Crack team of undercover police, led by ‘Mr Big’ got murderer Danny Deacon to confess

IT was a week before Christmas 2014 and Danny Deacon was mid way through a day’s-long grilling in a windowless interview room at the Peter McCauley Centre

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IT was a week before Christmas 2014 and Danny Deacon was mid way through a day’s-long grilling in a windowless interview room at the Peter McCauley Centre.

When detective Sergeants Martin Dole and Wade Jeremiah told Deacon he was free to make some phone calls to friends or family, there were two people he wanted to speak with: his mum and his best mate, John*.

The penny hadn’t quite dropped — John was an undercover cop who had for months been ingratiating himself with Deacon, as part of a sophisticated undercover sting, in the hope he would spill his guts and reveal the truth about the night of June 18, 2013.

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The details of the remarkable “Mr Big” sting which brought Deacon to justice have been under wraps for years, and some will never be made public, but for the first time today the NT News can reveal some of the details of how a team of remarkable police officers cracked the Deacon case.

John first bumped into Deacon in August, in a carefully orchestrated chance encounter.

What followed were 33 “scenarios”, all designed to make Deacon think he was becoming a trusted member of a powerful crime gang.

Danny Deacon during his trial: Picture: Stuart Thornton.

Typically, Deacon would act as lookout, pick up bundles of cash, while his new “mates” would talk a big game about having crooked cops on the payroll. As the Court of Criminal Appeal explained on Friday, the “Mr Big” ruse, also known as the “Canadian Method”, is “typically reserved for murder investigations where traditional investigative techniques have reached an impasse”, and was most famously used to coax Brett Peter Cowan into confessing to the murder of Daniel Morcombe.

By December, police were ready to roll the dice on what is known as the “resolution scenario”, where Deacon would meet with the gang’s “boss”, who would try to get Deacon to confess and reveal where he had murdered Ms Sinclair.

The boss, Charlie*, has the swagger of a Soprano’s character, and used a well-practised interview technique called “minimisation”, in which he “sought to devalue (Ms Sinclair) and other women”.

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Charlie wanted to “establish a common bond of misogyny” with Deacon, a plan which worked a charm.

It was that same deep-seated misogyny which, 18 months earlier, had led Deacon to murder the mother of his son, affronted by her plans to leave.

With cameras rolling, Deacon confessed, drew a rough map of where he had dug a bush grave off a dirt track near Mulgara Rd, Berry Springs.

Danny Deacon fronts a missing persons campaign in the days after he murdered Carlie Sinclair

Shockingly, Deacon “expressed pride in his organisation and execution”, bragging that he was “staunch”.

Within days, after having flown to Darwin to show his mates where he had buried Ms Sinclair, Deacon would find himself in cuffs, being bundled into a paddy wagon in front of the men he still thought were his mates.

When Charlie gave evidence in a locked courtroom at the Northern Supreme Court in August 2014, court staff taped black plastic over the small windows on the courtroom entrance, so closely guarded is Charlie’s identity.

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What drew Deacon to the fake gang, the court found “was that by reason of ordinary human failings (he) was attracted by the prospect of money, adventure and lifestyle”.

* “John” and “Charlie” are neither the real names nor the cover names of the undercover operatives.