Survivors of Brisbane’s Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub firebombing speak out
Nearly 50 years after the atrocity, will the truth of the infamous Brisbane nightclub bombing finally be revealed?
At about 10.15am on Thursday, June 1, 2017, an extraordinary and unexpected debate unfolded in Court Seven of the Supreme Court complex in Brisbane. The court was packed, the gallery crowded with detectives, journalists, members of the public and the relatives of two men – Vince O’Dempsey and Garry “Shorty” Dubois – who had been found guilty of a cold-case triple murder that reached all the way back to 1974.
The pair had brutally killed Brisbane woman Barbara McCulkin, 34, and her two daughters, Vicki, 13, and Leanne, 11, whose bodies have never been found. It was suggested during O’Dempsey’s trial that the motive to kill McCulkin may have been linked to what she knew about a string of arson attacks in Brisbane in early 1973, culminating in the infamous firebombing of the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub that killed 15 people. Her husband, Billy, was rumoured to have been involved.
On this first day of winter in 2017, inside the glass, wood and steel edifice that is the Queen Elizabeth II Courts of Law, O’Dempsey and Dubois were about to be sentenced by Justice Peter Applegarth. O’Dempsey wore an ill-fitting charcoal-coloured suit; Dubois was in khaki shorts and a Hawaiian-style shirt. They each sat at the far ends of the bench in the dock, behind thick glass. Before Justice Applegarth could begin his sentencing remarks, O’Dempsey’s counsel, Tony Glynn QC, told the court that his client wished to say something. O’Dempsey, a child killer, diagnosed psychopath, convicted drug dealer and gangster once described as “the most feared man in the Australian underworld”, wanted to address the court. It was a stunning moment. O’Dempsey had prided himself throughout his long and murderous criminal career on keeping his mouth shut. Once, when asked to state his name during court proceedings, he had answered: “No comment.”
Now he wanted to speak. There was a flurry of deliberation between legal counsel and the bench before Justice Applegarth decided that he would allow O’Dempsey to make his “little speech”. “If someone wants to express remorse, I’ll hear it,” Applegarth said. “What does he want to say?”
It was 10.31am. O’Dempsey read from notes scratched in ballpoint pen onto what looked like a folded advertising leaflet. “I’m here before you today wrongly convicted on false testimony,” O’Dempsey said. He insisted he “never had the slightest reason” to harm the McCulkin girls.
Then came the bombshell. O’Dempsey inexplicably told the court that his trial had been infected by a “prejudicial smokescreen” with regard to the arson attacks. And he denied having any knowledge of or involvement in the Whiskey mass murder. It was a moment when the court seemingly drew in its collective breath. Why had O’Dempsey, nicknamed “Silent Death” in prison, suddenly and without prompting announced to the world that he had nothing to do with the Whiskey blaze? Two men – John Andrew Stuart and James Finch – had been convicted of that horrible crime back in 1973. But from day one there were strong rumours that there had been more people behind the deadly attack.
In court, the astute Justice Applegarth took O’Dempsey to task on his Whiskey assertion and quoted evidence about O’Dempsey and Whiskey that he had earlier excluded from the trial. This included a story that O’Dempsey had become aware that Finch, who had been extradited back to the UK, might have once planned to return to Australia to implicate him in the firebombing. O’Dempsey had made plans to have Finch “knocked”, or killed, if that happened.
Justice Applegarth concluded that “there’s evidence in that form” that O’Dempsey was linked to the Whiskey firebombing. For almost half a century, the official line had always been that Stuart and Finch alone were the Whiskey killers, despite rumours that others had had a hand in it. Now O’Dempsey had been added to the narrative.
Within 24 hours of O’Dempsey’s little speech, Queensland Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath announced that she would ask the coroner to open a fresh inquest into the firebombing. More than three years after that news, the Whiskey saga – a complex, crowded, multi-headed monster of a story involving the Sydney underworld, corrupt cops, Brisbane gangsters, lies, obfuscation, red herrings and conspiracy theories – has yet to grace the Coroner’s court. And now the remaining survivors have been left wondering, as the clock continues to tick: will the truth ever be told?
In the first few months of 1973, suspicious fires were breaking out across the Brisbane CBD. In January, Alice’s bar and restaurant – owned by John Hannay, who had recently been sacked as manager of the Whiskey Au Go Go in Fortitude Valley – suffered damage from an arson attack. Then a small fire broke out in Chequers nightclub, owned and run by brothers Brian and Ken Little, who also had the Whiskey Au Go Go. And in late February, a massive blast blew out the shopfront of Torino’s restaurant and nightclub, also in the Valley. That attack was an arson job organised by Vince O’Dempsey and his mate, petty gangster Billy McCulkin.
The press declared the fires were in fact part of an attempt to muscle in on Brisbane’s nightclub scene by members of the Sydney underworld. Word on the street was that to show they meant business, southern mobsters were set to torch another club, this time one full of patrons. Finch and Stuart were well known to Sydney gangs, and had often done jobs for them.
Just before 2am on Thursday, March 8, 1973, Kath Potter, in her early 20s, was in the Whiskey Au Go Go having a drink as she waited to meet her new boyfriend. They had agreed to catch up at this late-night dive frequented by hoods and corrupt police, but the boyfriend hadn’t shown.
There were about 50 people in the club. Many had come to see a band, The Delltones, who’d just finished their set. Frustrated, Potter and her girlfriend left the club and headed for a phone box outside on St Pauls Terrace. Potter rang Chequers to see if her boyfriend was there. Maybe he’d mixed up the destination of their date.
While she was on the phone, she saw a black car glide up to Whiskey’s entrance. “Three men got out and they took a great big drum,” Potter recalls today. “Two were medium height, medium build. I can still see them in my mind’s eye. And the other one was a tall, skinny man… I saw them dragging the drum out of the back seat… They were pulling it out very carefully.” Afraid, Potter and her girlfriend started hurrying towards Potter’s car, which was parked across the road from the club. Then Potter turned for another look. She saw another drum being rolled out and one of the men lighting the wick. “I said to my friend, ‘Oh, my God. What are we going to do now?’” Potter recalls. “And she said, ‘We’re going, Kath. Come on, we’re going.’ And we got to the car, and the next minute, boom! And I started to shake uncontrollably. To this day, I don’t remember driving home.”
Upstairs in the club, waitress Donna Phillips, 22, had gone to the back bar for a glass of water. “I didn’t hear anything, but I saw the fire burst through the front door and catch alight across the curtains,” Phillips says now. “My line of sight also took in [co-worker] Peter Marcus and I still to this day say that I saw part of his shirt catch fire, the side closest to the curtain, and watched him run around the back of the bar… he seemed purposeful and he did something in the shelf area or under the bar and just fell forward.” Marcus died in the club. One of Phillips’ good friends who also perished was Decima Carroll, the mother of three young children – Sonya, Kim and Todd.
Queensland police constable Hunter Nicol, 21, a former military police officer, was sitting near the stage enjoying a drink with his friends Bill Nolan and Les Palethorpe. Palethorpe had been dancing with an old friend he’d bumped into. Then there was chaos. “Well, we’re sitting there and next I just felt this big whoosh sort of thing, big blast of heat came in,” Nicol says now. “A terrific heat hit us first with this big whooshing sound… we’re just completely enveloped in this real thick, pungent, stinking smoke. Like you see with burning tyres, diesel.”
Nicol fought through the smoke to a high window in the artists’ changing room in the back corner of the club. He was close to passing out. “Everything had gone,” he says. “I couldn’t see any fire escape sign, I couldn’t see nothing. No power, pitch black, the lights had gone. We’re totally enveloped in smoke. And couldn’t breathe. I’d resigned to the fact that I was dying and I saw a white light. People were climbing through this hopper window. I pushed a few people out. And then I pushed this girl I’d dragged with me out. Eventually I stood there getting a few puffs of fresh air coming in, and that sort of revived me.”
Nicol believes he was one of the last people to get out of the club alive. His friends, Les and Bill, didn’t make it. The fire brigade managed to extinguish the blaze in less than half an hour, but the firebombing had wreaked shocking carnage. Fifteen people lost their lives in the Whiskey that night. Their bodies, under white sheets, were laid out on the footpath in Amelia Street.
It was, to that point, the biggest mass murder in post-colonial Australian history. How could something like this happen in sleepy Brisbane?
Within 72 hours, two known criminals, JohnAndrew Stuart and James Finch, were arrested in Brisbane and charged over the atrocity. Both men claimed they were “verballed” – fitted up with false, unsigned statements – and bashed. The police present for the interviews included Brisbane officers Brian Hayes, Syd Atkinson and Ron Redmond, and Sydney detectives Noel Morey and Roger Rogerson. Stuart and Finch were later found guilty at trial and sentenced to life in prison. And that should have been the end of that.
But the embers of the Whiskey fire have never cooled. For years, then decades, rumours swirled that it wasn’t just Stuart and Finch; there were others involved. The word was that local petty gangster Billy McCulkin, husband to Barbara and father to Vicki and Leanne, was the driver of the black car that night, and that local hood Tommy Hamilton, along with Finch, was also part of the crew that torched the Whiskey. Stuart was at the nearby Flamingo bar when the Whiskey went up but had a major hand in arranging the fire, it was said. But police always insisted there were just two offenders, Finch and Stuart.
Ten months later, Barbara McCulkin and her daughters disappeared and were presumed murdered. O’Dempsey and Dubois were seen at the McCulkin house in South Brisbane the night they vanished. Before her death, McCulkin told friends she had information about the Brisbane fires in early 1973 that could put certain people in jail for more than 20 years. Was this triple homicide linked to the Whiskey and what she might have known about who was behind the mass murder?
She also said that if police had asked the right questions at the time, they would have discovered that there were more people behind the Whiskey than just Stuart and Finch. Stuart died in jail in 1979. After his arrest and conviction he had loudly professed his innocence and had gone on several hunger strikes.
As for Finch, he was deported back to the UK in 1988 at the height of the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police and political corruption in Queensland. A public campaign claiming he was innocent struck a chord during the royal commission hearings into crooked cops and dodgy state ministers. The government decided to wash its hands of him and send him home.
Shortly after, Finch made a startling confession to Queensland journalist Dennis Watt. He admitted that three men torched the Whiskey – Finch himself, McCulkin and Tommy Hamilton of the local Clockwork Orange gang. Stuart organised it at the bidding of McCulkin. He said they stole a black car that night, and they were all dressed in black – precisely what Kath Potter says she saw from the phone box outside the club. Finch accused a senior corrupt Queensland police officer and Vince O’Dempsey of being the masterminds behind the fire. “It was always funny how me and Stuart got pinched but nothing happened to the other pair [McCulkin and Hamilton] or Vince O’Dempsey,” Finch told Watt. “I always had a code of not squealing but nowadays I reckon it’s time the truth came out.”
The case was never reinvestigated, though. Nobody else was charged. And another 30 years would pass before authorities decided to solve, once and for all, the puzzle of the Whiskey.
The day after the curious debate in the SupremeCourt about Vince O’Dempsey’s involvement, or not, in the Whiskey atrocity, the Courier-Mail newspaper ran a front-page story demanding the reopening of the Whiskey inquest. In its editorial, it said: “While the truth behind the Whiskey has always remained blurred, this twist has the potential to rewrite our history and correct the past.” Just hours after the newspaper hit the streets, the state government announced the new inquest. A senior Queensland police officer was assigned the brief in 2017, subsequently handing it over to Detective Senior Sergeant Virginia Gray.
Gray, along with Detective Inspector Mick Dowie, were the cold case homicide investigators who had finally cracked the McCulkin case, which saw O’Dempsey and his cohort Garry “Shorty” Dubois jailed for life. It was one of the most spectacular and successful cold case resolutions in Australian criminal history. Now the tenacious Gray was assisting the coroner in handling the complex Whiskey investigation. According to survivors familiar with the progress of the case, Gray’s investigation has been thorough and wide-ranging, and has uncovered new information. It is uncertain if any possible new charges might stem from the renewed inquest.
For those who cheated death that night in 1973, and for the families of the 15 victims, the announcement of the fresh inquest gave them hope. But having waited now for three years – hampered by a change in investigators, the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors – they are now sceptical. Was the Whiskey case still too hard, too complex, too caught up with corrupt police and too dangerous given the rumours that Sydney gangsters were in the mix? It was easier to simply believe the conventional narrative – that Stuart and Finch had acted alone.
As for the new inquest, the Coroner’s Court told The Weekend Australian Magazine that a date would be set once the police investigation had been finalised. Sources say the inquest may go ahead in February next year.
Kath Potter, Hunter Nicol and Donna Phillips, who are all prepared to take the stand at the new inquest, are still haunted by the Whiskey. Shortly after the bombing, Potter willingly offered a statement to police about what she saw from the phone box just before the Whiskey went up: three men emerging from a black car and rolling out two drums of fuel into the foyer of the nightclub.
Weeks later, she was visited by police. “So I get home from work and here were these two cars at the front of my house,” she recalls. “And they introduced themselves as two detectives and one policeman. I had gone down to Fortitude Valley police station… and I had made this statement and they showed me the statement that I’d made. I said, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ They said, ‘No, it’s not. You’re lying.’ I said, ‘I’m not lying. That’s exactly what I saw and I’ve told you what I saw and that’s what it is.’” Potter says they continued to accuse her of lying and demanded she change her statement. “One of the officers said, ‘Who’s put you up to lying about this?’” Potter remains troubled by the fact that the police were so adamant only two suspects were in the frame, and by their insistence on her changing her statement. Why?
As for Nicol, he still suffers health issues from that unforgettable night. “I’ve got a lot of scar tissue in my lungs and in my throat. All from the heat and the smoke that I breathed in,” he says. He has mulled over the truth behind the Whiskey attack for decades, and has his theories. “I’m firmly convinced that Stuart and Finch were involved,” he says. “I’m firmly convinced in my own mind, although I’ve no evidence, that there were other people. I have my suspicions. But when it comes to the Coroner’s Court, if they ask me, I’ll tell them who I think and why. I’ve done a little plan of what I think… Unfortunately there’s so many, as the police like to call them, ‘persons of interest’ that have now passed away. So what will be achieved? I don’t know, that’s up to the Coroner.”
Donna Phillips has carried the burden of the Whiskey firebombing her entire adult life. She still thinks of her good friend Decima, the mother of three young kids. Hardly a day goes by when she doesn’t reflect on the early morning of March 8, 1973. Why has it taken so long to get to the truth?
“Well, that’s a good question and that’s what we’re all waiting for with the inquest,” she says. “I mean, I would love to know the truth, and I think that myself and the people I’m in contact with who are families of those that died, and other survivors and other people would too.
“Yesterday on Facebook I was contacted by a lady whose father was the ambulance man who’s seen in all of the clips on the news, and she still has his fire hat and she said it smelt of smoke… It always smelt of smoke from that night.”
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