Australia 1974 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

Begin tonight with a major update in one of Australia’s oldest ever cold cases. 87-year-old Vincent O’Dempsey has been ordered to stand trial for murder over the death of a police informant west of Brisbane more than 60 years ago. On the 26th of May, 2017, a jury in Brisbane found Vincent O’Dempsey guilty of three counts of murder.

 He was 78 years old. The judge who sentenced him a week later told him he would die in prison. It had taken 43 years to say his name out loud in a courtroom and mean it. Two nights before it all began, on the 18th of January, 1974, a man named Billy McCulkin walked up to a weatherboard Queenslander on a quiet street in Highgate Hill, a few kilometers from the center of Brisbane, number six Dorchester Street.

 The house was dark against the evening and locked, so he put his hand through a windowpane and let himself in. What he found was a house that had stopped mid-sentence. Every light was burning in every room. None of the beds had been slept in. In the front room, his wife’s sewing machine was still switched on. A half-finished dress still pinned under the needle.

 The family cats were shut inside with no food and no water. Her purse sat on top of the fridge. Her cosmetics were still on the shelf. Her sunglasses exactly where she’d left them. The girls’ school uniforms hung ready for Monday. There was food in the fridge. And in the letterbox outside, medical benefit checks worth $380 sat uncashed.

 Nothing that mattered to this family had gone anywhere except the family. The only things missing from the house were the clothes the three of them had been wearing when they walked out of it. Barbara McCulkin had on a blue dress with white and yellow spots. Barbara, 34, and her daughters, Vicki, 13, and Leanne, 11, were never seen again.

 No trace of any of them has ever been found. For nearly 40 years, the two men who knew exactly what happened to them walked free and talked about it to friends, to girlfriends, to strangers in prison cells, while police wrote the case up as a woman who’d simply left. This is the story of how that finally caught up with them.

 Barbara McCulkin worked days behind the counter of a snack bar in the city center and spent most of her evenings raising two girls more or less on her own. She was still sewing their clothes by hand at night on that same machine, whatever they needed for school. Vicki and Leanne went to the local schools, had plenty of friends, spent afternoons at the skate arena up at Red Hill, and came and went from the neighbor’s yard through a gate in the back fence, the way kids did on a street like that.

The marriage behind it had not been an easy one. Billy McCulkin was a former Navy man who worked as a storeman and picked up debt collecting on the side. He drank. He kept company with men who lived on the rougher edges of Brisbane’s underworld, and he brought them home. By late 1973, the marriage was over.

 Billy moved out. Barbara stayed in the house with the girls and kept things running. She told a workmate at the snack bar how hard it had been, the drinking, the other women, and then she went home and made her daughters’ clothes. That is the woman Queensland police would later decide had simply walked out on her own life.

 A 34-year-old who had stayed through a bad marriage so her girls could stay in school. A woman whose entire week ran between a school gate, a counter in town, and two children who needed feeding. It would take investigators years to treat that as the character reference it was. On the evening of the 16th of January, 1974, two sisters who lived nearby watched two men arrive at the McCulkin house at around a quarter past six.

 One carried a half carton of beer. The other went into the kitchen, talked with Barbara for a while, and stood there petting the family cat. Across the road, a 10-year-old girl was having her birthday party, and Vicky and Leanne were there. Leanne came home not feeling well around half past eight. Vicky stayed until about a quarter past 10.

 Later that night, a neighbor saw Barbara standing outside the house talking to two men, one of them with a mustache, while an orange two-door coupe sat parked nearby. Nobody on Dorchester Street reported hearing anything at all, no raised voices, no car doors. Whatever happened at number six happened quietly. At some point after Vicky got home from the party across the road, all three of them left that house.

They did not walk out on their own lives. Someone took them out of it and locked the door behind them. That same night, one of the two men drove the orange coupe across town to a house in Chermside and told a man named Peter Hall and another man who was there with him that he and his mate had been at the McCulkin’s place drinking and that he was going back.

It would be Peter Hall who carried what came next for the next 40 years. Two days later, Billy McCulkin put his hand through that window and found the house we’ve already seen, a home mid-sentence waiting for people who were never coming back. He didn’t call the police right away. He spent the next several hours driving from one friend’s house to another and anywhere else he could think to look before finally going to the CIB office in the city and later that night to the police station at Woolloongabba to report his family missing.

What happened next is the reason this case took 42 years to close. Queensland police wrote it up as a missing person’s matter, not a suspected crime. The separation was three months old, and for the detectives who caught the file, that was reason enough. There was no large-scale search, no forensic examination of the house.

 A detective named Basil Hicks finally went out to Dorchester Street on the 21st of January, five days after the family vanished, looked at the lights and the beds and the food still in the fridge and the cat still locked inside, and the file stayed exactly what it had been, a missing person’s file. It was the first week of February before anyone did a proper sweep of that house, took photographs, dusted for prints, collected what was left.

 More than two weeks had gone by. Whatever had once been there was gone. Fingerprints on a beer bottle, tire marks in the driveway. Anything two men might have touched in a kitchen while one of them stood there petting a cat, all of it sat inside an unsealed house for 16 days while the file kept saying missing person. And there is one more thing about that fortnight.

 In late January 1974, Brisbane flooded, the worst flooding in the city’s history. Police across Brisbane were pulled onto rescue work while crews pulled people off rooftops. A mother and two school girls missing from a quiet street in Highgate Hill dropped out of the newspapers entirely. While the city was underwater, the men who knew what had happened to that family were already talking about it.

Subscribe now because what those two men said over the next few weeks and who they said it to is the reason this case ever got solved at all. The day after the flood story broke, one of the two sisters who’d seen the men that Wednesday night told Billy what she’d seen and named them. Billy knew both men.

 He went and asked them to their faces. Both told him they’d been there. Then, within a day, both told him they hadn’t. On the 22nd of January, six days after the family disappeared, one of them sold his orange car and moved out of his flat. The other left town. And in the last days of that January, one of them sat down again with Peter Hall, the man he’d visited in Chermside on the night it happened, and told him the rest of it.

He said the other man had killed Barbara. He said he himself had been made to rape one of the girls. Peter Hall did not go to the police. He kept what he’d been told for the next 40 years. In the decades that followed, two coronial inquests would be held into this case. Two men would be charged, and both would walk free.

 A father would spend the rest of his life suspected of murdering his own family. And nobody, not the police, not a court, not either of the two men who knew, would ever tell Barbara, Vicki, or Leanne’s family where to find them. To understand why a mother and two schoolgirls were taken out of their own home that quiet Wednesday night, you have to understand what had been happening in Brisbane for the two years before it.

For two years before the McCulkins disappeared, the nightclub strip in Fortitude Valley had been worked over by standover men. Extortion, protection money, insurance jobs. Criminals out of Sydney wanted a cut of what the local operators were already taking, and violence had become ordinary background noise in that part of Brisbane.

Months before any of it happened, a criminal named John Stewart told a Brisbane newspaper reporter, Brian Bolton, exactly what was coming. An empty club would be firebombed first, he said. Then a second club would be firebombed while it was full of people. Bolton wrote the story. He personally warned the police commissioner and the police minister himself.

In February 1973, right on schedule, a nightclub called Torino’s burned to the ground. An insurance job ordered by men Billy McCulkin drank with, lit by a man who was paid $500 for the job. Torino’s had burned exactly as Bolton’s source said it would. Nobody acted on the second half of the warning.

 At 8 minutes past 2:00 in the morning on the 8th of March, 1973, two drums of fuel were thrown into the downstairs foyer of the Whiskey Au Go Go, on the corner of Amelia Street and St. Paul’s Terrace in Fortitude Valley. About 50 people were upstairs. The fire sent smoke and fumes up the building’s only stairwell.

 15 people died in 2 or 3 minutes. It remains the worst mass murder in Australian history until Port Arthur, 23 years later. John Stewart and James Finch were convicted of it that October and given life. Both men said, until the end, that they’d been framed. Stewart died in a prison cell in 1979. Finch served about 15 years before he was deported back to England.

 Neither of them ever named anyone else involved. Barbara McCulkin had spent years in a house that men exactly like that walked in and out of. She told people she knew things about the fire. Whether she actually had evidence, or had only ever repeated something she’d overheard in her own kitchen, made no difference at all to the men who had planned it.

 What mattered to them was that they believed she could talk. The file sat cold for years. In 1977, an inspector named Tony Murphy ordered it reinvestigated. Detectives Alan Marshall and Trevor Manery spent 2 years working back through old statements, building a case strong enough for a coronial inquest. That inquest, held in 1980, wasn’t only about the McCulkins.

 It also covered the disappearances of a man named Tommy Allen and a woman named Margaret Ward. Three separate vanishings with the same two names running through all of them. Billy McCulkin gave evidence. He testified about a drink he’d shared with one of the men in 1974, who had told him about putting people in a dam near Warwick.

 Of Tommy Allen specifically, the man had said he wouldn’t be talking to anybody anymore. On the 2nd of April 1980, both men were finally charged with the abduction and murder of Barbara, Vicki, and Leanne Mulcahy. The coroner found that a jury could reasonably conclude there was no rational explanation for the family’s disappearance other than murder, and that these two men were the last people seen with them.

10 months later, in February 1981, the Crown dropped the charges. The evidence, prosecutors decided, was too thin to put in front of a jury. No bodies, no forensic link, nothing beyond a house with the lights left on. Both men walked out of court and back into their own lives. The state of Queensland had known exactly who to charge in 1980.

 Now it let them go. There would be no trial, no verdict. For the Mulcahy family, the case that had come closest to an answer simply closed quietly, the same way the house on Dorcherster Street had once gone quiet. And this time, nobody was coming back for it either. After that, nothing. There were reviews in the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s.

 None of them produced anything, and the reason was always the same. Without remains, DNA was useless. Without a body, there was no cause of death to put in front of a jury. The orange car that had once sat in the driveway had been sold within a week of the murders and crushed and melted down long ago. There is also a harder answer, and people in Queensland have said it out loud.

The journalist Tony Koch, who covered that era of Queensland policing closely, has pointed out that corruption ran through the force in the 1970s, and that solving this particular case was not in the interests of a lot of the people who would have had to solve it. It took the Fitzgerald inquiry more than a decade later to clean that force out.

The cold case unit that would eventually reopen this file could not have existed in 1974. Billy McCulkin carried all of it for the rest of his life. Police had checked his movements on the night of the 16th and confirmed them. He’d been cleared. It made no difference. The rumor that he had killed his own wife and daughters followed him into every job he took and every room he walked into for 37 years.

 He cooperated with every inquiry that was ever run. He never once stopped asking. He died in 2011 at 72 without seeing anyone answer for it. There is a particular cruelty in how that ends. Three days after his family vanished, Billy McCulkin had walked up to both men and asked them to their faces what they knew.

 Both of them lied to him. He spent the next 37 years being treated by strangers who knew nothing else about him as the man who had done it. Subscribe now because it would take a cold case unit and the power to make people answer under oath to finally force out of those same witnesses what they’d been sitting on for 40 years.

In January 2014 on the 40th anniversary of the family’s disappearance, Queensland police reopened the case properly. The Homicide Cold Case Unit took it on working in partnership with the Crime and Corruption Commission, a partnership that mattered for one specific reason. The Commission could compel a witness to answer.

From February 2014, it sat for 31 days of hearings. Detectives tracked down and re-interviewed more than a dozen people who had been around Brisbane in the 1970s and were now scattered across four states. In August, officers executed search warrants on two rural properties near Warwick, about 150 km southwest of the city, and went over the ground.

 The government put up a quarter of a million-dollar reward. No remains were found, but the hearings did something 40 years of searching never had. Peter Hall, who had been told in 1974 exactly what happened to that family, was put in front of people with the power to make him answer, and finally, he did. He wasn’t the only one.

 A woman named Kerry-Anne Scully came forward. So did a man named Warren McDonald, and a neighbor named Trevor McGrath. Between them, their stories covered 1997, 2009, and 2011. Three different decades, three different towns, three different confidants, and all three told some version of the same account. These two men hadn’t been confessing under pressure.

 They’d been talking about it for years, the way other men talk about a job they once did. There was no new science behind any of it, no database, no forensic breakthrough, no test that hadn’t existed in 1974. What had been missing the whole time was somebody with the power to sit these people down, and the will to go and find them. In October 2014, an anonymous call came into Crime Stoppers.

 On the 18th of that month, both men were arrested. Vincent O’Dempsey, Garry Dubois. O’Dempsey came from Warwick. As a boy, he was known for torturing animals. At 16, his own father had him committed to a mental institution, where doctors assessed him as a psychopath who couldn’t tell right from wrong. Through the 1960s, he collected convictions for assault, for drugs, for bashings, and did time in Boggo Road.

 In Brisbane’s underworld, he carried two nicknames. They called him the angel of death for the way he came for people in the quiet of the night, and they called him Swami the magician, because people around him simply disappeared. In Warwick, the local joke was that his private graveyard was so full that bodies had to be buried standing up to save space.

Garry Dubois was the smaller man they called Shorty, convicted of sexual assault at 17 and sentenced to eight years, released in 1972, two years before the McCulkins vanished, and already collecting new convictions for theft and violence by the time they did. He was the man who had lit the fire at Torino’s on O’Dempsey’s orders for $500, the same unnamed arsonist from earlier in this story, now finally given a name.

$500 for 15 lives. There was one more detail that came out in court. Kerry-Ann Scully, the woman who would later become engaged to Dubois, testified that O’Dempsey once told her his own count. “33,” he said. Dubois went to trial first on the 8th of November, 2016, in the Brisbane Supreme Court. He pleaded not guilty.

The prosecution walked straight into the same wall that had stopped everything in 1981. 35 years hadn’t moved a single brick of it. What they had this time, instead of forensics, was people. Four decades of what those people had been told. Peter Hall told the jury what he’d been told in 1974. Trevor McGrath described the conversation from 2009.

 And Dubois’s own brother took the stand and testified that Dubois had told him the children were never meant to be there. On the 28th of November, 2016, the jury found him guilty of raping and murdering both girls, of the manslaughter of their mother, and of depriving all three of them of their liberty. O’Dempsey’s trial opened the following May, running four weeks.

 Prosecutors put him forward as the one who had organized it. Warren McDonald told the court what he’d heard on that drive to Warwick back in 1997. “They will never catch me,” O’Dempsey had said, “because they will never find the bodies.” Kerry-Ann Scully described how, in 2011, he’d had her buy a true crime book from the local Big W, then shown her a photograph inside it of himself walking out of a courthouse with a jacket slung over his shoulder.

 I am good for it, he told her, but they will never get me for it. A fellow prisoner gave evidence of yet another confession made in yet another cell to yet another man O’Dempsey had never expected to talk. In both trials, the defense pointed to Billy McCulkin dead since 2011 and unable to answer for himself. The jury was out a little over a day.

 On the 26th of May 2017, they found Vincent O’Dempsey guilty of three counts of murder. In the public gallery, the family made a sound. They had been waiting 43 years to hear that word said about him out loud in a courtroom that finally believed it. Justice Peter Applegarth sentenced both men on the 1st of June 2017.

 He did not spare either of them. The last hours of those three defenseless lives, he said, must have been terrifying. To Dubois, he said that like a coward, he had simply done what he was told. O’Dempsey addressed the court himself before sentencing, which is unusual. He said he’d never had the slightest reason to harm the three McCulkins and neither had his co-accused.

 He said a prejudicial smokescreen had been thrown over his trial by linking him to the nightclub fire. Applegarth called the protest completely unconvincing and found in him a complete absence of remorse. On the fire itself, the judge noted there was evidence of exactly the kind O’Dempsey was denying. Both men were sentenced to life.

The judge said he expected both of them to die in prison. Barbara’s brother, Graham Ogden, read a statement to the court. It was his fervent wish, he said, that one day the remains of his sister and his nieces would be found so the family could finally lay them to rest. The next day, Queensland’s Attorney General ordered the coronial inquest into the Whiskey Au Go Go fire reopened.

Evidence from the two murder trials had raised new questions about who else might have been behind the fire that had killed 15 people. The investigation Barbara McCulkin was killed to prevent had finally begun, 43 years after the two men took her out of her own house. Both men appealed. On the 21st of December 2018, the Court of Appeal dismissed both appeals.

 In June 2019, the High Court refused to hear O’Dempsey’s case. On the 7th of June 2021, Gary Dubois was found dead in his cell at Maryborough Correctional Centre. He was 74. He died days before he was due to give evidence at the reopened Whiskey inquest. He left a letter for his wife and daughter.

 It said nothing about where the graves were. That left exactly one man who still knew. In May 2022, on the final day of that inquest, Vincent O’Dempsey was brought to the witness stand. He was 83 years old. The coroner, Terry Ryan, had the power to compel him to answer. O’Dempsey was asked to take the oath or make an affirmation in its place.

He refused to do either. The coroner warned him he could be held in contempt of court. O’Dempsey answered that a fraud had been perpetrated on the court through false witnesses and what he called a farcical police report. He called the evidence given against him at his own trial an absolute lie. He answered the questions counsel put to him anyway.

 Then, asked one final time to take the oath, he said only, “My word is good enough.” The inquest ultimately heard evidence that O’Dempsey had not been at the club the night it burned and had not lit the fire himself, but had been involved in organizing the men who did. He has never been charged over it. He denies all of it.

 He is at the Wolston Correctional Centre to an old man in his late 80s, and he has never once expressed remorse for any of it. Dubois took what he knew into a cell at Maryborough and died with it there. O’Dempsey is still breathing. He is still saying nothing. Officers have dug at Warwick. Barbara’s family has asked him directly, to his face, where her daughters are.

 In more than 50 years, no one, not the courts, not the searches, not either of the two men who knew, has ever told Barbara, Vicki, or Leanne’s family where they are. A dress was left half finished under the needle of a sewing machine in a cottage on Dorchester Street on a Wednesday night in January 1974. The light above it was still burning two days later when a man finally came through the window to find it.

 Barbara McCulkin had been making that dress for one of her daughters. She never got to finish it. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.