It took a jury seven and a half hours to find Brett Cowan guilty and to finally bring closure for his parents, who had endured the unendurable for so long.

After sitting through 19 days of evidence and arguments - and listening to the testimony of 116 witnesses - the jury of six men and six women retired at 12.13pm on Wednesday to consider their verdict.

They returned almost 24 hours later and in a packed Supreme Court Room No.11 delivered the verdict the Morcombe family _ and the wider public _ had waited for: Guilty.

Cowan was unmoved.

Later, as Daniel's father Bruce faced his son's killer to read his victim impact statement, he told him: "You revolt me."

He called him a "perverted, cold-blooded child-killing’’ pedophile.

“Ten years ago you made a choice that ripped our family apart,’’ he said.

He said he had been left with the unbearable images of what might have happened to his son.

“Why was he really dumped without clothes? Why was his belt loose and not still looped through his pants? It makes me nauseous for your total lack of respect for a child’s life.’’

“He was a great kid and would not hurt a fly, you have robbed him of 70 years of life,’’ he told Cowan.

He said the family could not sleep that first night Daniel went missing, feeling helpless.

"Nothing about my life today resembles how we enjoy our lives today … we are no longer the same people,’’ he said.

Mr Morcombe said the family had to sell its business, moved from their home and could not return to their regular employment.

“You picked on the wrong family, our collective determination to find Daniel and expose a child killer was always going to win,’’ he said.

“I often wonder about the other victims that you have left in your wake,’’ he said.

“I have sat watching you in the same court for close to 40 days. throughout that time you have been completely devoid of any remorse than what you did to Daniel.

“Sitting in the same room as you revolts me. How you sit there day after day almost frozen in the one position is chilling,’’ he said.

“Predators like you cannot be rehabilitated.’’

.Denise Morcombe had prosecutor Michael Byrne QC read her statement.

In it, she said: ""For years I haven’t slept more than three hours at a time, I have lived and breathed each day to find the answers.

"I see my son lying by himself in that dark eerie bushland being devoured by wild animals … you Mr Cowan, have no respect for human life.’’

She said Cowan’s actions had destroyed her family.

"We all know one person is not there and we will never recover from that,’’ she said.

"Mr Cowan I saw you smiling with your son … and wife … you had a smirk like nothing had happened, a happy family snap, meanwhile my family was living in hell searching for a son who was dead.

"Your mistake was you picked on Daniel to release your animalistic perverted needs,’’ he said.

"That was your mistake you evil, evil unhuman thing.’’

In her summing up, Justice Roslyn Atkinson told the jury the prosecution had to discharge its burden of proving the guilt of the defendant by proving it beyond reasonable doubt.

She asked the jury to dismiss all feelings of sympathy or prejudice.

"As I have emphasised to you, you must approach your duty dispassionately, deciding the facts upon the whole of the evidence,’’ she said.

She summarised the evidence for the jury and the closing statements from both the prosecution and defence.

She took the jury through a "question trail’’ to help them decide a verdict in the case.

Justice Atkinson directed jurors not to draw any conclusions from Cowan’s decision not to testify at his own trial, saying it proved nothing. 

Crown prosecutor Michael Byrne QC told the jury Cowan was drawn into an underworld crime gang made up of undercover police over four months in early 2011, a sophisticated operation designed to elicit a truthful confession from him.

The jury watched a secretly-recorded meeting between the accused and the gang’s Big Boss Arnold at a hotel suite in Perth on August 9, 2011.

In it, Cowan confessed to his involvement in the abduction and murder of Daniel.

He then led undercover police to the place where he allegedly left the body on an isolated sandmining site off Kings Rd at the Glass House Mountains.

Mr Byrne told the jury the confessional evidence was "truthful and honest’’. “Our submission to you is these confessions are a very powerful aspect of the evidence in this trial,’’ he said.

“They are so powerful that they overcome any lingering questions you may have about the descriptions of the male at the overpass near 2.15pm and what I’ve submitted is the red herring of the blue car…’’

Barrister Angus Edwards, for Cowan, argued Cowan’s confession to undercover police was “demonstrably false’’.

He said the accused was offered powerful inducements to make a false confession and stood to lose everything if he was booted from the crime gang: brotherhood, a sense of belonging, a lifestyle that promised millions of dollars and ``a chance to be a part of something’’.

“They were about to cut him loose and all he had to do to make millions of dollars was tell a lie, a convincing lie,’’ he said. Mr Edwards argued Cowan told undercover police ``what they wanted to hear’’.

“Just like the police pretended to be crooks, he pretended to be a person who killed Daniel Morcombe,’’ he said.

He argued Cowan used information that had been circulated by the media since Daniel’s disappearance to construct his story, as well as information allegedly passed on to him through a man called Les McLean as to where the bones and clothes were.

Mr Edwards asked the jury to draw a "rational, logical inference’’ that convicted child sex offender Douglas Brian Jackway had passed on the information to Mr McLean.

He argued Jackway had a violent criminal history, was the owner of a blue car seen near the Kiel Mountain Rd overpass where Daniel went missing and was on the Sunshine Coast around the same time the boy disappeared.

Both Mr McLean and Jackway denied any involvement in such a sequence of events when they testified at the trial, however.

The Morcombes

They thought the most terrible of thoughts. Nightmare scenarios of Daniel being held captive for days. His body shredded through a mulcher.

Their beautiful, shy boy. The boy whose sparkling eyes looked out from countless television reports, milk cartons, pizza boxes and posters. The boy who should have lived a quiet life on a Sunshine Coast hobby farm. Annoyed his mother. Fought with his brothers. Finished high school and applied for university. Brought his first girlfriend home to meet proud parents. People should have never heard his name.

They would never stop looking for him. Even when they knew he couldn’t come home, that he was surely dead, Bruce and Denise Morcombe vowed they’d never give up.

They would find him. Bury him. Hold a funeral and leave flowers at his grave. He didn’t belong to anyone else. He wasn’t someone else’s to dump or bury or throw away. He was theirs.

They sat down with investigators four or five times a year. It was always the same. They’d leave shaking their heads. Nothing was happening.

It was a mammoth strain on their family but Bruce and Denise stuck together.  They had to.  They had to make sure their other boys still had a mum and a dad.

"We had to make sure the boys didn't go off the rails and hang themselves," Bruce said.

Psychics sent cards, letters and emails with information on the killer or the location of Daniel’s body. They spoke of pine forests or drew pictures of houses. None came close.

They were sent maps, an X marking the spot where Daniel was supposedly buried.

They conducted their own searches. They got down on their hands and knees in the dirt for the slightest chance of finding him.

Bruce met with pedophiles. Chased jailhouse rumours. It was torture but he had to do it. The one he missed could be the one who took him to his son.

At the time he just got on with it.  But looking back he knew he was struggling to cope.

Bruce tried to convince Denise not to read the letters that came with painful regularity. The ones that said they had Daniel but he’d soon be dead. The ones who had seen him alive. The ones who knew where he was, had seen him being kidnapped.

Denise eventually found the strength to clean out her son’s room.

In 2007, she had told how she’d ended up drinking to block the pain of losing her boy. First one drink. Then two, three, four or six. She didn’t care how many.
One night she’d grabbed some sleeping tablets and anti-depressant medication and downed the lot. It wasn’t enough. Bruce wasn’t angry. He just wanted to help.

They had to sell assets to keep up the search. Business interests, the family home, an investment property and shares. It all went. Nothing mattered but finding Daniel.

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