When the young father answered the knock his front door and saw plain clothes Constable Kenneth King and Detective Senior Constable Dennis Martyn he was certain he was done.

They’d found him. He was going back to jail.

Others might have crumpled. Panicked. Not Cowan. Perhaps if he had, they might have looked at him differently. Decided he had something to hide.

He didn’t betray the bolts of alarm screaming through his head. His thumping heart.

He was the coolest of poker players. The boy who could make his mum believe his lies looked those detectives in the eyes and asked them how he could help.

He’d heard about the boy disappearing from under the Kiel Mountain Rd overpass, he told them. Yes, he’d been in the area. He’d even driven along the Nambour Connection Rd on his way back from collecting a mulcher from his boss’s father in Nambour. But no, he told them, he hadn’t seen the little boy in the red t-shirt standing under the bridge.

He told the detectives he left home around 1.30pm got back about an hour later. He couldn’t be entirely sure of the times. There could be half an hour or so in it. His wife Tracey was home. They could speak to her. Or Frank Davis, his boss’s dad.

He readily gave them a DNA sample and allowed police to photograph him. They took pictures of his face, his scars and tattoos. And then they left.

Cowan couldn’t believe it. He thought he’d be leaving with them - in handcuffs.

Detectives returned the following day to speak with Tracey Cowan. She told them she’d left Cowan at home on the morning of December 7 while she took their six-month-old son to church.

She’d driven their white 4WD to the Christian Outreach Centre at Woombye. It was the same church where she’d met Cowan. Where his aunt and uncle worked as pastors. The same church he’d gone to pray each week after his release from prison. And it was the same church that sat off the Nambour Connection Rd, directly behind the overpass where Daniel was seen drawing lines in the dirt with a stick. She came home settled the baby and made lunch.

Her husband left about 1pm to collect a mulcher but she wasn’t sure what time he’d arrived home. He hadn’t come inside to say hello when he’d returned. She realised he was home when she heard the mulcher start up in the garden. Perhaps as late as 3pm.

Detectives Martyn and King timed the drive from Cowan’s home to the overpass. They timed the drive to Frank Davis’ house in Nambour.

They checked with Davis that Cowan had indeed collected a mulcher. Cowan’s alibi seemed tight. There might be half an hour or so in it but surely that wasn’t enough time to abduct a boy, murder him and hide his body?

On December 24, two detectives arrived at Alf’s Pinch Rd and asked Cowan if they could take his car for forensic examination. Of course, he agreed. He hadn’t even bothered to wash it. They covered the filthy white 4WD with fingerprint dust, checked for blood and took strip tests to collect hairs or anything else that might give them a DNA profile.

The samples were sent off to Queensland Health to await scientific testing. And there they stayed - for years.

With Cowan just one of many names on their list, nobody would check to see that the tests had been done. And they wouldn’t until 2011.

He was asked again and again about his movements. Cowan, who would obsessively comb the internet for pornography – gay, straight, wherever his imagination took him – never told them what he’d been up to the night before Daniel disappeared.

But phone line records would later give a very strong hint: from 8.50pm to nearly 4am, Daniel’s last night alive, somebody at Cowan’s house was using the internet.  He also didn’t mention the cannabis he’d smoked that day. The stuff that messed with his inhibitions. He didn’t mention he’d smoked just before leaving to pick up the mulcher.

But overall, he’d been so damned helpful. Police would later list his early co-operation as one of the reasons why he might not have been responsible for Daniel’s disappearance.

He’d offered his DNA. He’d posed for photographs. He’d offered up personal information and handed over his car keys.  He even thought they did a pretty good job cleaning the fingerprint dust from his filthy car before giving it back.

Police strangled by too much information

In most police investigations, information is power. Eyewitness accounts. Tips from the public. Informants from the criminal world.

But in the seemingly endless hunt to find Daniel Morcombe, the information strangled them.

A homicide investigation with 500 job logs is considered large. This one would log more than 18,000 separate jobs. It was the biggest in Queensland history.

They drowned in the sheer scale of it. The tips and leads. The absurdly contradictory and confusing accounts from motorists.

There was a blue car. There was a blue car and a white van. There were two men. Three men. Two men and a boy. The boy was being beaten. He looked frightened. He was talking to them. He wasn’t talking to them. Daniel was alive. He was inside a service station. He was under a tarp in the back of the blue car.

So many people would come to them about that blue car it would become one of the greatest investigative red herrings in Australian criminal history.

Detectives were desperate for any footage of the scene. A CCTV camera mounted on a caravan and truck sale yard across from the overpass turned out to be a dummy, there as a deterrent.  They called the army. Were there any satellite images of the area from the time Daniel disappeared?

The Department of Natural Resources and Mines was also asked to comb for satellite images after reports a blue car and a white van had been seen entering the Beerwah Forest on December 7. They even checked commercial satellites.

A week into the investigation, police filmed all cars entering and leaving the Christian Outreach Centre car park for their Sunday services.  They combed service stations from Tewantin to Caboolture for CCTV footage in case it could give them a lead on the blue car.

Two hundred hours staring at fuzzy screens later they were no closer to a breakthrough.  The descriptions of the blue car were so varied, they were left with a list of 460,000 vehicles Australia-wide.  They knocked on hundreds of doors and sent out a questionnaire through schools.

They quizzed every one of the 1600 people who had bounced calls off 14 transmission towers in the area that afternoon.  Anyone on shift at the Big Pineapple on December 7 was interviewed. More than a dozen witnesses who drove past Daniel at the overpass sat down with a clinical psychologist and were hypnotised for regression therapy.

Hunting Daniel’s treasured fob watch, investigators visited 61 second hand dealers.

They also looked for any similar cases around Australia, including the 1997 unsolved Perth murder of teenager Gerard Ross, snatched while roller blading during a seaside family holiday.

One of the suspects in that case was living in Caloundra in 2003 and drove a blue car. He became a person of interest.

Pictures of Daniel were posted in prisons. They were printed on milk cartons and Eagle Boys pizza boxes.

Witnesses – mostly from the bus that had driven past Daniel as he waited under the overpass – sat with a police sketch artist and described the man they’d seen.

The sketches and computer generated images would be made public in the hope that someone recognised the gaunt-faced man with the heavy eyebrows.

Someone did.

It was Brett Cowan, they’d said. He’d been in prison in Darwin. He’d once offered a little boy $5 in exchange for a sex act.

Various images released over time would bring a barrage of calls. Several people would ID Cowan.

It was good – but it didn’t break open the case.

Police came up with a list of 33 persons of interest – some were pedophiles, others weren’t. All of them needed police attention and detectives were assigned to each one. 

The files would be reviewed and reviewed again as the investigation stalled and the years went by.

More than 100 investigators were involved. 10,000 people were interviewed.

Police even called in the FBI for help.  Special agent James Beasley’s report contained 13 recommendations but no magic bullet.

A reward was offered, ramped up and offered again. Eventually it would climb to $1 million. But even the fortune on offer wouldn’t help find Daniel.

Police determined to leave no stone unturned as they hunted for Daniel.

But there was a boulder right under their nose.

Cowan had the background but his alibi seemed tight. Was the time, 45 minutes at tops, long enough to kill a kid and dispose of the body? 

And there was another one they liked. They liked him a lot.

Douglas Brian Jackway. Predator. Animal. Child rapist. Owner of a blue car.

Top suspect: Douglas Jackway

For years he’d been at the top of their list. There were just so many reasons to suspect Jackway of kidnapping and killing Daniel Morcombe.

The letter was one of them. Sent  to the Wolston Correctional Centre. Addressee: Doug Jackway.

"I can’t handle it anymore, Daniel Morcombe’s picture is in the paper, it’s on TV, I see him when I sleep, all the time," its anonymous author had scrawled.

"(I’m) going off my head what we done to him, I have to clear my conscience. I say you do the same.

  "I will go to the police soon. You are in jail now what dose (sic) it matter if you stay there you killed that poor kid. His parents need to know."

Doug Jackway. A man caught in the act of raping a little boy, threatening to stab him if he dared scream as the child’s father and a police officer ran towards them.

A man who flat out denied the assault, even though they had to pull him off the boy. An animal who shouted that he would kill the child’s family as police led him away.

They called him Rat in prison and he was already well on the police radar when the handwritten letter was intercepted on the way to his cell.

Late 2003, when Daniel disappeared, was one of the rare stints in Jackway’s adult life when he was not under lock and key. 

He’d walked from prison on November 22, having served eight years for raping the nine-year-old boy.  Within days, he’d bought himself a new car – a 1980 Holden Commodore. It was blue.

He’d been out a matter of weeks when a car chase through Noosa, brought to a grinding halt when road spikes blew his tyres, landed him in court yet again.

He was due to front a magistrate on the Sunshine Coast on December 8.

Jackway called his sister and arranged to stay at her house, arriving on the 7th. She was nervous. He could stay, as long as he slept in his car out the front. He wouldn’t turn up until the following morning.

Jackway gave police his first alibi on December 11 when they came knocking. He would change his mind several times about where he was, threatening friends and associates into providing cover stories.

Police weren’t buying it. They continued to drop in on Jackway. Surveillance teams followed his every move. Photographed him as he drove around in that blue car. They came knocking again on January 7, just over a month after the abduction. Questioned him. Drove away.

They came again that night. This time with a warrant for the car.

"That’s my f… car," he told them. "No c… touches it."  They had a warrant, they said. They would touch his car all they liked. But the vehicle had been cleaned thoroughly. Forensic examinations found no evidence.

Detectives pulled phone records and narrowed down his whereabouts from among his lies. They decided that he would have had little time to slip away to the Sunshine Coast on the 7th before returning home to Goodna.

And his Commodore had distinguishable black louvers on the rear window. Not one of the witnesses had mentioned black louvers.

A review of Jackway’s file in 2008 determined there was insufficient evidence to implicate him in Daniel’s murder.

People confessed to the murder. They pinned it on others in revenge for past grievances. One sent a hoax message to Crime Stoppers claiming to have Daniel. He was sent to jail for his efforts.

It was all torture for a family who just wanted to know what happened to their son.

Why didn't they catch him earlier?

For eight years they interviewed thousands of people, knocked on hundreds of doors, searched fields, forests and waterways, called in the FBI and the CMC and reviewed and reviewed their work.

Yet years later, Bruce Morcombe would declare his son’s murder should have been easier to solve.

“I felt he was a remarkably simple person to identify and this was a simple puzzle to solve,’’ he said

Here was a man who had abducted and raped two boys already.

He was the only one on their list who admitted to driving past the overpass at the time Daniel disappeared.

On his shocking criminal history alone, the Morcombes had always rated Cowan in their top three in the long list of persons of interest. But they felt he had always managed to slip under the radar.

On October 28, 2010, a year before his arrest, the Operation Vista detective responsible for leading the investigation into Cowan would testify he was "fairly satisfied" of his innocence.

Investigators put together detailed reports on each of the 33 persons of interest (POI).

In the report on Cowan, detectives listed six reasons why he could be responsible.

His history as an opportunistic sex offender.

He drove past the overpass where Daniel was last seen.

He had a 45-minute gap in his alibi.

He looked like one of the police sketches of the suspect.

He was familiar with the area.

And he had links to the church just metres from the overpass.

They also listed 10 reasons why he was thought to have not been responsible.

They helped explain why Cowan had spent so many years flying under the radar. They just didn’t think he’d had enough time to do it.

"The times frames ascertained by investigators of the movements of Daniel Morcombe do not allow for sufficient time for Cowan to commit this offence and get back to his residence, even by the latest time estimated that he could have returned home,’’ the report said.

That was not the only thing. He didn’t drive a blue car. And the clothes Cowan was wearing that day didn’t match the descriptions given by witnesses.

Some witnesses had apparently seen two people talking to Daniel. As far as police could tell, Cowan was on his own on the drive to collect the mulcher.

"Cowan’s movements and actions on this day do not give rise to any suspicion,’’ the report said.  Cowan had simply been going about his daily business, picking up a mulcher. Then when he got home he went about mulching trees.

And that cool calm demeanour way back on December 21, 2003: “Cowan was initially cooperative with investigators offering to provide his DNA, photographs and personal description/details as well as allowing for his vehicle to be scientifically examined.”

Nothing was found when his dirty 4WD was tested by forensics at Christmas 2003. It was obvious from the mounds of rubbish, dirt and lawn clippings covering every surface of that car that Cowan had made no attempt to clean it.

Ten reasons why police believed he was innocent. Some made sense.

The conflicting descriptions from witnesses were confusing. They couldn’t all be true. The blue car puzzle – a mystery police would later realise had absolutely nothing to do with Daniel’s disappearance. The lack of forensic evidence.

But the gap in his alibi? That he came home and spent an ordinary afternoon working in his garden? That he was obliging when the police came knocking?

If Brett Peter Cowan had achieved anything in his miserable life, it was this: If he saw a vulnerable child, he could strike like a snake. In an instant. With no plan. Then, just as quickly, as if nothing had happened, he could get on with life.

The Inquest

By 2009, the leads were all exhausted and so were many police.

Frustrated by years without answers, the Morcombe family wrote to State Coroner Michael Barnes requesting an inquest.

They felt police were openly resistant. Bruce thought they were fearful of having someone check their work. 

They were shocked when they discovered the following year senior investigators wanted their son’s case downgraded, shuffled off to the Cold Case Unit.

Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson, by then a great ally of the Morcombes, ordered his officers to keep going.
Barnes ordered an inquest. But when he announced he would call a number of persons of interest, including Cowan, to give evidence, police resisted.

Counsel for Atkinson said "there was no forensic or other purpose to be served in calling any of them".

A diary clash meant Barnes could not get the senior silk he wanted to take on the role of counsel assisting – the inquest’s interrogator  so ambitious young in-house counsel Peter Johns put up his hand. 

Johns met with the Morcombes. He’d be giving it everything, he promised them.

They opened in October, 2010 at Maroochydore.  Cowan told police he wouldn’t be able to make it. He had emphysema. Regretfully, he wasn’t able to fly. Doctor’s orders. He’d also changed his name. 

Barnes and Johns told police they would happily arrange him a bus trip to Brisbane from Perth. Via Darwin. And Cairns. He flew.

Solicitor Peter Boyce represented the Morcombe family – and would for many years to come. He became their protector, their advocate. He came into that inquest like a wrecking ball, tearing through witnesses and putting a magnifying glass on the investigation.  Police would twice up their counsel as the hearing went on.

About three weeks before interrogating Cowan, Johns was in the shower, details of the case swimming round and round in his head.

Here was a man who had twice lured children away to secluded locations before sexually assaulting them. In both cases there had been evidence he had tried to strangle them. In both cases he had acted quickly before sauntering off as though nothing had happened.

Daniel’s disappearance just seemed too similar. The coincidence too great.

As his hot water system earned its keep, Johns flipped the case in his mind. Stopped considering whether Cowan was guilty. Posed the question another way:

Could Cowan be innocent?  With his criminal history, how could he be so unlucky to be at the very spot at the exact time Daniel went missing?

"Get out of the shower,’’ Johns’ wife yelled. He had been in there for an hour.

On March 31, 2011, a tall skinny man who looked like the image of the police sketches media outlets had been showing for years, walked into the Queensland Coroner’s Court.

Bruce Morcombe saw him and knew exactly who had killed his son.

 "I think everyone in the room did. We just knew he was a done deal," he said. 

Johns was ready for him. He’d studied a psychologist’s report and decided the best way to attack Cowan on the stand. Go slow. Butter him up. Then pounce.

Cowan was stoned and far from convincing. He thought the suggestion he could have killed Daniel Morcombe in such a short time was “funny”.

Why? For starters, he liked boys much younger than Daniel.

The next morning. Buttering up over, Johns went in for the kill.

"You’re pretty unlucky, aren’t you?’’ he asked his number one suspect.

"You’ve committed these two offences and both times, for some reason, the victim’s gone and provided a statement straight away saying that you had choked them. And on your account, on neither occasion did it occur. An extraordinary coincidence, isn’t it?

"Do you know how rare the type of crime is, and to define it, I’m talking about situations where a juvenile boy, a boy under 18 years of age, is snatched or kidnapped from a public area and the perpetrator is never found or isn’t found for years – that type of crime?

"In your lifetime, for instance, apart from Daniel’s case, how many times do you think that might’ve happened in Queensland?" 

Cowan didn’t know.

"Well, I can tell you. The answer is never," Johns retorted.

"This is the only time. And do you understand that, as of December 2003, you were one of the very few people in Queensland, if not Australia, who had a proven history of kidnapping and sexually assaulting young boys after taking them from public areas. Do you understand that?’’ 

Cowan understood.

"You haven’t ever cursed how unlucky you are that, here you are, someone trying to get yourself back on the straight and narrow, stay away from assaulting children, and you say you don’t want to go back to jail, and then this event (happens) - this event that’s only happened once in your lifetime in Queensland.

"(And) you, the person with this history who would immediately attract suspicion, happens to be right there, right then?"

To suggest he had seen the boy and driven on by was like expecting a snake to slide past an injured mouse without paying it any attention, Johns said.

In a break during Cowan’s cross examination, the Morcombes pulled Johns aside to thank him for his "intense’’ questioning.

The inquest would also hear from Cowan’s drug dealer and her partner – the same one he claimed he had shared a cup of tea with when Daniel was being abducted. 

But Sandra Drummond and her boyfriend were probably playing the pokies when Cowan claimed he was sitting around their kitchen buying dope and having a chat.

Things were certainly heating up for Cowan. 

Alan McSporran, QC, by then called in to act as counsel for police, would eventually say what everyone was thinking.

Cowan was the "prime suspect" in the abduction and murder of Daniel Morcombe.

A review conducted by police and an independent third party in the lead up to the inquest had also put a big ring around Cowan’s name. They just couldn’t rule him out – so they wouldn’t.

Behind the scenes, with all thoughts of a blue car gone, police had moved into action.