Cold case cracked: O’Dempsey’s bragging leads to guilty sentence

After more than 40 years of speculation, one of Queensland’s most notorious murder mysteries has come to a close.

Seventy-eight-year-old Vincent O’Dempsey was found guilty of brutally raping and murdering Barbara McCulkin and her two daughters and sentenced to life in jail.

In 1974 McCulkin, 34, and daughters Vicki, 13, and Leanne, 11, were taken from their home in Highgate Hill in Brisbane.

The trio were tied up and driven to bushland near Warwick where they were raped and murdered. Their bodies were never found.

O’Dempsey was sentenced for strangling the 34-year-old mother before murdering her daughters and disposing of the bodies. His accomplice Garry Dubois was last year found guilty of raping and murdering the daughters, and for the manslaughter of Barbara McCulkin. 

Dubois also received a life sentence. 

The judge who presided over the case, Justice Peter Applegarth told the pair they were cold-blooded, heartless killers who would likely die in jail. 

“You are a hardened killer and a criminal who has no conscience,” he said.

While the case took more than four decades years to crack, O’Dempsey’s downfall was his own mouth. The now convicted murderer bragged about the killings to people he thought would never tell, according to reports. Those people appeared as witnesses in the trial and were integral in cracking the case.

Read more: First witnesses testify in 43-year-old triple murder case

One such witness was O’Dempsey’s former fiancé Kerry Scully, who recounted an instance where one night they were lying in bed and O’Dempsey showed her a photograph of himself leaving a court, saying he’ll never be charged for the murders of the McCulkins. Scully ended the relationship the next day.

Another was associate Warren McDonald who O’Dempsey worked with on a cannabis crop plantation. McDonald told the court O’Dempsey said they’d never catch him as they’ll never find the McCulkins’ bodies.

A key witness in the case was then 10-year-old neighbour Juneen Gayton, who saw two men at the McCulkin home on the day of the disappearance, one of which she knew of as ‘Vince’.

O’Dempsey told the court before his conviction that he was innocent and had no reason to harm the McCulkins and that the confessions only came when the informants stood to gain something from them. 

Dubois and O’Dempsey were known associates of the family through Barbara’s estranged husband who was a gang member.

Justice Applegarth said it was clear Barbara knew too much about the firebombing of a Brisbane night club by the gang, and was silenced by O’Dempsey with the assistance of Dubois.

O’Dempsey and Dubois were involved in the Torino night club fire and were worried they would be linked to the fatal Whisky Au Go Go fire that occurred a week later.

Barbara McCulkin’s nephew Brian Ogden said outside the court that the sentencing was the best outcome they could have hoped for but the family still needs information about the location of their loved ones’ remains.

Do you remember when the McCulkin family disappeared?