Daniel Morcombe: The perverted world of killer Brett Peter Cowan
IN bringing the man who abducted and murdered Daniel Morcombe to justice, police had to learn all about Brett Peter Cowan’s perverted world.
IN bringing the man who abducted and murdered Queensland boy Daniel Morcombe to justice, police officers learned all about Brett Peter Cowan’s perverted world before they finally caught the vile child sex offender and killer.
In this second extract from Kate Kyriacou’s stunning new book, The Sting, Cowan tells undercover police, who are readying to spring their trap after he revealed he killed Daniel, he’s ‘proud’ to be a sexual deviate who craves sex with children.
FIRST EXTRACT: The moment Cowan came unstuck
ARNOLD didn’t miss a beat. There was still work to be done.
“All right, OK, so you did it,” he said, matter-of-factly. “But what I’m saying is, you know, I need to kind of know, I need to step you right back to the whole thing ... so if there’s anything like, I don’t know, if they’ve got any DNA or that kind of shit?”
“There’s no DNA,” Brett said.
“You know,” Arnold said, “obviously they haven’t found the f---king body.”
“They took my car, they searched my car, did all forensics in my car, they got nothing out of my car.”
“Well, look, just lead me through the whole f---king thing, how it happened, from whoa to go.
Then I’ll think about things that we need to sort and fix.”
It was the secret he thought he’d take to his grave. Now he needed to find the right words. He’d always told versions of the truth when cornered, admitting only to the barest of details. With the boy at the childcare centre, he’d always denied putting his hands around the child’s throat. In Darwin he’d always denied causing the horrific injuries that covered his victim’s body. Would he do that now?
“Umm,” he said. “I don’t know how it ... I seen him standing there. I did a loop around and came back. I was going up to my boss’s father’s place to pick up a wood mulcher. [I] picked it up and on the way home there was a broken-down bus and then I seen Daniel.”
He’d parked at the church, Brett told Arnold. The same church where he’d spent many hours listening to sermons. The church where his wife had been with their baby that morning.
“I walked down and sat there and then ... I didn’t talk to him at all when I got there, maybe just lookin’ as though I was waiting for the bus. Umm, the bus drove past and that’s when I said I’m going down to the shopping centre, do you want a lift? And he’s gone ‘yep’.”
“So he missed the bus or something, did he?” Arnold asked.
“No, the bus drove past.”
“OK, so you asked him if he wanted a lift and he said yeah.”
“Yep, he’s jumped in ... instead of taking him to the shopping centre, I took him to a secluded spot that I knew of.”
“Where was that?”
“It’s at Beerwah.”
Arnold made him spell it out. It was right by where he used to live, Brett explained.
“OK, so you know the area,” Arnold said. “You’ve taken him to Beerwah ... how far away is that from where you picked him up?”
“Oh, half an hour,” Brett said.
“Did you talk to him along the way?”
“Yeah, just chatted.”
“No, no problems?”
“No.”
“All right. Well, like I said, I’m not judging you at all. So bear that in mind, all right? Just tell me what I need to fix. You’ve taken him to Beerwah?”
“Um, yeah, [we] went to an abandoned house thing that I knew where ... “
“Do you know exactly where that was?”
“Yeah. End of Roys Road.”
“We’re gonna need to get that sorted.”
“There’s nothing there,” Brett said. He’d gone back a week later to look for Daniel’s body. There’d been nothing left.
“What happened in the house?” Arnold said.
Brett paused.
“Like I said, I’m not judging you, all right?”
“I never got to molest him or anything like that. He panicked and I panicked and grabbed him around the throat and before I knew it he was dead,” Brett said.
Daniel was dead, it seemed, before anyone had known he was missing. Long before Bruce and Denise began their frantic search.
Before the police were alerted. Before the Sunshine Plaza shut its doors. Daniel was dead.
He’d taken Daniel outside, Brett said, and put him in the back of his car, arranging his little lifeless body around the mulcher he’d collected earlier. He’d driven Daniel’s body only 100m or so, to where the clearing met thick bushland. An old sandmining site was just behind the rows of macadamias that arranged themselves around the dilapidated demountable house. Brett had looked at it in the past as a possible place to run a sandblasting business from. Now he used it to dump the body of a child.
There was a lake, Brett said, through the trees. Down an embankment. It was thick scrub. Difficult to push through.
Brett opened the back of his 4WD and carried Daniel out. He walked to the top of the embankment and threw him down. The slope was about a metre and a half. Brett jumped down after him and dragged him through trees, along the sand, until he figured he’d gone far enough. He told Arnold that that’s when he stripped Daniel, bundling his clothes together to take with him. The little boy’s naked body, he’d left under a tree, covered in a few branches and twigs that had littered the ground.
“His clothes I took back with me and threw them into the creek,” Brett said.
“Which creek?” Arnold asked.
“I’m not too sure.”
“Was the creek there?”
“No, no, it was on my way home ... it was still secluded and everything but, like an old logging bridge type thing. There’s a creek there. It was fast-flowing and I threw his clothes in there.” Daniel’s clothes had sunk as he watched. Nothing had ever been found, Brett said.
“You’re lucky, aren’t you?” Arnold said.
“Yep.”
A week later, Brett loaded a shovel into his Pajero and drove back to the macadamia farm. He’d wanted to make sure nobody would find Daniel. The boy’s picture had been all over the papers. All over the television. Police had been crawling the Sunshine Coast — around the bus stop a good half-hour away. They were looking in the wrong place. Brett pulled his car in and crawled through trees and scrub down the embankment. He was shocked to find Daniel gone. Only a small fragment of bone was left. He crushed it into the ground with his shovel.
“I’ll have to get you there with some of the ... we’ll get a couple of the boys and sort all that shit out, right?”
They were taking him back. Arnold would send his own crew in. He needed to make sure no trace of Daniel was ever found. Brett would have to take them in, show them. Point out the exact place where he’d dumped a 13-year-old boy and left him for the animals. It was a neat trap.
It was a long flight for Brett Cowan and his restless legs. And he was nervous about being back on Queensland soil, where he figured police and their inquest subpoena could find him at any moment.
They were heading directly to the Sunshine Coast. No time like the present. Ian was collecting them from the airport.
“So how far is it?” Fitzy asked. “Maybe about an hour away?”
“It’s about an hour,” Brett agreed.
Ian was driving a Toyota Hilux. They needed Brett to direct them, so he took the front passenger seat.
“You’re happy with us to do it, with what you spoke to Arnold about yesterday?” Ian asked Brett.
“Yeah, mate,” he replied.
Brett would take them to the house where he’d lived with Tracey, along the route he’d taken to collect the mulcher, past the abduction site and then to the place where he’d murdered and discarded a defenceless schoolboy. They’d see it all.
“Mate, whatever happens here ... by the end of the night, mate, it’ll be done.”
Thursday, 11 August 2011: The investigation team had work to do. While surveillance crews watched Brett, Fitzy and Ian took a group of officers back to the macadamia farm in the Glass House Mountains. The stick Fitzy had left in the fork of a tree was an X marking the spot.
He was filmed as he led them in, recounting Brett ’s confession as he went. They filmed the bridge where Brett had thrown Daniel’s clothes into Coochin Creek. He took them to the bridge where Brett had first led them, before realising he was in the wrong place. And he also took them to the place where the demountable house had once stood in the shade of a giant mango tree.
It was a shame, Brett told Fitzy, that he hadn’t found himself one of those paedophile rings that you heard about in the media. Perhaps if he’d hooked up with an organised group of child sex offenders, he wouldn’t have the two convictions. Paedophile rings “pass kids around”, Brett said. He wouldn’t have had to abduct anyone if there were children being passed around.
“The kids do not know any different,” he insisted to Fitzy. They didn’t know they were being abused. They didn’t know it was wrong.
He told his mate he’d be sure to let him know when the “feelings” came back again.
“They reckon it goes in a six-year cycle,” Brett said. It had been six or seven years by the time he’d taken Daniel, he said. And it had been more than that since. When the time came, he told Fitzy, he’d let him know. He’d want the group to send him to Thailand so he could “go and have some fun”.
“I am f---king proud to be a deviant,” Brett said. He loved pornography — particularly bestiality. It really got his blood boiling and his motor running. “I don’t mind looking at a bit of bestiality,” he said. “I wouldn’t go out of me way to f--k an animal though.”
Detective Senior Constable Grant Linwood, Queensland covert controller John Carey and Detective Superintendent Brian Wilkins were running on adrenaline. They’d spent the day doing paperwork, working out a plan, and caught a late flight back to Brisbane after Brett’s conversation with the big boss, arriving well after dark.
On the night of August 11, 2011, Linwood fronted a room of around 30 detectives at Queensland Police HQ. They were in the crime operations conference room on level three and he delivered a briefing to the inner circle of the investigation. They were the people who would decide the next step. He’d given a similar briefing to Western Australia’s covert unit. It was everything they needed to know about the schoolboy who left home to buy Christmas presents and never came back.
“This is Daniel,” he’d said, showing a picture of a beautiful boy with his mother’s eyes. He was the reason they were all there. The little boy whose fate had gripped everyone.
Saturday, August 13, 2011, 6.55am: “Mate ... pik ya up bout 945 ... c u then bro ...”
They picked Brett up from his hotel and hit the road for a second trip to the macadamia farm. He chatted with Ian and Fitzy as they drove north.
“Got a root last night,” he said. He told them he’d met a woman at the pub and taken her back to his hotel room. She worked for the Department of Child Services.
“That’s a bit ironic, isn’t it?” Brett laughed.
They laughed too. They knew he’d done no such thing.
Ian told Brett they would be flying out that afternoon. But first they needed to return to the macadamia farm. Ian wanted to do one last check for Daniel’s fob watch. He wanted to be 100 per cent satisfied it wasn’t there. It was fine with Brett. He hadn’t liked being there on that first day but now he was feeling good about things. He’d told them his biggest secret and nothing terrible had happened. Soon he wouldn’t ever have to think about it again.
In a service station toilet cubicle en route to the Sunshine Coast, Fitzy checked the recording devices he wore on his body to make sure they were working. Then he pulled out his mobile phone to call his boss. They were nearly there.
Detectives were already in place. They’d hidden in sheds. Among trees and behind the woodpile. An officer with a video camera stood behind a bush and police officers in camouflage gear, usually used to hunt out marijuana crops, were guarding the scene. They held their breath, silent as mice, as the sound of a car engine cut through the air. It had been nearly eight years. The car rolled in and Brett got out. He lit a cigarette and brought it to his mouth.
He barely flinched when they jumped out at him. They shouted at him to stay still. Don’t move! Stay where you are! Police! He took another drag of his cigarette.
“Be cool,” Fitzy told him as police surround him too.
Brett stood smoking his cigarette as Detective Stephen Blanchfield stood in front of him, reading him his rights.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“No,” Brett said.
Blanchfield told him he was under arrest for the murder of Daniel Morcombe.
“Yep,” Brett said.
He had the right to a lawyer. He didn’t have to say anything but if he did, it could be used against him.
“Yep,” Brett replied. “Yep. Yep. Yep.”
He repeated the same word over and over. He seemed calm. He kept smoking his cigarette, standing there in the clearing.
PART TWO: The perverted world of Killer Brett Peter Cowan
- The Sting: The Undercover Operation That Caught Daniel Morcombe’s Killer by Kate Kyriacou. Echo Publishing RRP $32.95
- This story was first published in August 2015
Originally published as Daniel Morcombe: The perverted world of killer Brett Peter Cowan