Hold Close Your Loved Ones

Whooshkaa Studios: Ghost Gate Road contains graphic details of sexual assault and violence and it not intended for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

The actual Ghost Gate Road outside Warwick may have a beginning and an end, taking you past plowed fields near the foot of Mount Marshall and through a dead landscape of blackened tree trunks and tall grass before it comes out near the little village of Goomburra.

But together in this podcast we have travelled a dark road of the mind that even at this late stage appears to have no sunlit ending. To me it feels like we entered, arm in arm, into Vince’s story and, by the time it was too late, found ourselves in the gravitational pull of a black hole which even light cannot escape.

The black hole of one man’s life.

Yet here we are, perhaps a little battered and bruised. Possibly still trying to comprehend a serial killer’s view of the world, and the actions he takes, and the decisions he makes.

If you are not a murderer, how can you expect to understand one?

I think we’ve come close. Or as close as we want to get to those horrible truths.

For the majority of us, there is something inside that tells us when to stop.

For Vince, maybe he sees in his mind’s eye just a limitless road into an infinite darkness.

It has been difficult, this story, to spend time with the dead. It has been just as uncomfortable to get to know O’Dempsey.

In some ways, I’m looking forward to healing from the Vince virus and getting back to some form of what we call normality. In others, I’m dreading it. Because no matter how far behind I leave Ghost Gate Road and Vince, he has taught me one thing. For all our pretensions to civility and respect, to decent behaviour and the sanctity of life, there have always been Vince’s in this world, and there always will be.

He is, as I said from the beginning, that dark shadow at the back of all of our minds. And the shadow does not just go away with successive generations.

Being submerged in Vince’s life, as horrific as that experience has been, at least tells us what we are NOT as human beings.

But another part of our nature, yours and mine, is just as primitive.

It is an outrage when someone takes the life of innocents. It is horror when young lives are snuffed out prematurely because of the incomprehensible greed and lust of a heartless and cruel person like Vince.

It is that desire for revenge when, as a parent yourself, you wonder what you might be forced to do if one of your own children was murdered by an animal like Vince O’Dempsey.

Would you be able to stop yourself then?

Now, at this point along the road, it is time to exact that revenge.

From Whooshkaa Studios, I’m Matthew Condon, and this is Ghost Gate Road. In this episode, time has finally run out for psychopath Vince O’Dempsey as he’s finally held accountable for the McCulkin triple murder. But that poses more questions than it answers, with a string of deaths and disappearances that may be linked to this remorseless serial killer. And have we found Barbara, Vicki and Leanne? Or did this monster have the last word when it came to closure for the long-suffering McCulkin family?

I was eleven years old, the exact age of Leanne McCulkin, when she, her mother Barbara and her sister Vicki were taken and slaughtered in the darkness of the Australian bush in 1974.

As a child, I had regularly gone to the Red Hill Skate Arena to zoom around the track with friends, just like Leanne and Vicki, and who knows - I may have seen them there on occasion without even knowing who they were.

At 11, too, I often stayed with my grandmother at her house in the Brisbane suburb of Rosalie, and often walked with her down to the local shops. Our route directly passes the Nethercote block of flats where Vince and Dianne were living at that precise moment in time.

Then more than 40 years later, as a middle-aged man, I found myself attending Vince’s trial daily.

The separate trials of Vince O’Dempsey and Shorty Dubois for the McCulkin murders were held in Brisbane’s imposing Queen Elizabeth II Courts of Law building in George Street in the Brisbane CBD.

Shorty’s Supreme Court trial unfolded in November 2016. Vince’s went ahead in May 2017.

On most mornings during Vince’s trial I took the train into the city from the Queensland Newspapers building in Bowen Hills and got off at Roma Street station.

And often, on those mornings, I saw the same elderly man and his wife making their way down the tiled pedestrian tunnel out of the station to the nearby court building.

I would learn over time that that elderly man was Graham Ogden. He was the brother of Barbara McCulkin, and most days he made this pilgrimage to hopefully see justice for his sister and young nieces.

There was, too, a daily irony there for all to see in Court 7 during the trial, presided over by Justice Peter Applegarth.

When the electronic window shades were open at the rear of the court, behind Justice Applegrath, it was possible to catch a glimpse, beyond the city skyscrapers, of the suburb of Highgate Hill, across the river, where the house at 6 Dorchester Street sat, immovable and frozen in time.

In the court, Vince - in the dock - wore a dark suit, white shirt, tie and black slip-on loafers. I wrote at the time that he wore his suit as a farmer might wear a suit to a funeral.

What was his demeanour? He was facing the remainder of his life in jail. And yet he wiggled his fingers at family members through the thick dock glass, and seemed completely unmoved by the hideous allegations levelled against him.

It’s impossible not to go right back to the start of this story, and the assessment of Dr Peter Browne Rowland who diagnosed Vince as a psychopath when he was 15 years old.

How extraordinarily accurate that assessment turned out to be, holding true and echoing into a modern courtroom almost 70 years later.

I vividly remember Wazza McDonald being called into the witness stand to be questioned. He had spent years preparing for this moment. He had agreed to assist police and tell them everything he knew about Vince and the McCulkins. To the criminal underworld, he would have been considered what they called a dog.

To the people of Queensland, and the State’s criminal justice system, he was a hero.

Wazza looked uncomfortable in his suit.

He was naturally nervous.

He had sweat on his top lip.

It was also a difficult moment for Peter Hall.

He too had defied the unwritten criminal code of never betraying your mates. He too felt regret at what he was about to do. But common decency outweighed those negative thoughts.

Would he hold up under pressure?

In court, Peter revealed what Shorty had told him about the McCulkin murders the day after it happened in January 1974.

And while the courtroom was tense, there was also a distant feeling that the tectonic plates of this case had finally shifted.

That good just might prevail.

There was one moment I’ll never forget in Vince’s trial.

When Peter had finished giving his evidence and was excused as a witness, he walked towards the dock, which held Vince and Shorty, and headed for the exit.

As he approached Vince he deliberately stared him straight in the eyes as he passed. Their eyes locked. Peter didn’t flinch. And then Peter was gone.

It was an act of defiance. It was also an act of courage, and, in a way, a gesture of victory.

This time, Hall was saying without words, the truth will triumph.

This time, the McCulkins will get what they’ve long deserved.

Justice.

Brisbane Channel 9 court reporter Tessa Hardy broadcast live the verdicts on the final day of Vince’s trial from the grassy forecourt of the Queen Elizabeth II court complex.

It was a tense report on what many hoped would be a fitting and just conclusion to the McCulkin mystery.

After Vince was found guilty of the McCulkin murders by a jury of his peers, finally held accountable for one of the most vile and vicious murders in Australian history, he stood in the dock, turned towards his family in the public gallery, half-grinned and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say - you win some, you lose some.

Shorty had also been found guilty at his trial.

At sentencing in June 2017, these two old partners in crime came together one last time in the dock of Court 7.

Both would spend the rest of their natural lives in jail.

I found my original notes from that extraordinary day.

They read in part:

In his sentencing remarks, Justice Applegarth was scathing.

He told the hushed court:

That two monsters were jailed for life in one of Australia’s oldest cold cases was not the only astonishing thing that happened on this day in Court 7.

Vince, the man who prided himself on his many nicknames, especially Mr No Comment when it came to talking to police or the courts, declared that he had something important to say.

It was strange, if not unprecedented, that a defendant already found guilty of a triple murder wanted to stand and profess his innocence.

Justice Applegarth allowed Vince to give his little speech.

And so Vince stood in the dock, with his scrap of paper filled with handwritten notes, and denied he had ever harmed the McCulkins. And he claimed that his case had been negatively affected by what he called a “prejudicial smokescreen” that had arisen out of evidence involving the Torino and Whiskey Au Go Go fires in 1973.

Vince told the court he had nothing to do with those firebombings.

It was a jaw-dropping claim. Especially as the trail and giving of evidence was over. And nobody had linked Vince to the Whiskey in the first place. It was like saying - I had nothing to do with the murder of those 15 innocent people in the nightclub when no-one asked him if he had.

Given the trial was well and truly over, Justice Applegarth said he found O’Dempsey’s proposition “interesting”, and revealed evidence to the packed court that he had previously ruled out as being prejudicial to Vince.

It was clear Vince did have something to do with the Whiskey Au Go Go mass murder, althoiugh exactly what remained unclear.

The next morning, the Queensland Government announced a new Coronial Inquest into the Whiskey firebombing of 1973.

Yet another door into Vince’s dark past had sprung open.

This has been a story littered with victims.

Some we know about. Many we don’t.

Families have grieved loved ones who have vanished off the face of the earth. Others caught up in this evil tale have taken their own lives. Children have grown up without parents.

Yet it’s easy to overlook Vince’s friends and associates when he was at the height of his criminal powers in the 1970s, the men who went in with Vince on numerous crimes and scams, some who briefly lived with him or put him up when he was on the run. They were brothers in crime, and they had each other’s back.

But only now, following the McCulkin trial, these old men have put their heads together to freshly reassess their friendship and working relationship with Vince O’Dempsey, and they haven’t liked what they can only now see as an unforgivable betrayal of their trust.

None knew Vince worked as a police informant as early as he did in the 1970s. None knew that on the many occasions they were caught red-handed by police in the commission of a crime, or in possession of drugs or stolen goods, that it was anything more than either excellent police work or their own rotten luck.

No. The pattern these men have finally discovered is that Vince had tipped them in to the coppers for his own benefit. He ratted out his own mates for decades. Many did long prison stretches because of Vince.

In one instance he put out a hit on a long-time criminal associate. But just not him. The contract killing would include that man’s wife, and their two young daughters.

There was no end to O’Dempsey’s depravity.

His former mates are angry. And deeply hurt by Vince’s betrayal.

I talked to Peter Hall about it.

Garry Lawrence said he never thought he’d say it, but he’s pleased that Vince and Shorty are in jail for life.

And Bob still shakes his head over what he’s only now understanding about Vince.

Many of the players in the O’Dempsey saga never got to see him put away for life.

Some had aided his criminality. Others had fought it.

There are men and women alive today who had to live with the impact of this one man’s evil deeds. There are others with unidentifiable grief who would not even know that he had somehow featured in their family history.

Rat Pack detective Tony Murphy, one of O’Dempsey’s chief enablers, died an old man in late 2010. His funeral was attended by many former Queensland police. A serving Assistant Commissioner spoke to the mourners.

Vince’s old mate Garry Lawrence remains convinced that authorities only started moving in on O’Dempsey after Murphy died.

Glendon Patrick Hallahan, the disgraced detective and friend and colleague to Murphy, who had worked with not just the Clockwork Orange Gang in the 1960s but some of the biggest criminals of the day, died in mid-1991.

On January 1, 1979, convicted Whiskey Au Go Go killer John Andrew Stuart was found dead in his cell in Boggo Road Jail in Brisbane. Officials pronounced no suspicious circumstances, but others weren’t so sure.

There were rumours that prison authorities, on the orders of corrupt police and criminals, had progressively slipped dingo bait into his food which had eventually killed him.

Stuart was buried in section 9, grave 11, of the Lutwyche cemetery in inner-northern Brisbane. He was buried on top of his father, David, who had beat him mercilessly as a child.

Billy McCulkin, husband to Barbara and father to Vicki and Leanne, died in obscurity on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast in 2011.

Not long before he died, he got a visit from none other than former detective Alan Marshall. Like all good cops, he couldn’t leave the Whiskey or McCulkin cases alone, and he decided to pay Billy a visit.

Way back in January 1975, Clockwork Orange ganger and aspiring boxer Tommy Hamilton also vanished off the face of the planet.

Was it the work of Vince? The court heard during Vince’s committal and trial that Hamilton was unhappy with Vince over the murder of the McCulkin children. And Vince knew about Tommy’s anger.

But in the end crook William Stokes was convicted of Hamilton’s disappearance and murder and imprisoned. The Crown alleged that there was bad blood between Stokes and Hamilton over a number of issues, and that Tommy had taunted him by making obscene suggestions about Stokes’ wife. Stokes still protests his innocence.

Tommy’s body, however, has never been found.

In 1985 Vince was sentenced to 10 years in jail for dealing in heroin. He was eligible for parole after seven years. That stretch effectively ended his relationship with Dianne Pritchard.

Then in 1995, in a seedy riverside motel room in Murwillumbah in far northern NSW, Dianne was tragically found dead of a heroin overdose. Everyone said Di might have had an alcohol problem but she stayed clear of drugs.

At her funeral, friends said Vince was distraught.

Garry Lawrence remembers Di with sadness.

Many years after they worked together on the McCulkin case, Detective Alan Marshall’s partner in crime, Detective Trevor Menary, who had also developed a problem with alcohol, took his own life.

And Brian Bolton, the reporter who blew the whistle on the Whiskey before it went up in 1973, also struggled with grog. He committed suicide in March 1988, and was never able to forgive himself for missing that meeting with John Andrew Stuart on the night the Whiskey went up.

Bolton believed he could have saved lives. Instead, he lost his own. Years before Vince was arrested for the McCulkin killings, when he was living with his lover Kerri-Anne Scully, niece to Tommy Hamilton, in Warwick, she would later tell police about a frightening conversation she had with Vince.

She said in a police interview:

So what can we make of the alleged number of 33 victims?

Vince’s criminal mates all say he only said 33 to make Scully feel less frightened than if the actual figure was revealed, which they all believe to be over 100. We may never know the truth.

Over the years the rumour mill around Vince has always been rife, not diminished by Vince himself revelling in his reputation as a man who made people disappear at will. Fear for him was a permanent weapon.

But we could speculate with some loose math, and look at the names that have been mentioned in relation to Vince down the decades.

There is Tommy Allan, the jug-eared Bodgie who vanished in 1964. And..According to his criminal associates, Vince often talked about “jarring” two Sydney criminals associated with the notorious Toecutter’s Gang in Sydney in the early 1970s. He alleged he’d buried them along a fenceline in western NSW.

Fast forward to 1972 and there is the disappearance and presumed murder of Gaye Baker, 23, who was in the Women’s Royal Australian Airforce based in Brisbane and was about to meet her first “blind date” as a job for a hostess service when she vanished into thin air. At this time Vince was the king of the Brisbane brothels and escort agencies.

In late 1973, country girl Margaret Grace Ward was lured into working at Vince’s massage parlour, Polonia’s, and following a police raid was about to give evidence against Dianne when she too disappeared.

In 1977, big brothel madam Simone Vogel, who was paying tens of thousands of dollars in kickback money to corrupt police was set to get out of the game and potentially blow the whistle on the lot of them. She had arranged to meet a man to make a final cash kickback payment to police, but completely vanished. Was Vince the man she met that day?

In early 1979, Sydney couple Anneke Adriaansen and fiance Alan Fox hitchhiked to far northern NSW to seek a new life. They’d bought a property at Burringbar, north of Byron Bay and mysteriously disappeared. Over the years the press speculated that it was the work of that other Australian serial killer Ivan Milat. Vince had lived in Mullumbimby, a short drive to Burringbar, in those years on the run through the 1970s.

Crook Norman “The Doorman” Ford was working with corrupt police on a stolen car racket when he also disappeared in early 1979.

Then there is Tanya Buckland, the mother of three children, who disappeared from Warwick in August 2013. She was 36 when she vanished.

A few months later notes and photographs were posted to Tanya’s family, the police and a local newspaper. She was fine, she wrote. She apologised for causing any inconvenience. The letters were postmarked from the Hunter Valley region, a seven and a half hour drive south of Warwick.

As we were putting together this final episode of Ghost Gate Road, I received a tip off about Tanya’s relationship to Vince, and I learned that she and one of her young daughters had been living with Vince at his property on Willowvale Road at Massie, outside Warwick.

Several locals told me Tanya and Vince also had a sexual relationship.

This has never been reported in the media.

After finding a Facebook page dedicated to finding Tanya, last week I telephoned Tanya’s parents - Gordon and Sheralyn - who live outside Orlando, Florida, in the United States.

After seven years of hearing nothing from their daughter, they have their theories.

The case of Tanya Buckland - a young mother who just seems to have slipped through the cracks, having last been seen with Vince - reminds me over and over of the claims by Vince’s former associates that he has allegedly killed more than 100 people.

This figure is, and probably always will be, impossible to verify. But how many other Tanya’s are other there? Vanished women whose cases never made it into the mainstream media, and were dismissed by police as simply as missing persons?

Then there are the innumerable tales of Vince’s obsession with hitchhiking backpackers, or “coldies” as he called them.

There is a temptation, when discussing someone like Vince, to see him as the shadow beneath every rock. The perennial culprit.

But let’s just say these unsolved murders are his handiwork.

This list numbers 10. And what if you added the Whiskey victims, if indeed Vince had a primary role in that mass murder.

Then the tally jumps to 25.

And if what Vince says about his thirty-three is true, and our list is even remotely close to the truth, then who are the lost eight victims?

What, then, of Barbara and the girls, and the possible graves at Morgan Park, outside Warwick?

You will remember from Episode 6 that in 1975 Vince wrote a letter to Shorty asking that he exhume the McCulkins and dispose of them in acid.

I asked ancient DNA expert Jeremy Austin what might still be found in a grave if that was a likely scenario.

When you speak to scientists like Jeremy, a story like this becomes all too real.

I’m not entirely sure if the graves at Morgan Park in fact constitute Vince’s private graveyard. There are dozens of forests surrounding Warwick that Vince was familiar with. As he often said to criminal associates, the best place to hide bodies was in a gazetted National Park. They would never been found.

My instinct tells me that given Vince’s meticulous nature, and the lengths he went to to evade capture, it is more likely he has cleaned up his past. He has expressed to others a keen interest in acid. And prior to his arrest in 2014, he had plenty of time to destroy evidence.

What is a fact is the McCulkin children were denied a full life, were denied a future they were entitled to.

Abd what remains inexplicable is the behaviour of corrupt police over decades, and their critical role not just in this tragedy, but allowing a killer, a psychopath to continue on his merry way in the community at large.

Those police are a disgrace to their badge, to their sworn oath, and just as Vince has been held accountable for at least some of his behaviour, so too should they be damned for all time.

Some time ago we wrote a letter to Vince at the Wolston Correctional Centre west of Brisbane.

I had heard whispers from various sources about how he was getting on in jail as a convicted child rapist and murderer.

I was told variously that he had been bashed in prison by some young punks trying to make a name for themselves. Look at me. I took down a serial killer.

I heard he was suffering from prostate cancer.

Someone rang and said he had not received a single visit from any members of his family since he’d been behind bars.

It was just gossip. Nothing could be substantiated.

In our letter to Vince, we wrote:

Several weeks later we received our letter back marked: RETURN TO SENDER: Not approved by General Manager.

It is doubtful Vince ever even saw the letter.

He may as well have been a ghost.

Then in August 2019 Vince was back in the headlines.

Police announced that they had charged an 80-year-old man with the murder of Raymond Vincent Tommy Allan in Warwick in 1964. They gave the accused’s address as Wolston, as in the Wolston Correctional Centre.

It was Vince, of course.

The past was rushing to meet him. And it reminded me of that famous speech out of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that he gave on a tree stump in the early 1960s after he’d just raped a woman.

The evil that men do lives after them.

Police Minister Mark Ryan and Tara Kentwell of the Homicide Squad announced the historic arrest at a press conference.

Detective Senior Sergeant Kentwell then took to the microphone:

Justice never sleeps.

Nor do the hands of time.

Vince is not getting any younger.

And while he may be belatedly tangled up in court proceedings for the crimes he has committed throughout his life, true justice is now a race between police and prosecutors and the only thing that will protect Vince’s darkest secrets - his own death.

Back in the beginning, we warned you that Vince O’Dempsey was not just a remorseless killer, but in some ways a state of mind.

That once you went down the trail of investigating his story, he would infect you, like a virus.

He had that effect on many people he met throughout his life, and still he haunts the dreams of people who happened, by fate or circumstance, to cross his path.

I remember years ago talking to a former prison guard at Boggo Road Jail in Brisbane who was working in the prison when Vince was there in the 1960s.

“You just got the feeling that you could die at any moment with O’Dempsey,” he said. “He’d stick you with a knife. He’d shoot you and wouldn’t bat an eyelid.” He said Vince was the most evil man he had ever encountered in 30 years on the job.

Years after he left the prison service, Vince still haunted him.

He told me: “For years after I used to have a recurring nightmare that my car broke down in the bush and I was out there alone. Then suddenly Vince O’Dempsey came out of the bush.”

Only recently I was talking to Wazza McDonald when he too revealed how this story had entered his mind and taken on a life of its own.

I have been investigating this story for over 10 years…and although this is where we close this chapter of Ghost Gate Road…it won’t be the end of my curiosity or investigations.

As I’ve said, this man has embeds himself firmly under your skin, if you let him.

This story will never rest, it is too vast in scope, covers almost three quarters of a century, some dead, some alive.

The one thing I can ensure you is that if I uncover anything that helps solve so many unanswered questions about this hideous individual I promise to let you know.

If you have any information about the people you’ve learned about in this podcast - please visit the www.ghostgateroad.com website, or email me confidentially matt@ghostgateroad.com