You’d think the name of a man who has admitted to 33 murders and was jailed for the brutal killing of a young mother and her two girls would be instantly recognisable.
More so when you discover that, as one of the most feared names in the Australian underworld, his body count could actually be far higher.
But Vincent O’Dempsey is only just coming into focus as one of our country’s worst serial killers.
For decades, the 1974 slaying of Brisbane mum Barbara McCulkin, 34, and her daughters, Vicki, 13, and Leanne, 11, remained a mystery. Their bodies have never been found.
In 2014, the case was re-examined and three years later O’Dempsey and his co-accused, Garry Dubois, were found guilty of their murders and sentenced to life in prison.
The prosecution argued that O’Dempsey, who knew the McCulkins, killed the trio to silence Barbara over her perceived knowledge of two nightclub fire bombings.
One of these was the 1974 Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley which killed 15 people. O’Dempsey continues to deny any involvement in the attack.
While being implicated in these crimes is grotesque enough, they are by no means the end of O’Dempsey’s rap sheet.
His list of horrors began when he was just a boy, growing up in the rural town of Warwick in South East Queensland.
He was known to torture animals and, as a teenager, was terrorising the area to the extent his father even admitted him to a mental institution when he was 16.
It was here he was diagnosed as a psychopath, with no ability to see right from wrong.
Once he was let back out into the community, O’Dempsey was seen as a terrifying ‘Bogeyman-like’ figure. Local parents reportedly referenced him as a means of subduing their naughty children.
“If you play up, Vince will come and get you”, they would say.
By the 1960s O’Dempsey was involved in drug dealing, rapes, and police bashings, crimes that led to him serving time in Brisbane’s notoriously harsh Boggo Road Gaol.
An officer who worked there at the time said O’Dempsey was the “most evil man” he’d ever encountered in prison.
“When he looked at you with those steel eyes, your hair stood on end,” the officer told journalist and author Matthew Condon in his book The Night Dragon.
“He looked at you and you just about p–sed yourself. You wouldn’t think that anyone could look that evil. You just got the feeling that you could die at any moment.”
Other myths about O’Dempsey began to emerge, including that he always buried his victims upright to save space.
It’s also been speculated that he has a private, mass gravesite potentially on his alpaca farm or elsewhere in Warwick.
“Where that is, who knows, only O’Dempsey would know, but its location police would be very interested to discover,” Matthew says.
What police do know from evidence given at trial is that O’Dempsey told his former girlfriend, Kerri-Anne Scully, that his kill figure was 33.
He apparently also told an associate, “They’ll never catch me because they’ll never find the bodies.”
O’Dempsey, now 86, remains at Wolston Correctional Centre. He will likely die in jail.
