Around 1pm on December 7, 2003, Daniel Morcombe, a beautiful boy with his mother’s 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.

But it had rained and the neighbours called and asked them to come a little later.

Bruce and Denise, anxious to secure a good picnic spot, decided to leave them at home.

Daniel was on his way to the Sunshine Plaza, a sprawling shopping mall in Maroochydore, to get a haircut and buy Christmas presents for his family. His wallet held the cash he’d carefully saved picking passionfruit next door.

He’d been pestering his big brother Dean to go with him. Dean wasn’t interested. He jumped in the shower and never saw Daniel again.

It was just after 1pm when Daniel grabbed his wallet and the pocket watch he liked to carry and headed down the drive. The Sunbus to the Plaza would be there to collect him at 1.35pm.

The verge of dirt under the Kiel Mountain Rd underpass wasn’t really a bus stop. But people knew to wait there and drivers knew to stop.

1.35pm arrived. But the bus didn’t. A tall, skinny, brown haired man made his way from the nearby church car park and joined the wait for the bus.

He leaned up against the overpass wall, one leg raised like a stork.

Daniel picked up a stick and drew lines in the dirt.  The Sunbus was almost 30 minutes late when Daniel spotted it rumbling towards them.

Stick in hand, he stepped out and waved the driver down. But the bus had been ordered to run express after an earlier breakdown put it behind schedule. 

The driver tried to signal to the boy in the red shirt that another bus was following a couple of minutes behind but Daniel’s shoulders slumped and he kicked the ground in frustration.

The driver picked up his radio and contacted the second bus. A man and a boy were waiting, he said. Make sure you pick them up.  It took no more than a couple of minutes for the second bus to reach the overpass.

But the man and boy were gone.

Bruce and Denise arrived home mid-afternoon to find Daniel gone to the shops.  The boys knew they had to be on the last bus home from the Plaza at the very latest. The 5pm Sunbus would drop Daniel at the overpass at around 5.30pm.

Denise looked for her boy as she took the garbage outside around 4.30pm. She didn’t worry when he wasn’t walking down the road towards home.

At 5.30pm, Bruce hopped in the car and drove the short drive to the bus stop. He expected Daniel to be hopping off the bus, or already heading home.

There was no bus. And there was no Daniel.

He’d never let them down before. Daniel was quiet, shy, reliable. They thought he might have lost his fare for the bus. Or fallen and twisted his ankle. Maybe he’d been bitten by a snake.

The Morcombes drove to the plaza but their boy wasn’t there either. They tried the bus depot. Rang the bus company. They tried waving down a bus. Jumped on board another. Nobody could help them.

Something was very wrong.  At 7pm they walked into Maroochydore Police Station to report their son missing.

Sergeant Robbie Munn listened as Daniel’s frantic parents explained their boy hadn’t come home.

He was not the type to run away, they said. If he was running late, he knew to call them from a payphone with a phone card they made sure he carried with him.

Sgt Munn jotted down a few notes on a scrap piece of paper and told them he wouldn’t report him missing yet. Daniel would catch up soon, he assured them. He’d check back in with them before his shift ended.

He called them as promised at 10pm. Bruce and Denise had been back to the overpass with a torch. They’d searched their property. Tried everything. 

They had a sleepless night, Denise was up at 4.30am and the search was on again.

A few hours later police started looking for their son. They would search for eight years.

The streets of Woombye were soon pulsing with police. They searched cane fields, waterways, backyards. Public appeals were made for witnesses to come forward.

Forensic officers found shoe and tyre imprints under the bridge. They would turn out to be useless.

Passing motorists came forward to tell police about a blue car and a white van they’d seen pulled over near the side of the road, just past the overpass.

Some had seen two men standing by the blue car. Some had seen three. Most had seen a child, looking frightened or being manhandled into a vehicle.

The accounts were vastly different. They couldn’t all be right. But enough had described an early model "boxy" blue sedan that police counted it as a serious lead.

Police set up what was called the "Blue Car Room", where photographs of boxy blue sedans papered the walls for witnesses to pick out as being similar to what they’d seen.

A major incident room was set up and within 72 hours of Daniel’s disappearance, police established Operation Vista – an investigation that would become the biggest in Queensland history.

Prior to Daniel’s disappearance, the Sunshine Coast police’s District Intelligence Office had set up Operation Butcher, an investigation designed to identify pedophiles living in the area.

When the teenager vanished, Operation Butcher officers provided a list of known sex offenders in the area. Each pedophile was placed on a job log and interviewed.

On the list was a tow truck driver by the name of Brett Peter Cowan.