Whiskey Au Go Go inquest: ‘Killer admitted nightclub bombing’

The man whose testimony helped convict Vincent O’Dempsey of the murder of the McCulkin family says the killer confessed to him that he was behind the Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing.

Vincent O’Dempsey. Picture: Nine News

The man whose testimony helped convict Vincent O’Dempsey of the murder of the McCulkin family says the killer confessed to him that he was behind the Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing in 1973.

Warren McDonald, 51, a long-time associate of O’Dempsey, told an inquest into the nightclub fire that killed 15 people that O’Dempsey had discussed killing a man convicted of the firebombing if he returned to Australia to give evidence in the early 2000s.

It was during a walk to their marijuana crop near Warwick, 130km southwest of Brisbane, that Mr McDonald passed on a message from his father, a close friend of O’Dempsey’s, that a federal police source had told him James Finch was set to return to Australia to give evidence against him regarding the Whiskey fire.

“He said to me, if he comes back, he’s (Vince) screwed,” Mr McDonald told the court via video­link. “He said to me, ‘if he comes back, he’ll have to be knocked. If Finch comes back he’ll have to be knocked’.”

Later, on a fishing trip in northern NSW with Mr McDonald’s father, O’Dempsey repeated his concerns, saying, “he’s (Finch) the only one that could finger me for the Whiskey”.

During Mr McDonald’s two-hour hearing, O’Dempsey himself sat in a glassed-in dock in the Brisbane courtroom, listening quietly. But where much of the conjecture about the past week of testimony has centred on diminished recall and fading memories, the inquest hearing on Thursday’s was more concerned with the truth and whether the witness was telling it.

Under fierce cross-examination by O’Dempsey’s barrister, Mr McDonald repeatedly denied he had fabricated the confessions to get a reduced sentence for significant drug trafficking charges in 2014.

Did he make it up? “I did not,” Mr McDonald insisted.

He admitted to giving false evidence to the Crime and ­Corruption Commission, but that was because O’Dempsey threatened him, he said.

Other transcripts of testimony he gave at O’Dempsey’s murder trial were “the truth, under oath, to the best of my ability”, he said.

O’Dempsey and his ­accomplice Garry “Shorty” ­Dubois were in 2017 convicted of the cold-case murders of Barbara McCulkin, 34, and her daughters Vicki, 13, and Leanne, 11, in 1974. It was suggested during the trial that the motive to kill McCulkin may have been linked to what she knew about the Whiskey fire.

Vincent O'Dempsey.

Mr McDonald, told the ­inquest on Thursday about a “confession” by O’Dempsey, sometime in 1997 or 1998, while they were discussing security of one of their marijuana crops.

“Vince said to me, ‘you need a notch on your gun. You need a kill. When I was your age I had serval notches on my gun’.

“He brought up about the McCulkins. He said, ‘I murdered the McCulkins and Shorty raped them.”

Mr McDonald’s testimony was, in part, full of detail.

He could remember the colour, make and model of the car O’Dempsey’s then-girlfriend drove them in to the NSW fishing trip and the “little marquee and courtyard out the front” of his parents’ caravan where his father had given him the tip-off about Finch.

He recalled specific conversations, and the razing of marijuana crops after security breaches. But he had only a vague sense of when the conversations happened.

He also struggled to explain why he had supposedly lied to his lawyer and denied knowledge about O’Dempsey’s involvement in the murders even before he received the threat from O’Dempsey that persuaded him to tell the same “lie” under oath to the CCC.

Was his only temptation to later reveal the confession about the McCulkin murders driven by the lure of a reduced sentence?

“That was the benefit I got, but that wasn’t the reason,” Mr McDonald said. “I believe it’s because of the (McCulkin) kids.”