Catching the devil: Brett Cowan, the monster who killed Daniel Morcombe
THIS is the definitive inside story of psychopath Brett Cowan who killed Daniel Morcombe and how he was eventually brought to justice.
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THIS is the inside story of the psychopath who killed Daniel Morcombe and how he was brought to justice.
Tracey Haneveld was the first to know for sure. She knew Brett Peter Cowan as well as anyone. Knew what he was capable of. Knew what he’d done. His terrible past.
In 2005 she’d told them — if he was around when Daniel Morcombe was snatched from the side of the road, they’d best arrest him.
Peter Johns, an ambitious young coronial lawyer punching above his weight at the inquest into Australia’s most baffling crime, put it together too.
Bruce Morcombe knew it too. The moment he saw him. The lankiness. The hair. The way the stubble peppered his face. He’d looked just like the sketches.
And the police. For so long the investigative wheels had spun in the dirt. The thousands of leads that had taken them to a thousand dead ends. Now, they stood silent and weathered the criticism, while behind the scenes, things were moving.
Nobody, not even Daniel’s parents, could know police were putting together the most elaborate of stings. Taking on the guise of the criminal underbelly, they were creating an intricate world of crime and glamour, brainwashing and blood diamonds — all to trap a devil into spilling his darkest secret.
CHAPTER 2: THE DAY DANIEL DISAPPEARED
CHAPTER 3: THE MONSTER WHO KILLED DANIEL
CHAPTER 5: THE STING THAT TRAPPED A KILLER
CHAPTER 6: JUSTICE FOR THE MORCOMBES
But it began on an otherwise normal summer’s day.
Around 1pm on December 7, 2003, Daniel Morcombe, a beautiful boy with his mother’s blue eyes, left his home at Palmwoods on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and walked the kilometre to an unofficial bus stop under the Kiel Mountain Rd overpass.
He’d woken up that morning with different plans.
He and his brothers were supposed to spend the morning at their neighbours’ fruit picking, before going to Brisbane with their parents for a Christmas picnic.
If only it hadn’t rained that day. If only the bus hadn’t broken down. If only the 13-year-old boy standing under the bridge hadn’t been wearing that bright red shirt that caught the eye of everyone who drove by.
After he was snatched — snatched away from his family. From his life — police went to work, scouring the local area, interviewing anyone who saw anything.
But the investigation became overwhelmed with information. In the years after Daniel’s disappearance, police logged 18,000 incidents (a normal homicide case has about 500), conducted 10,000 interviews and had 33 persons of interest. They even came close, in January 2010, to giving up and declaring it a cold case.
Yet they had already spoken to the killer.
December 21, 2003, was the day Brett Cowan nearly got away with murder.
When the young father answered the knock his front door and saw plainclothes 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.
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.
It took an elaborate undercover police operation to get their man.
The stark, heartbreaking reality was this: When a shaken Brett Cowan walked out of the coroner’s court on April Fool’s Day 2010, despite having been torn apart at the inquest and Peter Johns, Bruce Morcombe and almost everyone connected to the case being now certain he was Daniel’s killer, all he had to do was stay silent. And he was home free.
Then some “crooks” befriended him and offered him a part in their gang’s operations.
Only there was no gang and the “Mr Big” was a fiction. The police had set the whole thing up.
And when they convinced Cowan to talk about that day in December 2003 when he picked up a red-shirted boy from the side of the road, they had him bang to rights.
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