Detective reveals the subtle clue that gave away Daniel Morcombe’s killer Brett Cowan immediately
A detective has opened up about the subtle slip-up that gave away one of one of Australia’s most notorious child killers. Here’s why it took cops eight years to arrest him.
From the minute retired detective Dennis Martyn drove up the driveway of paedophile Brett Peter Cowan’s house just two weeks after the disappearance of 13-year-old Sunshine Coast schoolboy Daniel Morcombe, he knew something was off.
Daniel had recently vanished from a bus stop and the detectives were hunting for clues.
“His house was on the front of the block,” he explains, “there was a lot of - I wouldn’t say kids’ toys - but there were a lot of things around in the yard, like little windmills that Cowen had made, all sorts of things he would take to markets and sell. But they were painted in such a way that to me, I thought a kid would want them, you know? There were butterflies on the blades of the windmills and all this sort of stuff.”
“I said to [detective Ken King, Martyn’s partner] straight away: ‘that’s a bit strange, mate. It just looks like a kid’s area’. And I knew he didn’t have any children at that age.”
But it was the conversation Martyn would have with the house’s inhabitant that would change everything.
From the moment Martyn and King left Cowan’s house that day in December 2003, they were convinced he was their suspect.
Sitting down with fellow ex-detective Gary Jubelin for an episode of Jubelin’s podcast I Catch Killers, Martyn recalled the moment, over 20 years ago, that convinced him Cowan was the perpetrator.
It was two weeks since Daniel had last been seen waiting for a bus, on his way to buy Christmas gifts for his family.
Martyn, who at the time was working as a senior constable on Task Force Argos, a team responsible for investigating child sex offences, had been handed the file.
“At that time, they gave you a series of folders [full] of convicted, released sex offenders in that area,” he tells Jubelin.
“Our job was to go around and check out their bona fides. If they said, ‘I was at the shop at that time’, you would spend half the day going to the shop, getting CCTV to verify their alibi. That’s how we came up, and one of the people in the file was Brett Peter Cowan.”
Martyn was already aware of Cowan’s criminal history, most notably his 1993 conviction for the horrific rape of a six-year-old child in the Northern Territory.
He was also aware that a white 4WD with a black snorkel had been seen near the underpass where Daniel Morcombe was last seen, which matched the description of Cowan’s vehicle.
Once they’d arrived at Cowan’s house, the two officers began questioning the paedophile about his whereabouts on the day of Daniel’s disappearance.
After admitting he “might have gone in and picked something up at Nambour” around the time Daniel was last seen on the Nambour Connection Road, Martyn says Cowan was “acting cocky.”
“He was a skinny sort of fellow, and every movement was accentuated, that’s sort of the way he was,” Martyn recalls. “He was very cocky and straight away I didn’t like him. I said to Ken, ‘just keep an eye on this bloke, mate’.”
“I said, ‘did you happen to see a little child with black hair on the underpass from the other side near the bus stop?’ [Cowan said] ‘No, no, no. Not at all. Never saw anybody.’ I said, ‘well, did you see a white 4WD with a snorkel on it?’
‘No.’
“I said, ‘do you think it is a coincidence that you drive a white car with a snorkel on, and it’s a four wheel drive, and someone’s saying they saw something similar on that side of the road?’”
Martyn decided it was time to apply more pressure.
“I said, ‘you’re a paedophile. A bad one by the sounds of it. And Daniel is in your [preferred] age group’. And he goes: ‘well, he looked it.’”
“I said, ‘did he? That’s strange. I thought you said you didn’t see anyone,’ [and he said], ‘oh, well I might have pulled over.’”
“I said: ‘so now we’ve established two things. First, you’ve pulled over and you reckon you’ve seen Daniel, and [second] you’re a liar. But we all know you’re a liar, because paedophiles are liars.’ And then he started to get cranky.”
In spite of this, and the officers’ conviction that Cowan was responsible for Daniel’s abduction, it would be another eight harrowing years for the Morcombe family before their son’s remains were found, and Cowan apprehended after a lengthy undercover sting operation which became the subject of the 2022 Netflix film The Stranger, starring Joel Edgerton.
But it wasn’t for Martyn and King’s lack of trying.
“Ken briefed the major incident room the next day,” Martyn explains.
“And that was it. It was quietly dismissed.”
“So that people understand the working of a strike force, whether it be in Queensland or down here,” explains Jubelin, “all that information comes in at briefings. As you said, Ken briefed the major incident team and said, ‘OK, this is our take on it’. You’ve done the report, submitted that, and you would think that there would be some priority given to what needs to be done.”
“At that point in time, our report dictated that that should have been the case,” agrees Martyn. “My reports are reasonably concise and very clear and accurate in relation to what recommendations should and should not be done.
“The recommendations on that report were very clear - basically, he’s your main suspect. If he’s not, he should be, and everything should be done to rule him in rather than trying to rule him out … but they never even went and seized his computers.”
Cowan is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of Daniel and will be eligible for parole in 2031.
During his trial, the court heard he was a serial predator with an extensive history of sexually abusing children.
In 2014, he told an inquest into Daniel’s disappearance that by the time he turned 18 he had already preyed on up to 30 children.
He said his offending stretched back to when he was about nine or 10 years of age.
However, he was first convicted of a child sex offence in 1989 over the molestation of a seven-year-old boy in the public toilets of a Queensland playground.
After Daniel vanished and the initial interview with Cowan two weeks later, officers interviewed him again in 2005.
Cowan changed his name to Shaddo N-Unyah Hunter between 2003 and a 2011 inquest into Daniel’s disappearance, at which he was called to give evidence.
“I had nothing to do with Daniel’s disappearance, nothing at all,” he told the court.
However, shortly after Cowan’s appearance at the inquest he told undercover police officers that he picked Daniel up from a bus stop to “have fun” with him.
The sting was one of largest ever police investigations of its kind in Queensland.
The trial was the first time those outside a sophisticated undercover police operation heard of the lengths Queensland police went to in order to catch Daniel’s killer.
Cowan was lured into a powerful crime gang through initiation and gradual involvement in a series of fake crime scenarios that were as wide and varied as gun-running, pimping, debt collecting and dealing in illegal crayfish.
Undercover police from Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria assumed identities in the crime organisation and paid Cowan for his work over four-months, promising him the spoils from an upcoming ``big job’’ that would earn him $100,000 for his part.
But Cowan’s ``dream’’ was almost derailed when a so-called corrupt police officer called Craig told the gang about a fresh subpoena that was to be issued for the accused to testify a second time at the continued inquest into Daniel’s disappearance.
Cowan was cross-examined over two days at the first (and only) inquest, before getting on a plane to Perth and meeting an undercover police officer from Queensland called Joe Emery on April 1, 2011.
Joe Emery became Cowan’s first contact with the crime gang in Perth, introducing him to the man who would become his closest confidante, Paul ``Fitzy’’ Fitzsimmons.
Revelations of Cowan’s involvement in the Daniel investigation was a problem for the gang and he was hauled before the Big Boss, Arnold, to see if it could be ``fixed’’.
The secretly-recorded video footage from the Swan River Room in Perth’s Hyatt Hotel captures the moment Cowan tells Arnold: ``Yeah, okay, you know, yeah, I did it.’’
Days later he returns to Brisbane with undercover police posing as henchmen for Arnold and leads them to the place where he confessed to dumping Daniel’s body, an isolated macadamia farm and a sandmining site off Kings Rd at the Glass House Mountains.
Cowan was arrested by Queensland detectives after being sprung at the bush site along with undercover officers on August 13, 2011.
Queensland police and SES volunteers began searching bushland for Daniel’s remains in the area where Cowan told undercover officers he left the body.
On the fourth day, August 17, 2011, a right Globe-brand shoe was found.
It was followed by the discovery of a second shoe on August 20. Then slowly, over the next few weeks, some 17 bone fragments and clothing identified as belonging to Daniel was unearthed from the mud of the sandmining site and the waters of Coochin Creek.
Crown prosecutor Michael Byrne QC told the jury Cowan the confessional evidence was designed to elicit a ``truthful and honest’’ confession.
``Our submission to you is these confessions are a very powerful aspect of the evidence in this trial,’’ he told the jury in his closing address.
``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…’’
Mr Byrne said Cowan killed Daniel when the boy tried to escape his clutches as he began to pull down his pants in the demountable building at the macadamia farm.
He said Cowan applied a chokehold to Daniel’s neck before he ``immediately and callously’’ disposed of the body.
``In that context we suggest he panicked and he deliberately killed him as an act of self-preservation,’’ he said.
Mr Byrne told the jury it was the Crown’s case that Cowan killed Daniel Morcombe in circumstances where he either intended to kill him, or at least did so while carrying out the unlawful purpose of indecently treating him: ``That is, he murdered him.’’