Australia 1974 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

One of Australia’s most horrendous crimes was finally solved when 78-year-old Vince Odmpsey was found guilty of murdering young mother Barbara Mcculkin and her two daughters. The evil thug OD Dempsey will now die in prison.  On the evening of the 18th of January 1974, a man broke a window pane to get into a house on Dorchester Street in Highgate Hill  in Brisbane.

 His wife and his two daughters, aged 13 and 11, had not been seen for 2 days. Every light in the place was on. The beds hadn’t been slept in. The cats  were locked inside with no food or water. And his wife’s sewing machine was still running with a halffinish dress under the needle.

 None of the three was ever seen again, and no trace has ever been found. Police filed it as a missing person and left it there. By 1980, detectives had charged both killers and then watched the case fall apart. The man who broke that window  was cleared and spent 37 years being called the one who did it.

 And for 40 years, both of them kept telling people what they had done. This is what happened. Number six, Dorchester Street was a weatherboard Queenslander, a little rundown on a quiet street in an inner suburb. Billy McCulken came looking on the Friday evening. The house was locked, so he put a  window pane in and climbed through.

 What he found inside was a night that hadn’t finished. The lights were on in every room. The beds had not been slept in. The sewing machine was still switched on with a dress on it that was not finished. The cats were shut in with nothing to eat or drink. His wife’s  purse was sitting on top of the fridge.

 Nothing that mattered had gone anywhere. Her cosmetics were on the shelf. Her sunglasses were where she left them. The girl’s school uniforms were hanging up. There was food in the fridge. In the letter box were medical benefit checks worth $380 sitting there unccashed. The only things missing from that house were the clothes the three of them had been wearing.

Barbara had on a blue dress with white and yellow spots. Barbara McCulken was 34 years old. She worked at a snack bar in the city center and raised her two girls mostly on her own in that cottage. In the evenings, she sewed dresses for Vicki and Leanne, school clothes, whatever they needed on the machine in the front room. Vicki was 13.

 Leanne was 11. They went to the local schools and had a lot of friends. They went to the skate arena at Red Hill. They came and went through a gate in the back fence that connected their yard to the neighbors, the way kids did  on that street. The marriage had been a hard one. Billy McCullen was a former Navy man who worked as a storman and did some debt collecting on the side.

 He drank. He kept company with men who lived on the edges of Brisbane’s criminal world. And he brought them home. The couple  separated late in 1973. Billy moved out. Barbara stayed in the house with the girls and kept it going. She talked to  a workmate at the snack bar about how hard it had been, the drinking, the other women, and then she went home and made her daughter’s clothes.

 That is the woman police decided had  walked out on her life. A 34year-old who had stayed put through a bad marriage and kept two girls in school. A woman whose whole week ran between a school gate, a counter in town, and two girls who needed feeding. On the evening of the 16th of January 1974, two sisters who lived nearby saw two men arrive at the Mcculen house at about 6:15.

One of them was carrying a half carton of beer. The other went into the kitchen, talked to Barbara, and stood there petting the family cat. Across the road, a neighbor’s daughter was having her 10th birthday party,  and Vicki and Leanne were at it. Leanne came home around 8:30 not feeling well.

 Vicki stayed until about 10:15. Later that night, somebody saw Barbara outside the house talking to two men. One of them had a mustache. An orange twodoor  coupe was parked nearby. Nobody on that street reported hearing anything at all. No shouting and no car doors. Whatever happened at number six happened quietly.

 At some point  after Vicki got home from the party, all three of them left that house. All were taken out of it and the door was locked behind them. Later that same night, one of the two men  drove the orange car across town to a house at Chermite. He told a man named Peter Hall and another man who was there that he and his mate had been at the Mcculan’s drinking and that he was going back.

After he broke in and saw the house, he spent  hours driving to friends places and anywhere else he could think of. Then he went into the CIB office in the city and later that night to the police station at Wulong Gaba. What happened next is the reason this case took 42 years. Queensland police recorded it as a missing person’s matter, not a suspected crime.

The separation was 3 months old and that was enough for the file to be written the way it was written. There wasn’t a largecale search. There wasn’t a forensic examination of the house. A detective named Basil Hicks went out  to Dorchester Street on the 21st of January, 5 days after the family vanished.

 He looked at the lights and the beds and the food and the lockedin cats and the file stayed a missing person’s file. It was the first week of February before anyone  did a proper sweep, took photographs, and collected what was left. More than 2 weeks had gone by. Whatever had been in that house was gone. That fortnight cost  everything.

 fingerprints on a beer bottle, tire marks in a driveway, whatever two men had touched in a kitchen while one of them petted a cat. All of it sat in an unsealed house for 16 days while the file said missing person. And there is one more thing about that  fortnite. In late January 1974, Brisbane flooded.

 It was the  worst flooding in Brisbane’s history, and police right across the city were pulled onto  rescue work while crews took people off rooftops. A mother and two children missing from a quiet street in Highgate Hill dropped out of the newspapers entirely. Subscribe so you don’t miss how 40 years of loose talk finally put both men away.

 The next day, one of the sisters who lived nearby told Billy McCullen what she had seen. She named the two men  who had been at the house on the Wednesday night. Billy knew both of them, so he went and asked them. Both men told him they’d been there. Then, very shortly afterwards, both of them said they hadn’t.

 On the 22nd  of January, 6 days after the family disappeared, one of the two  sold his orange car, and moved out of his flat. The other left  town. And in the last days of January 1974, one of them sat down with Peter Hall, the man he  had visited at Chermite, and told him what had happened.

 He said the other man had killed Barbara. He said he’d been made to rape one of the girls. Peter Hall did  not go to the police. He kept it for 40 years. In that time, two coronial inquests were held. Two men were charged and released. A father died under suspicion of murdering his own family and three people stayed in unmarked ground outside Warick.

 The reason a mother and two school girls were taken out of their own house sits in what had been happening in Brisbane in the two years before. The nightclub strip  in Fortitude Valley was being worked over by standover men. Extortion, protection, insurance jobs. Sydney criminals wanted a cut of  what the local operators were taking.

Violence was ordinary. In February 1973, a club called Torino’s on an street burned down.  It was an insurance job set on the orders of men Billy McCullen drank with. And a man who lit it was paid $500.  Months before any of it happened, a criminal named John Stewart told a Brisbane  reporter, Brian Bolton, exactly what was coming.

 He said an empty club would be firebombed first. He said a second club would then be firebombed while it was full of people. Bolton wrote about it. He personally  told the police commissioner and the police minister. Torino’s  burned in February exactly as he had said it would. Nobody moved on the second half of the warning.

 At 8 minutes  past 2 in the morning on the 8th of March 1973, two drums of fuel were thrown into the downstairs foyer of the whiskey ogo on the corner of Amelia Street and St. Paul’s Terrace in Fortitude Valley. There were about 50 people upstairs. The fire sent smoke and fumes up the only stairwell. 15 people died  in 2 or 3 minutes.

 It was the worst mass murder in Australian history until Port Arthur 23 years later. John Stewart and James Finch were convicted of it in October 1973 and given life. Both men said until the end that they had been  framed. Stuart died in a prison cell in 1979 and Finch served about 15 years before he was deported to England. Neither of them ever named anybody else.

And Barbara McCulken had spent years in a house that men  like that walked in and out of. She told people she knew things about the fire. Whether she really had evidence or was repeating what she’d picked up in her own kitchen made no difference at all to the men  who’d planned the arson.

 What mattered was that they believed she could talk. The file sat for years. In 1977,  an inspector named Tony Murphy ordered the case reinvestigated. Detectives Alan Marshall and Trevor Manary spent 2 years going back over statements, building it up again  for a coronial inquest. That inquest in 1980 was not only about the McCulkans.

It covered the disappearance of a man named Tommy Allen and a woman named Margaret Ward as well. Three separate vanishings and the same name running through all of them. Billy McCullen  gave evidence at it. He told the inquest about a drink he had with one of the men in 1974 and about what the man said to him about  putting people in a dam near Warick.

 Of Tommy Allen, Billy said the man told him he would not be talking to anybody anymore. On the 2nd of April 1980, both men were charged with the abduction and murder of Barbara Vicky and Leanne McCulken. The coroner had found that a jury could  reasonably conclude there was no rational explanation for the disappearance other than murder and that these two men were the last people seen with the family.

 In February 1981, the crown dropped the charges. The evidence, the prosecutors  decided, was deficient. There were no bodies and no forensic link and no crime scene beyond a house with the lights left on. A jury would not convict on it. Both men walked out. The state of Queensland knew exactly  who to charge in 1980 and had let both of them walk into the rest of their lives.

 After that, nothing. There were reviews in the 1980s, in the 1990s, in the 2000s. None of them produced anything. And the reason was always  the same. Without remains, DNA was no use to anybody. Without a body, there was no cause of death to put in front of a jury. The orange car that had been in the driveway was sold within a week of the murders and had long since been crushed and melted down.

 There is also a harder answer,  and people in Queensland have said it out loud. The journalist Tony [ __ ] who covered that era has pointed out that corruption ran through the Queensland police force in the 1970s. 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 to clean the force out. The cold case unit  that eventually reopened this file could not have existed in 1974 and Billy Mcculen  spent the rest of his life carrying it. He’d been cleared. Police checked his movements on the night of  the 16th of January and confirmed them.

 It made no difference. The rumor that he had killed his own wife and children followed him through every job  he took and every room he walked into. He cooperated with every inquiry anybody ran. He never stopped asking. He died in  2011 at 72 without seeing anyone answer for it. There is a particular cruelty in that.

 3 days after his  family vanished, Billy Mcculin walked up to both men and asked them to their faces and both of them lied to him. He then spent the next 37 years being treated by strangers as the man who had done it. Subscribe so you don’t miss what a cold case unit finally forced out of the witnesses who had been sitting on it for decades.

 In January  2014, the 40th anniversary of the disappearance, Queensland Police reopened  the case properly. The homicide cold case unit took it on, working with the Crime and Corruption Commission. That partnership changed the case for one reason. The commission can compel a witness to answer.

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

 The government put up a reward of $250,000. No remains were found, but the hearings did something the searching could not. Peter Hall, who had been told in 1974 what happened to that family, was put in front of people who could make him answer, and he finally said it out loud. And he was not the only one.

 A woman named Kerry Anne Scully came forward. So did a man named Warren Macdonald  and a neighbor named Trevor McGrath. Between them, they covered 1997, 2009, and 2011. And all three had the same kind of story to tell across four decades in different towns to different people.  These two men had been talking about it, not confessing under pressure.

 Talking the way other men talk  about a job they once did. There was no new science in any of it. no database and no profile and no test  that hadn’t existed in 1974. What had been missing all along 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  Crimestoppers.

 On the 18th of October, both men were arrested. Vincent Odempsey,  Gary Dubois. ODMY came from Warick, the country town he would later  drive people to. 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 he did time in Bogo Road. In the Brisbane underworld, he had two nicknames. They called him the angel of death because of the way he came for people in the quiet of the night. And they called him Swami the magician because people around him disappeared.

 In Warrick the joke was  that his private graveyard was so full the bodies had to be buried standing up to save space. Dubois was called Shorty. He had been convicted of sexual assault at 17 and sentenced to 8 years. He was released in 1972, 2 years before the Mcculans  vanished, and he picked up more convictions for theft and violence after that.

 He was the man who set the fire at  Torino’s on ODM’s orders for $500. And there is one more thing from the mouth of the woman who was engaged to him. Keranne Scully told a court that Odempsey once told her his own count. He said it was 33. Dwir went first on the 8th of November 2016 in the Brisbane  Supreme Court. He pleaded not guilty.

 The prosecution walked into the same wall that had stopped everything in 1981 and 35 years had not moved a brick of it. What they had instead was people. And four decades of  what those people had been told. Peter Hall told the jury what he had been told in 1974. Trevor McGrath described the 2009 conversation.

 Dubois’s own brother took  the stand and said that Dubois had told him the children were not meant to be there. On the 28th of November 2016, the jury convicted him of murdering both girls, of rap both girls, of the manslaughter of Barbara, and of depriving all three of them of their liberty. ODM’s trial opened on the  2nd of May, 2017, and ran 4 weeks.

 Prosecutors  put him forward as the one who organized it. Warren Macdonald gave the court what he had heard on that drive to Warick in 1997. They will never catch me, ODMY had said. Because they will never find the bodies. Kerannne Scully described how in 2011 he had her buy a true crime book from the local Big W and then showed her a photograph in it of himself walking out of court with a jacket 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. In both trials, the defense pointed at Billy  McCulken, who was dead by then and could not answer for himself. The jury was out a little over a day. On the  26th of May, 2017, they found Vincent Odempsey guilty  of three counts of murder.

 In the public gallery, the family made a sound. They had been waiting 43 years for that word. Justice  Peter Applegath had both men in front of him on the 1st of June, 2017, and he did not spare either of them. He said the last hours of the lives of those three defenseless women must have been terrifying.

 To Dubois, he said that  like a coward, he had done what he was told. ODMY  addressed the court himself before sentence, which is unusual. He said he’d never had the slightest reason to harm the three McCullans in  any way, and neither had his co-acused. He said a prejuditial smokec screen had been thrown over the trial by  linking him to the nightclub fire.

Applegath called the protest completely unconvincing and found in him a complete absence of remorse. on the fire. The judge said there was evidence of the kind Odempsey was denying. Both men were given life. The judge said he expected  both of them to die in prison. Barbara’s brother, Graeme Ogden, read a statement to the court.

 It was his fervent wish, he said, that someday the remains of their loved ones would be found so the family could finally lay them to rest. The next day, the Queensland Attorney General ordered the coronial inquest into the Whiskey Orgo fire reopened. Evidence from the two murder trials had raised questions about who else had been behind a fire that killed 15  people.

 The investigation that Barbara McCulken was killed to prevent finally began 43 years after they took her out of her house. Both men appealed. On the 21st of December 2018, the Court of Appeal dismissed both appeals. In June to 2019, the High Court refused to hear ODMY. On the 7th of June 2021, Gary Dubois was found dead in his cell at Merry.  He was 74.

 He died days before he was due to give evidence at the Whiskey Inquest. He left a letter for his wife and daughter and said nothing in it about where the graves are, which left one man  who knew. In May 2022, on the final day of that reopened inquest, Vincent Odempy was brought to the witness  stand. He was 83.

 The coroner, Terry Ryan, could compel him to answer. He was asked  to take the oath or to make an affirmation in place of it. He refused to  do either. The coroner warned him that he was liable to be held in contempt of court. ODMY answered that a fraud had been perpetrated on the court by the use of false witnesses and a farical police report.

 He called the  evidence of one of the men from his own trial an absolute lie. He answered the questions council put to him. Then he was asked one final time to take the oath. My word is good enough, he said. The inquest heard evidence that Odmpsey was not at the club that night and did not  light the fire, but was involved in organizing the people who did.

 He has never been charged over it, and he denies all of it. He is at Woolston Correctional Center now, an old man in his late 80s. He has never once expressed any remorse for any of it. Dubois took what he knew into a cell at Mebra and  died with it. ODMI is still breathing and still saying nothing. Officers have dug at Warrick.

 Families have asked him directly. In more than 50 years, no one has ever been told where Barbara, Vicki, and Leanne are buried. A dress was left half finished under the needle of a sewing machine in a cottage on Dorchester Street. And the light above it was still on 2 days later when a man came through the window.

 Barbara McCulken had been making it for one of her  daughters. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.