Daniel Morcombe: Inside the police sting that snared murderer Brett Peter Cowan
IN an elaborate police undercover operation featuring a fake crime network and months of careful manipulation, it all came down to one moment for Brett Peter Cowan.
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AN elaborate undercover police operation featuring a fake crime network eventually netted Daniel Morcombe’s murderer.
In this extract from Kate Kyriacou’s riveting new book, The Sting, police investigating the Sunshine Coast abduction build their relationship with Brett Peter Cowan who finally reveals to the bogus ‘Mr Big’ he killed Daniel.
PART TWO: The perverted world of Killer Brett Peter Cowan
THURSDAY, 4 August 2011, 4.36pm: “Mate ... meet u at the normal meetn place in bout 45 ...”
Fitzy turned on the recording device and went through the usuals. “OK,” he said. “Five, four, three, two, one. I’m a sworn member of the West Australian Police, currently conducting duties at the undercover police unit. My covert operative number is 452 and I’ll be using the assumed name of Paul. I’m currently working on Operation Vista in relation to the Daniel Morcombe homicide. Today’s date is Thursday the 4th of August, 2011. That’s Thursday, the 4th of August, 2011.”
He was in the car, waiting for Brett. A moment later, the door opened. Brett was all smiles and freshly shaven.
“G’day, brother, how you going?” Fitzy said.
“Not bad, yourself?” Brett replied.
“Hey, f---en hell! Hello, you look like a different bloke, mate! What’s going on?”
Brett got in the car and Fitzy handed him a carton of cigarettes. His favourite brand. The boys had done a job, he explained. Fitzy had picked up some of the loot for him. Jeff had said it was OK to give some to Brett. Fitzy steered the car onto the road and they headed off. They were meeting Craig again.
They spotted Craig’s unmarked vehicle in the Cottesloe Beach car park. Fitzy pulled up alongside to find Craig sitting in the back seat.
“Hey, mate, how are ya?” Fitzy greeted the cop. “You remember Shaddo, yeah?”
Craig nodded. “Yes, yes. Mate,” he said, “I’ve gotta give this stuff to Jeff. It’s all ... she’s got a fair bit of history.” He handed Fitzy a package of documents. Dirt for the boss on a female target. And another thing, Craig said, the silver Hyundai being used by the gang had to go. Police had their eye on it.
The conversation seemed to be wrapping up. And then: “Ah, and the one other thing which is ... might ahh, raise your hackles, there’s a ... subpoena from Queensland for Brett ... do you know about that?”
It was a surprise for Brett, as they’d known it would be. “For coroner’s court,” Craig continued.
“That’s been and gone,” Brett said.
“No, it’s ... this is fresh.”
“Fresh, is it?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, I didn’t know about that.”
“But that’s something we can fix as well,” Craig said.
Fitzy didn’t say a lot. They would have to let Jeff know, he said. Craig was relaxed, confident it could be sorted out.
They waved Craig off and got back in the car.
“What’s that about, mate?” Fitzy asked.
“I was living in the area that that Daniel Morcombe went missing from,” Brett told him. “And that’s how I f--king met Joe – on the plane back from being subpoenaed over there for coroner’s court in Queensland. And, um, I know I had nothing to do with it, I’m, my alibi is 100 per cent, you know?”
Fitzy nodded.
There was more. Brett had convictions for two sex offences. He’d molested young boys. But it had been 20 years and he hadn’t touched a kid since.
“There’s nothing we can’t get fixed,” Fitzy said. “But the thing what they want, I know the bosses make sure ... nothing can come back on us, cause, you know we work as a good group, man. There’s shit that’s been fixed. There’s nothing they can’t fix. So don’t stress about shit, man, it’s just ... you gotta be honest, man, you gotta be 100 per cent honest to us, you know. You can’t f--king lie to us.”
Brett agreed. They were mates. He’d never felt so much a part of something as he did with Fitzy and the guys.
“If I’d known that there was going to be another subpoena, I would’ve said something to you or Jeff,” he said.
“Don’t f--king stress, dude,” Fitzy told him. He took out his phone and dialled Jeff ’s number. They’d see him in an hour. In the meantime, they had business to attend to. A cash pick-up at the brothel. Easy work.
“Don’t even f--king think about it, dude, I can see you thinking,” Fitzy said as he steered the car through Perth traffic.
“I am thinking about it,” Brett said, “but I’m not letting it get to me. It’d be the only thing that stuffs me up with youse. This’d be the only thing that stops me from coming in, coming in with youse would be that.”
He’d done the sex offenders program in prison. They’d told him not to hide it from people. He’d hidden the fact that he was bisexual for a while. But then he’d “come out of the closet”. He wasn’t gay though, he told Fitzy.
“I don’t care if you are gay,” Fitzy said.
“That’s why I offended against kids,” Brett said. He hadn’t had the “guts” to go and see a man.
They would fix everything, Fitzy assured him. They were a team. A brotherhood. They’d do anything for each other.
MONDAY, 8 August 2011: Brett had seen Craig on the television news over the weekend. He’d thought it was hilarious. It was a news item about a murder and there he was! The very same cop they had on their books. He and Fitzy were driving to a cash pick-up, Brett chatting away as Fitzy drove.
“I was thinking about what happened the other day,” Brett began.
He’d decided he could walk away from his life, if need be. Cut ties with his family. Cut ties with his children. Disappear and start again with a new identity. Brett Cowan would be dead. If that’s what it took to stay with the group, then that’s what he’d do.
“I am loving this,” he said. “I am happy. I haven’t been happy like this before. It’s not just the money, it’s what I am getting from yas – the mateship.” He interrupted this sentimental line of thought to wolf whistle at a girl in the car beside them.
“I was a bit pissed off,” Fitzy told him. Brett should have been honest about his past. It didn’t look good for Brett to have lied. “We don’t want shit like that popping up,” he said.
“I’m not proud of my past,” Brett said. He’d made a decision in jail to never offend again. “I do not want to be behind bars for the rest of my life,” he said.
“We all have a past,” Fitzy told him.
“It’s hard to tell someone you have molested children,” Brett said. “You know it all now.” Then he figured that perhaps his past could be a selling point to the group. “With those sorts of convictions under my belt,” he said, “you know I am well and good to do virtually anything.”
They met Cassie for the cash pick-up at Fremantle’s famed Little Creatures Brewery. The madam gave Brett an affectionate hug when she saw him. They sat down to lunch and chatted away like old friends, Brett telling Cassie about the car he’d taken for a test drive. He was thinking about buying a boat, too. He bragged about his French polishing skills, explained to her how to do it. He talked about his approaching birthday. He’d be turning 42 in just a few weeks. Fitzy paid for the meal and he and Brett headed back to the car.
“She’s a nice chick but if she wants her sewing machine French polished, I won’t go out of my way to do it,” Brett said.
Fitzy steered him back to the topic of work. There was another country job coming up. Jeff needed them to go to Kalgoorlie, a mining town out east.
“Only if you want to come,” Fitzy said.
Brett was keen.
“Don’t worry about that shit the other day,” Fitzy told him.
Fitzy collected Brett from Michelle’s house just after 10am on August 9. It was an overnight trip. Another cash pick-up. It would be hours of Brett’s mindless chatter. Brett talking about Brett. Sex. Murder. His father. His brothers who hated him. His many trades, his many skills. Complaints about his ex-wife, his ex-girlfriends. Hours of Fitzy’s immeasurable patience. It was an hour before Fitzy’s phone rang. It was Jeff. There’d been a change of plans. Arnold was in town. He’d be needing them to turn around. The big boss wanted to see Brett.
Covert operative number 483, Arnold, was in position in the Swan River Room of the hotel. Next door, in another room booked out by the investigative team, was a handful of detectives, monitoring every word on a screen. They had eyes and ears on Arnold and Brett. This was it. Months of carefully constructed scenarios. Of tension and arguments. State versus state for control of one of the biggest investigations in the country’s history. Months of careful manipulation.
They’d taken a man on the edge – jobless, homeless, without a penny to his name, without enough cash to buy credit for his mobile phone – and shown him another life.
Detective Superintendent Brian Wilkins, the head of Queensland’s Homicide Squad, fixed his gaze on the television screen. So too did Detective Senior Constable Grant Linwood. They held a collective breath as Brett walked into the room. It was down to this. The last roll of the dice.
“I’ll be straight with you,” Arnold said, “I’m here on other business but I got some information through early this morning which has kind of made me postpone that stuff .”
“OK,” Brett said.
“Is there something you need to tell me, or ...?”
Brett rattled off his criminal history. The fraud charges when he was young. Stealing. And the two child sex offences. He’d spent time in jail for those.
“There was other offences that I haven’t been caught for ... which is something I haven’t told other people,” Brett said.
“ ... I’m told you’ve done, you’ve done the Daniel Morcombe murder.”
“Yep,” Brett said.
“I’m told it’s dead set that you’re the one who’s done it.”
“Yep.”
“And like I said, it doesn’t bother me at all, but what concerns me is that I need to, I can sort this for you.”
“Yep.”
“I can sort things out. I can find alibis. All the kind of things that need to be done, I can do.”
“Yep.”
“So if you say to me, look, I had nothing to do with it, that’s not what I’ve been told. And that brings me in a real dilemma, in a crossroads, because I want to move forward with what we’re doing.”
“Yep.”
“So look,” Arnold said, “what happened and how can I sort it out?”
Brett was cornered. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Like I said, right? Honesty, trust, respect, right?” Arnold said.
“Yep.”
“You know where you’re going. You know what your options are here, right? And you know the information I’ve got and I said I’ve paid good people good money ...”
“Yep.”
“ ... to keep us clean and if I’ve gotta postpone what we’re gonna do for a few months to sort this out ...”
“Yep.”
“ ... I’m happy to do that for your sake.”
“Yep.”
“Right. Because I’m told that you’re pretty loyal.”
“Yep.”
“You built up a good relationship with some of the boys and they speak very highly of you.”
“Yep, I appreciate that.”
“So what do I need to fix?”
“Yeah ... OK,” Brett said. “No, yeah, I did it.”
A couple of metres away, in the next room, the gathering of detectives stared at the screen in astonishment. Jaws dropped. It was an all-encompassing astonishment. They couldn’t shout, so they stuck to whispers of jubilation. Phone calls were made.
“F--k!” they said, wide-eyed in shock.
PART TWO: The perverted world of Killer Brett Peter Cowan
- This is an edited extract from 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.
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