Vincent O’Dempsey, gangland’s most feared
This 80-year-old man may be the worst killer Australia has never heard of.
Vincent O’Dempsey held up three fingers, closed his hand into a fist and then held up the same three fingers.
“What, 33? Really?” said girlfriend Kerri-Anne Scully.
“Yep,” O’Dempsey replied, confirming the murders he was good for.
That was Scully’s evidence at O’Dempsey’s 2017 trial for the murders of Barbara McCulkin and her daughters Vicki, 13, and Leanne, 11. It was an extraordinary court case, unfolding 43 years after the McCulkins vanished without trace. Such was O’Dempsey’s fearsome reputation that his criminal cohorts thought Scully was underplaying it.
“When they heard the figure 33 mentioned, they all collectively guffawed and said, ‘That’s not accurate — it’s upwards of that’,” says author and journalist Matthew Condon. “Is he potentially the worst killer Australia has never heard of? It’s definitely worth asking that question.”
Condon delved deep into Queensland’s criminal history and police and political corruption in his bestselling trilogy Three Crooked Kings, Jacks and Jokers and All Fall Down. He continues the investigation in his new book, The Night Dragon. In part, it examines the life and some of the crimes of O’Dempsey, now 80, a man who is said to have his own private graveyard, so full that the bodies had to be buried upright.
O’Dempsey, descendant of some of the earliest white settlers of Warwick, 160km southwest of Brisbane, was the black sheep of his respected family. As a child, he lived within sight of Warwick’s St Mary’s Catholic Church, where his parents, Thomas O’Dempsey and Mary McConville, had married and attended mass daily.
Something was amiss with O’Dempsey from an early age, Condon discovered. Police would learn he had gathered stray cats, stabbing them to death through a bag, and that he was obsessed with guns and explosives. When a gang of local youths was caught with a stockpile of stolen items — rifles and enough gelignite to blow up a building — their names were suppressed in the local paper because of their age. But it matched O’Dempsey to a tee. At almost precisely this time, O’Dempsey’s father sent him to a private hospital for assessment. The diagnosis was that he was a “psychopath with schizoid tendencies”.
Paradoxically, O’Dempsey was protective of wildlife and a vegetarian. He was smart, and in prison when young would study animal husbandry and top his courses. At his school, St Joseph’s, he was bashed by the Christian Brothers; some blame this for him going off the rails. His mother, in particular, stuck by him but would have been horrified by his metamorphosis into a thief, thug and killer, friends told Condon.
By the 1970s, he’d graduated from Brisbane’s Boggo Road jail to the interlinked underworlds of Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley and Sydney’s Kings Cross.
“In Warwick, the O’Dempsey name is famous, and he’s famous as a hard man, a tough guy,” Condon says. “But you speak to people from the criminal milieu of that era and all of them say he was the most feared man in the Australian underworld. From Warwick, Queensland. It’s bizarre.”
Outside his home town and criminal circles, O’Dempsey is relatively unknown largely because he was aged in his late 70s when he was convicted of murdering the McCulkins, who disappeared on January 16, 1974. Co-accused Garry “Shorty” Dubois was found guilty, in a separate trial in 2016, of the rape and murder of the McCulkin sisters and the manslaughter of their mother.
In turn, the conviction of the men has shone a light on other unresolved crimes, including the firebombing of the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley that killed 15 people.
As a direct result of the guilty verdicts and evidence from the trials, a new inquest will re-examine the inferno that tore through the nightclub just after 2am on March 8, 1973, a year before the McCulkin murders. Two men were convicted of the arson, John Stuart and James Finch, but it is almost certain they were not the only ones responsible. O’Dempsey is among the suspects. The Whiskey fire and the earlier torching of another Brisbane nightclub, Torino’s, were the likely motive for the McCulkin family murders; Barbara, the wife of another Whiskey suspect, the gangster Billy McCulkin, knew too much.
That these historic events are on the agenda can be traced back to the 40th anniversary of the McCulkin murders. The occasion prompted two detectives from the Queensland homicide squad’s cold case unit, Virginia Gray and Mick Dowie, to have another look at the files and to launch a public appeal. “I firmly believe the timing was right,” Dowie tells Inquirer. Witnesses were at a point in their lives that they were ready to speak. “He (O’Dempsey) is obviously recognised as one of Queensland’s most notorious criminals from back in that era. The challenge we faced was the code of silence.”
O’Dempsey and Dubois were suspects because they were the last to be seen with the McCulkins at their home at 6 Dorchester Street, in Highgate Hill, inner Brisbane, on the night they vanished. Proving it was another matter, and for a long time nothing would stick to O’Dempsey. After the McCulkin killings, he had returned to Warwick, where he ran an alpaca farm. It was an aside to his multimillion-dollar crops of bush cannabis, which he tended to on properties around the district until his arrest for the McCulkin murders.
The cold case investigators had at their disposal the Crime and Corruption Commission’s coercive, or “star chamber”, hearings in which witnesses are compelled to answer questions under threat of jail for perjury. “Modern investigators had that, and they had the luxury of three very brave human beings who gave state evidence,” Condon says.
Peter Hall, a one-time member of a loose criminal group known as the Clockwork Orange Gang, testified that Dubois confessed to him in the days after the family vanished. Hall said Dubois had spoken to him in gruesome detail about Barbara McCulkin’s murder. O’Dempsey’s former girlfriend, Scully, said he once told her: “I’m good for it, but they’ll never get me on these murders.” And Warren McDonald spoke about spending years working as O’Dempsey’s “apprentice” on the marijuana crops.
“Vince said to me, ‘You need a notch on your gun … you need a kill. When I was your age I had several notches on my gun,’ ” McDonald said.
Condon says McDonald evaded jail time over the drug operation because of his evidence but will spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.
“He’s had to leave Warwick. He gets intermittent threats for doing the right thing and giving evidence against Vincent O’Dempsey. The evidence he gave, along with Hall and Scully, turned this case completely, along with the CCC.
“People make a decision to risk their lives and reputations to try and get to the truth and change the history of this state. They do that, then they walk back into the world and they’re vilified and abused and castigated as rats. I take my hat off to McDonald.”
Mick Dowie was head of the cold case unit during the McCulkin investigation, a role oddly paired with him running the stock squad. He recently moved back to uniform, looking after a vast beat in central Queensland, a move partially prompted by the successful McCulkin prosecution. He said this week the result was primarily due to his colleague Gray’s dedication, and that he concluded the case would be a hard career moment to top. “That achievement definitely warranted a further look at him with other matters,” he said.
There is a pattern when it comes to O’Dempsey of people vanishing whenever they threaten his freedom. The McCulkins seemingly had to go because of what Barbara heard inside her home, where there was a constant procession of hardened criminals; her daughters were collateral damage, or a sick bonus.
But O’Dempsey’s first victim may have been 22-year-old Raymond Vincent “Tommy” Allen, who assisted him in burgling Warwick’s Pigott & Co jewellery store. Tommy disappeared after being questioned by police in 1964. “He spilled the beans,” retired detective Alan Marshall told Condon. “He agreed to give evidence against O’Dempsey.”
Released on bail, O’Dempsey was seen driving down the main street with Tommy. “Young Tommy’s never been seen since,” Marshall said. O’Dempsey’s robbery case collapsed. He’d already spent a lengthy stint in prison by that point for severely bashing a police officer and wasn’t in any hurry to go back.
Margaret Grace Ward was given a summons on prostitution charges after a police raid on O’Dempsey’s “health studio” in Lutwyche, north Brisbane, in 1973. Ward was going to have to give evidence against O’Dempsey and his de facto, Dianne Pritchard. Ward failed to appear in court, was reported missing by her stepmother just over a week later, and has not been seen again. O’Dempsey’s name has been associated with her disappearance ever since.
Despite the passage of time, key figures can still be found. The only way to speak to one of these, William Stokes, is to drive to a block of flats on the Brisbane River and beg the friendly manager to go up to his one-bedroom unit to pass on a message; he has no phone, intercom or internet. Stokes was convicted of the murder of another Whiskey suspect, Thomas Hamilton, but insists to this day that he was framed by a corrupt detective. He served 16 years before being released in 1992. Prior to that, he was in Boggo Road jail with O’Dempsey when both were incarcerated for robberies. They’d play cards together for high stakes.
Stokes told Inquirer this week he believed that by holding up three fingers twice, O’Dempsey was saying he had killed six people, not 33. This would include the three members of the McCulkin family, Tommy Allen, Margaret Ward and a migrant worker whose disappearance in the Warwick area attracted less publicity.
O’Dempsey would not have held himself responsible for the murders of 15 innocent people at Whiskey because he did not strike the match and “only tipped the others into it”, Stokes says. O’Dempsey described himself to Stokes as “gregarious” and was generally friendly, but his black eyes sometimes betrayed how bad he could be. “This badness, as far as I can ascertain, came when he felt threatened,” Stokes said.
Other criminals from the era have a different assessment, Condon says. They have said the depth of O’Dempsey’s depravity is deeper than almost anyone realises. Horrific tales abound of other murders and sexual assaults. O’Dempsey’s work in Sydney, where he was a gun for hire, ended almost immediately after the McCulkins vanished. Word spread fast about the horrific degradation of Barbara and her daughters, and serious criminals would have nothing to do with him.
Condon adds that O’Dempsey’s colleagues look back and conclude, despite his reputed hatred of police, that he was protected from “somewhere high up”. Long stretches of known criminality without corresponding terms of imprisonment led to no other conclusion.
It took some extraordinary circumstances for the story to have some light shone upon it, and his hope is that by laying out all the pieces and seeing what fits together, the whole picture will emerge.
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