spilling the beans on him, he was fully cognisant of the fact that Tommy had done that. Because the police had actually told him during the interview. That was the rock that Tommy Allen perished on.’

MORE than a decade later, on March 8, 1974, Brisbane woke to the news that the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub, in St Pauls Terrace, had been firebombed by persons unknown, and that 15 innocent people had lost their lives.

It was, to date, Australia’s biggest mass murder.

In the end, two suspects – John Andrew Stuart and James Finch – were arrested and charged with the Whiskey atrocity, despite their protestations of innocence, and in the spring of 1974 they were sentenced to life in prison.

Days after the sentencing, Vince O’Dempsey and his de facto wife Dianne Pritchard, opened a ‘health studio’ at Lutwyche, in Brisbane’s inner north.

The studio was a part of a small clutch of offices at 518 Lutwyche Rd.

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 were all glass and aluminium, illuminated by neon lights. Inside 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 decor was painted besser brick and carpet.

The leasee of the space that would become the Polonia Health Studio was Ernest Latima Watkins of 34 Cordelia St, 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.

The building that housed Polonia was owned by noted city solicitor Vic Zappulla and one of the heirs to the Nanda pasta empire, Vic de Pasquale. According to police records, Polonia opened its doors on Friday 19 October 1973. Interestingly, it was just a block or two north of Napoleon’s Retreat, a massage parlour owned and operated by none other than Brisbane brothel queen Simone Vogel.

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 Rd, O’Dempsey was off on a new venture that, if successful, and despite the downside of the tax to corrupt police, could be a license to print significant amounts of money.

To open a brothel in Brisbane at that time, you needed permission from corrupt police. Why had career gangster Vince O’Dempsey, a man who continuously expressed his hatred for police, been the recipient of such largesse?

One criminal close to O’Dempsey at the time said the timing of the opening of Polonia’s 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 (Detective Tony) Murphy. The question is, what did Vince have on Murphy that allowed him to do pretty much what he pleased?’

Another criminal colleague added: ‘At the time I thought nothing of it, but now you have to wonder… was he being rewarded? I don’t know, to be honest. But there’s a good chance it was a reward.’

But a reward for what? The question remained – did O’Dempsey have anything to do with the Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing? There was immediate speculation – and it continued for decades – that there were more people behind that mass murder than just Stuart and Finch.

The questions lingered.

Meanwhile, Keith Meredith, one of the members of the so-called Clockwork Orange Gang out of Chermside, north of the Brisbane CBD, 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 Mead at an auction house run in Queen St, 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 jail 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 down the road 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.

Only the Licensing Branch could sanction these outfits, 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 sometimes it 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 honest police commissioner Ray Whitrod’s Crime Intelligence Unit, and one of its leading detectives, 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 to establish the identity of the people managing that particular business. I remember late in the year 1973 in either late October or early November visiting the Polonia massage parlour … I can remember seeing a woman there 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 of the massage parlour; 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 in that particular room.’

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’ 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 said, “Do you know about O’Dempsey?”

‘He told me Vince O’Dempsey had buried two people on a fence line 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.’

It was a setback for O’Dempsey and his new business venture.

Somehow Detective Hicks, the cleanskin in Commissioner Whitrod’s corruption-busting Crime Intelligence Unit, 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 the campfire one night at a property outside Warwick when Tony Murphy’s name came up. Dennis Ide and other criminal associates were present. One witness said: ‘Dennis Ide was carrying on about Murphy, and Vince said, “We don’t have to worry about f---ing Murphy. Murphy’s not going to come out here and bring us undone. He’s been to the Warwick coppers and told them to f---ing pull up.”

‘It’s like everybody needs someone to do their dirty work, don’t they? Dennis (Ide) had an issue with Murphy, and Vince just, with a little cheeky grin on his head, he said, “He’s already been out and told them f---ing don’t even touch me and leave me alone”.’

FOLLOWING the Licensing Branch raid on O’Dempsey’s little ‘health studio’ at Lutwyche, his de facto Dianne Pritchard and young worker Margaret Grace Ward were issued summons on prostitution charges. They were due to appear in court on 16 November 1973.

Ward was terrified about her court appearance, and extremely worried that her parents would discover she was being prosecuted for prostitution. On 15 November, the day before her court hearing, Ward, with Pritchard and O’Dempsey, saw solicitor Pat Nolan in the city about the imminent case. Ward was going to have to give evidence against Pritchard, and in turn, O’Dempsey.

The next day, Ward failed to appear in court and was convicted in her absence. All of her clothes and belongings remained untouched in her room at the Vogue Private Hotel.

Pritchard was found guilty of keeping a premises for the purpose of prostitution. She was given a fine.

On Saturday 24 November, Ward was reported as a missing person by her grandmother. A police investigation was launched into her disappearance.

Despite years of police work and a coronial inquest, Margaret Grace Ward was never heard from again. Like Tommy Allen, she had seemingly vanished off the face of the earth.

* Extract from The Night Dragon by Matthew Condon (published by University of Queensland Press, $32.95)