Corrupt NSW cop Roger Rogerson speaks from behind bars on Brisbane’s Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing tragedy
CONVICTED murderer and corrupt cop Roger Rogerson has written from behind bars to deny any wrongdoing after assisting Queensland police in the reinvestigation of the 1973 Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing.
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CONVICTED murderer and former corrupt NSW cop Roger Rogerson has written from behind bars to deny any wrongdoing after assisting police in the reinvestigation of the 1973 Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing that left fifteen people dead.
The Courier-Mail can also today reveal the crooked officer, currently behind bars for murder, was recently questioned as part of a fresh inquest into the historic Brisbane nightclub fire.
“I can’t help you with any new or secret evidence. There is none,” he wrote to The Courier-Mail on December 7 last year, after being sought for comment.
“How is what you are attempting to do going to help the families of the Whiskey victims?”
Rogerson, serving life in prison for murdering student Jamie Gao over a drug deal in 2014, was interviewed by two Queensland homicide squad detectives on September 1.
Police have been reinvestigating the Whiskey tragedy for the past 12 months after Queensland Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath ordered a new inquest into the mass killing.
Criminals John Andrew Stuart and James Finch were found guilty of the crime in 1973, but there has always been speculation that they did not act alone.
Rogerson, 77, who is serving his time in Sydney’s Long Bay jail, was moved to Silverwater Correctional Complex in the city’s west for the police interview.
Sources said Silverwater had better facilities for formally questioning inmates.
As a young detective, Rogerson and police partner Noel Morey were sent from Sydney to assist Brisbane police in investigating the Whiskey fire which erupted in the early hours of March 8, 1973. The club was on the corner of St Pauls Terrace and Amelia Avenue in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley.
Three days after the fire, Finch and Stuart were arrested and interrogated for hours by six police officers, including Rogerson.
Finch later claimed he had been bashed by police and “verballed”. His so-called typed confession to the crime was unsigned.
Finch was deported to the UK in 1988 and later confessed to the crime. He named other co-conspirators in the torching of the Whiskey, including the Brisbane criminal Billy McCulkin.
In June last year Attorney-General D’Ath ordered a new inquest into the Whiskey after Vincent O’Dempsey and Garry Dubois were sentenced to life in prison over the murder of Barbara McCulkin and her two daughters in 1974.
The court heard during O’Dempsey’s trial last year that Barbara McCulkin, wife of Billy McCulkin – an associate of O’Dempsey and Dubois – may have been murdered because of what she knew about who was behind the Whiskey fire.
Stuart and O’Dempsey were regular visitors to the McCulkin’s workers cottage in the inner-Brisbane suburb of Highgate Hill.
Barbara told a neighbour that she had enough information on certain people involved with the fire to “put them away for 20 years”.
“There is no doubt there is significant public interest in getting answers in relation to the Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing,” the Attorney-General said in her statement in June last year. “Given recent events, witnesses who have previously not been willing to come forward, might now be willing to provide new information that will give us those answers.”
Over the years Rogerson has bragged about his involvement in the Whiskey investigation.
Months before his arrest over the Gao murder in 2014, he told Sydney journalist James Phelps about flying to Brisbane to join the hunt for the Whiskey killers.
He told Phelps he helped lock up Stuart and Finch.
Rogerson said Stuart had been “walking around Fortitude Valley standing over places”, telling clubs he had been sent north by Sydney gangsters like Lenny McPherson and George Freeman.
“The boss of the CIB sent me up,” he told Phelps. “We had a Lear jet 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.’’
Rogerson then elaborated on the actual crime.
“Finch was the one that did the job,” he said. “The nightclub had a mezzanine. Vince went to the stairs at the back of the kitchen and threw a molotov cocktail in. Because it was downstairs the draft took it in and set the explosion rushing up into the club.
“Within seconds the whole place was on fire. There were 15 people in there. They were all killed.”
In his letters to The Courier-Mail, Rogerson could not identify the “Vince” he mentioned to Phelps.
“To start with, none of that is my verbage (sic), and to be quite truthful, it doesn’t make sense and does not fit in at all as to how the fire started,” Rogerson wrote. “I have never heard of anyone called Vince having anything to do with either Stuart or Finch.”
Rogerson added: “If an inquest takes place there is no doubt I will be contacted. It did occur a long time ago and I can’t imagine too many of the Brisbane cops who were involved in the investigation would be willing and able to give evidence.”
Rogerson was adamant that Stuart and Finch were the only culprits.
“I believe it was really a simple case,” he wrote. “I think it gets down to this. When one psychopath gets with another psychopath you end up with mayhem.
“I think you are barking up the wrong tree.”
He said he had always co-operated with the media throughout his police career and beyond, but that had now “come to an end”.
For months Queensland detectives have been interviewing members of the criminal milieu and civilians as part of their reinvestigation of the Whiskey tragedy.
Sources said they have also gathered information on corrupt police of the era and their possible involvement.
In a wide-ranging newspaper interview in 1988, Finch claimed there was a senior police officer behind the planning of the Whiskey fire.
After 45 years, there remains debate over the motive. Unsubstantiated theories have ranged from an insurance job to a political plot to discredit the then Queensland police commissioner, Ray Whitrod, who was out of favour with the force.
On the morning of the fire Barbara McCulkin saw the news of the mass murder on the front page of an early edition newspaper. Her first response to the tragedy was: “Oh my god, they did it.”
No date has been set for the new Whiskey inquest.
TIMELINE: HOW THE TRAGEDY UNFOLDED
March 8, 1973: The Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in Fortitude Valley is firebombed about 2.10am. Fifteen people are killed. Until the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 it was Australia’s biggest mass murder.
March 10: James Finch and John Andrew Stuart are arrested and charged with arson and 15 counts of murder after a tip-off from Stuart’s older brother.
October 23, 1973: Finch and Stuart found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in jail.
January 16, 1974: Barbara McCulkin and her two daughters Vicki and Leanne are murdered by Vincent O’Dempsey and Garry Dubois. It was suspected the motive for the killing was that Barbara had information about the Whiskey fire.
January 1, 1979: Stuart found dead in his cell at Boggo Road prison after a six-day hunger strike in which he sewed his lips together with paperclips.
February 1, 1988: Finch is released from prison and deported back to the UK.
June 1, 2017: In sentencing O’Dempsey and Dubois, Justice Peter Applegarth raised new evidence which he said implicated O’Dempsey in the fire.
June 2, 2017: Queensland Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath announces the coronial inquest into the fire will be reopened after The Courier-Mail demanded a proper investigation.
September 1, 2018: Roger Rogerson interviewed at Silverwater Jail.
Originally published as Corrupt NSW cop Roger Rogerson speaks from behind bars on Brisbane’s Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing tragedy