The barbaric, brutal torture and killing of Cory Breton and Iuliana Triscaru - dubbed the “toolbox murders”, or the “bodies-in-the-box” - was straight out of a Quentin Tarantino movie, but with absolutely none of the black humour for which the Pulp Fiction director is famous.

The crime rocked a southeast Queensland community to its core, shocked the most hardened detectives, devastated families and left young children without a mother and a father.

And it all started with this image, taken inside a local convenience store, of the man who’d go on to become the ringleader in the sadistic double-murders. Sporting dark shades and a broad grin, he was literally a smiling assassin in the making.

His name was Stou Daniels, a leading Logan drug dealer. A jury found him guilty of murdering Cory and Iuliana.

Although only 21, Daniels possessed the hulking frame of the archetypal Pacific Islander but he was definitely no gentle giant.

“Yeah, he’s a big timer … not a person to f..k with,” was how Daniels was described by Cory just days before he and Iuliana disappeared.

Stou Daniels was a ticking time bomb of paranoia and pure evil and Cory Breton had the terrible misfortune to light the fuse.

Today, ahead of the 7th anniversary of the murders, The Courier-Mail can reveal the photo that sparked it all.

Cory and his friend Iuliana were drug addicts and at times drug dealers.

They moved in shady circles, mixed with ‘nefarious’ people and were known to police.

But to their families, who are still struggling to come to terms with the horrific murders almost seven years on, they were so much more.

Iuliana was a mother-of-three, a wife, part of a large and proud Romanian family. She helped her mother with medical appointments, was close to her sisters and loved her three daughters.

Cory had a three-year-old daughter and a partner of 10 years, who he met as a fresh-faced 18-year-old on the touch football fields of Mount Gravatt.

Back then, Cory worked for his family business and was determined to buy a house by the age of 22, a goal he achieved.

Tragically, had been planning to leave “the scene” and Logan for a fresh start with his girls, but the move north wouldn’t come in time.

THE PHOTOGRAPH:

Cory and Iuliana knew their killers and went willingly to meet them at a unit in Kingston on January 24 in 2016, oblivious to the horrors that awaited them. A murder trial was told of the events which led to their deaths.

There they were beaten, shot, stabbed and taunted, before being stuffed inside a large industrial toolbox, which would later be dumped in a muddy creek south of Brisbane, with the pair still screaming inside.

An unfocused photo of Daniels, taken from a convenience store’s CCTV and sent to Cory’s mobile phone, was all it took to unleash the horror.

Cory regularly sourced burner phones from a convenience store in Marsden.

It was the owner of this store, Phat Tan Khuu, who unwittingly set into motion the grisly events that would end Cory and Iuliana’s lives, a court later heard.

The Supreme Court was told Khuu bought drugs from Cory and became curious to know where he got his supply from.

“Islanders,” Cory told him in a text exchange on January 22, 2016.

Khuu replied with a blurry CCTV image of Daniels and asked Cory “is this him”?

Cory replied, “Yeah that’s him”.

He later replied again and said, “Yeah he’s a big-timer. Not a person to f**k with. LOL.”

Khuu was not involved in deaths of Cory or Iuliana.

Cory would later show the CCTV screenshot to Iuliana, their mutual friend Lelan Harrington and another man on January 22.

Two days later he and Iuliana would be dead.

Daniels, then known as a big player in the Logan drug scene, later learned from Harrington that Cory had the image saved on his phone.

To Daniels, paranoid and unpredictable, there was only one explanation: Cory was a rat.

He was furious and convinced he was being set up.

Tragically, Iuliana was implicated because she had been seen with Cory in the days prior.

That information had also reached Daniels, and her fate was sealed.

THE CRUELLEST CRIME:

It was January 24 when Cory was summoned to a Kingston unit to talk to Daniels about the CCTV photo saved in his mobile.

Cory had no way of knowing what awaited him as he arrived at the rundown townhouse, a place he had visited many times.

Iuliana was also invited, casually cruising into the back entrance of the unit complex on her bicycle.

It was the last time she would ever ride it.

The Supreme Court heard how she and Cory were ambushed. It also heard how they were beaten, secured with zip ties, gagged with duct tape and tortured.

The toolbox – their final tomb – lay in the middle of the lounge room and eventually both were stuffed inside.

Harrington, who was upstairs the whole time, told the Supreme Court during the murder trial that he heard the attacks while he was upstairs, before coming down and seeing the pair injured on the lounge before they were loaded into the box.

Ngatokoona Mareiti, a mother-of-seven, who knew Iuliana and Cory unwittingly arrived at the unit to buy drugs.

Let alone help the hapless pair, she stole a small bag of the drug ice from Iuliana’s bra as she sat bound and bloodied on the lounge next to Cory.

Soon after, the two were locked inside the giant industrial toolbox.

Mareiti pleaded guilty to manslaughter, was jailed for seven months and was sent back to New Zealand upon being released on parole last year.

Then the seven men and one woman drank, played video games and even sat on the toolbox, keeping the pair imprisoned for several hours.

Harrowingly, Iuliana had at one point managed to free herself from the box, while the group were upstairs.

Bloodied and terrified, Triscaru would have been able to slip out the door undetected if not for Harrington.

Her eyes wide with terror, she brought her hand to her mouth as the two locked eyes – a motion for Harrington to be quiet.

It was to no avail.

“She’s getting away,” Harrington yelled to the others, who were upstairs.

She was grabbed, beaten, secured with more zip ties and stuffed back in the box.

One zip tie was put around her neck so tightly she choked on her own blood, Brisbane Supreme Court heard last year.

Harrington told the jury during the murder trial Trent Michael Thrupp asked him to help restrain Iuliana and then load the toolbox onto the back of a ute.

But he maintained he never thought the pair would be killed – just scared with a “boot ride”, a common tactic used by drug dealers to frighten people who had wronged them.

Harrington was not charged with any homicide offences, and for his role, pleaded guilty to assault occasioning bodily harm and deprivation of liberty, on the proviso he would testify against his co-accused.

It was about 8.30pm, several hours after Cory and Iuliana had arrived at the unit, when the toolbox was slid onto the back of a ute. The two screamed and banged inside.

Neighbours could hear the pair’s panicked screams as the ute was driven out of the unit block.

It would later emerge one member of the group – Tepuna Tupuna Mariri - attempted to distract neighbours, ensuring them everything was fine.

A convoy of cars made its way to Scrubby Creek, off the Logan Motorway.

Tuhirangi-Thomas Tahiata would tell police Trent Michael Thrupp dragged the toolbox into the water.

“Time to die,” he yelled chillingly.

Tahiata fired a warning shot into the air with a home-made shotgun, in an attempt to silence the pair, but it only made them scream more.

Then Thrupp used a claw hammer to punch holes into the toolbox, allowing it to sink.

The pair also went back to the scene days later and used rocks to sink the box again, after discovering it floating in the dam.

THE HEARTACHE AND GRISLY DISCOVERY:

Miranda Parkinson was Cory’s partner of more than a decade.

In January 2016 she was visiting family in NSW. But she began to fear something was very wrong when she couldn’t get Cory on the phone for days on end. The two rarely went 24 hours without speaking.

In her victim impact statement Ms Parkinson told the court she had lost track of how many times she had called his phone, almost certainly every few hours, leaving voicemails, hoping he would call her back.

When she arrived back in Brisbane on January 29, Cory was not at the airport to collect her as planned. She made her way to the Logan home they shared, forced to break in through a bedroom window - Cory had the keys.

Inside she was shocked to find people – some she didn’t know and the house in disarray with days of dog droppings and urine, their pets frenzied and distressed.

Ms Parkinson then reported Cory missing to police.

Meanwhile, another family across town was also waiting anxiously for their daughter, wife, sister and mother to come home. Iuliana’s mother, Victoria Duga, would also report her daughter missing to police.

In a bizarre twist, Harrington was reported as a missing person alongside Cory and Iuliana. But unbeknown to detectives and the families of Cory and Iuliana at that time, he had been asked to dispose of Cory’s car - but instead went into hiding.

On February 9, just two days before Cory and Iuliana were found locked in a submerged toolbox, Ms Parkinson and Ms Duga appealed publicly.

“I miss her,” Iuliana’s mother, Ms Duga, said at the time. “She’s a very good girl and a very good mum. The kids ask me all the time, ‘Where Mummy, where Mummy?”

“I’d be happy with just one call saying, ‘Mama, I’m still alive’.”

Ms Parkinson told reporters she was thinking of “a million and one different scenarios” that would explain his absence.

“Unfortunately, my gut feeling is not very good,” she said.

“Nothing adds up ... it’s like a big puzzle that’s missing a lot of pieces.”

Police were beginning to suspect foul play.

The day after the appeal Harrington was found - alive - holed up in a house in Logan.

A crime scene was set up at his Kingston home and he was taken into police custody for hours of intense questioning, however police said he was not considered a suspect.

But after weeks of futile searching for Iuliana and Cory, suddenly, events began to escalate.

The case had changed from a missing persons case to a homicide investigation and very soon it would become a recovery mission.

On Wednesday February 10, in the afternoon, hours after Harrington was found, police swarmed a vacant site on Mudgee Rd in Kingston and launched water, land and air searches.

By the early evening, they had started to make arrests.

For 18 days Cory and Iuliana’s families held on to hope. Hope they would walk back in the front door, hope they would call, hope they were still alive.

February 11 in 2016 that hope would be lost.

That morning police, including divers and dog squads, descended on Scrubby Creek, at the end of Mudgee Rd.

Spilling into a complex series of catchments across Kingston, Marsden, Logan Central and flowing all the way down to Park Ridge, Scrubby Creek is isolated and quiet, besides the occasional fisherman.

It was the perfect place to dump a body and never be seen.

The large toolbox was half submerged and full of water, police couldn’t lift it, so they called a crane in.

That’s when the gruesome discovery was made.

There were two bodies inside the toolbox.

Police found Cory and Iuliana inside, head to toe, buried under piles of garbage.

Bags of sheets and towels which had been used to mop up their blood, tape and zip ties used to bind the pair, along with rubbish were found in the bottom.

Cory and Iuliana’s bodies were so badly decomposed the exact cause of death could not be determined. But a pathologist told a court it was either asphyxiation or drowning.

THE VICTIMS:

For 12 months in the lead up to Cory’s death his devastated partner watched him descend into a heavy drug addiction that soon took over his life.

Gone was the determined young man who wouldn’t take no for an answer and who worked hard to achieve his goals in life.

Before Cory spiralled into a seedy world of criminals and drugs he was a healthy, happy and “very sporty” guy who had an infectious personality.

“He was quite a bit younger and I guess he was chasing a little bit. We became really good friends and then I finally gave in,” she said.

“He was a very persistent and very determined person.”

He was the doting dad who held regular tea parties on the back deck and the man who “melted” Ms Parkinson’s heart one night as he put cream on their young daughter to calm her eczema.

“I was in our bedroom and I heard him say ‘until you get older and tell me to stop I’ll be here every day to put cream on you’,” she recalled.

“It was just one of those things after a bath and just one of those melt your heart moments.”

Cory grew up between Lowood and Brisbane and after leaving Ferny Grove State High School, he began working in his dad’s thermal and fire specialist business.

Fiercely determined to own his first house by 22, Cory and Ms Parkinson scraped and saved and bought their home in Logan just before his 23rd birthday.

Their lives slotted into a comfortable routine with Cory working in the family business and Ms Parkinson running a family day care centre from their home.

“He always wanted to have a stable environment, a house and job, he didn’t want to be a millionaire, he just wanted a normal life,” Ms Parkinson said.

Tragically, the life they had built together began unravelling 12 months before Cory’s death when he fell in with the wrong crowd and began battling a drug addiction.

In a heartbreaking twist, Ms Parkinson says they had plans to get out, but they would never get the chance.

“The last 12 months before Cory passed was hard with him falling into the wrong crowd and getting caught up in it all,” she said.

“We tried so hard to help him, which is why we were making plans to move away from Logan.

“The worst part for me is the last conversation we had as he sounded so positive and was finally ready to get away from the scene and work towards getting back on track and bettering himself, but now it’s too late.

“We only hope that other families can learn from this and don’t have to endure the pain and suffering that we are.”

For Cory’s family the road to healing has been muddied by lengthy court proceedings, which Ms Parkinson said was “absolutely gutting”.

Ms Parkinson and Cory’s sister Tamara Breton sat through almost every day of the trial.

“As hard as it was, I needed to know,” she said.

“It was extremely emotional but I wanted to try for my daughter so that one day I can answer as many questions as she might have.”

When the verdict came down, a small weight was lifted from the family.

But with every mention of the case. Ms Parkinson said the family is thrown back into the “whirlwind of grief”.

“It really slaps you in the face, you get taken right back. I got so emotional with the realisation that it is out of our control for the most part. We don’t get to choose when we grieve but it’s bestowed upon us by courts and media that we get thrown into the whirlwind of grief.

“It’s an acceptance that I’ve come to learn that this is my normal and this is how it’s going to be. That was a really hard thing to learn, that I just have to relinquish that control over when my moments are. I don’t get to choose and we don’t get to choose as a family.”

Ms Parkinson is now focused on giving their daughter a normal childhood and helping her remember her dad who is “very much alive” in their house.

“She’s got photo boards, memorabilia, and a chest full of stuffed toys that he won for her,” she said.

“She puts her own cream on now and I tell her the story of what her dad used to say.”

Iuliana’s family have not spoken since the trial, too devastated to relive the pain.

Stou Daniels, Davy Malu Junior Taiao and Trent Michael Thrupp were found guilty on two counts of murder while Waylon Ngaketo Cowan Walker was cleared of murder but convicted of manslaughter.

But before the four men were sentenced, Crown Prosecutor David Meredith read in court from a final victim impact statement penned by Iuliana’s mother. Ms Duga described how her life had been turned upside down.

“We received a lifelong sentence on 24 January, 2016, because of your actions,” her statement read.

“I miss her so much. Words can’t describe how I feel because you did this to her, to all of us.

“Before everything unfolded you instructed to close the windows and doors … You let them beat her while you knew he was already being tortured,” wrote Iuliana’s mother wrote in an address to Mariri, who pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter and two of torture.

“You knew she would be tortured too … She did not have a fighting chance.

“She managed to get out and she was caught and pulled back in. You sat on top of it so she couldn’t get back out.

“Neighbours heard kicking and screaming while you took the box to the ute. You distracted them, ensuring them all was good, that nothing serious was going on.

“You cleaned up their blood … It must be a very cruel depraved mind … By doing what you did you opened my eyes to evil of the worst kind.

“You destroyed my family.”

Breton’s sister Tamara Breton, in her victim impact statement read in court, said she had been robbed of the brother she had grown up with – the only person who could remind her of her childhood.

“Cory was the glue that held our family together and this tragedy has absolutely destroyed it,” she told the court in her victim impact statement.

“We learned from a very young age to rely on each other, no matter what, and would always be there for each other.

“The only person I grew up with was taken from me….he is never coming home.”

Ms Parkinson’s stepmother, Lois Platt, told the court of the severe impact the loss had on her step daughter. She said in May 2016, she found her step-daughter had “hit a wall” when the pair were meant to celebrate Mother’s Day.

“She cried constantly, had not showered in days and used every pot, pan, cup, glass and utensil and had not washed up,” she said.

It took six weeks to get Ms Parkinson back on her feet.

“You will never know the pain of having to explain to your grandchild that bad people have hurt her daddy and that he would not be coming back home, ever,” she told the court.

“To hear her cry and scream for her daddy was heartbreaking.

“Even five years after Cory’s death, my granddaughter still asks ‘Why?’

“How do you explain to a child what you did to him? What would you tell her? You could never explain it, it was senseless and inhumane.

“You will never be forgotten, or forgiven.”

THE SHRINK AND COP

Tim Watson-Munro, a criminal psychologist and author with 43 years in the field, has described the torture and killings as “pure evil” and one of the worst in modern Australian criminal history.

“This couple (Cory and Iuliana) really copped it for a long time,” he said.

“I have no hesitation in saying it’s right up there as one of the worst.

“This goes next level: it’s abduction, psychological and physical torture and they drown in a metal toolbox in a creek. It’s really appalling.”

Mr Watson-Munro said the psychological torture of the pair made the case particularly heinous.

He said claustrophobia and bewilderment of being locked in the toolbox, the physical ordeal they endured prior to being entombed and their inability to escape as water poured in would have escalated the terror.

“Even if they had been let go, the trauma associated with that psychologically would have been lifelong,” he said.

“A terrible death, for those two.”

Former top homicide cop Dave Hutchinson saw plenty of horrific crimes 30-plus years as a detective on the job.

But few shocked the veteran cop more than the ‘Logan toolbox murders’.

A former detective superintendent, Hutchinson was the crime coordinator for the southeastern police region - in charge of the Gold Coast and Logan CIBs - when the gruesome murders took place.

He oversaw the massive investigation in what the Brisbane Supreme Court heard was a ‘breathtakingly evil’ and ‘extraordinary barbaric’ killing of Cory and Iuliana.

Speaking to Hutchinson, who retired in 2016 soon after the alleged perpetrators had been arrested, you get the sense that the case still sends shivers down his spine.

“In my 36-odd years as a police officer, 30 of them as a detective, that would be in the top three of the worst I saw,” he told The Courier-Mail.

“It was absolutely horrendous. You can’t even begin to imagine what would have been going through those people’s minds in that toolbox. They were put in there head to toe, with rubbish and clothing stuffed in.

“Just being in that box would have been terrifying enough, but then to start feeling the water coming in. You just shake your head at the cruelty.”

Hutchinson said investigators had done an ‘incredible’ job to solve the crime.

“It started as nothing more than a missing-person report,” he said.

“Not only did the investigators recover the remains of the victims but they then identified the bad guys and got them convicted.”

Hutchinson said the toolbox murders came at a busy time for detectives who were also working on other major cases including the murder of Logan schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer.

“It started as the missing person report but as detectives looked at it and it became more sinister, more people were assigned to the job,” he said.

“Slowly, the story started coming together after numerous people who had been involved were identified,” he said.

“It was a complex investigation but once the ball started rolling, it came together relatively well.”

Hutchinson said he followed the case and ‘it was pleasing to see the result’.

THE SMOKING GUN

Damning’ messages on an encrypted BlackBerry phone that police managed to access - along with Harrington eventually ‘spilling his guts’ - proved crucial in helping crack the case, say those familiar with the investigation. These messages were tendered in court.

“The day before Harrington was found, investigators were on a different path,” a source said.

“It was thought he was hiding out on Stradbroke Island and a decision was made to go over there. When he was found (at Logan), he pretty much spilled his guts straight away.

“He ended up telling the story of what happened on that day (of the murders) and over time, detectives were able to corroborate a lot of what he said.

“There were some discrepancies on minor details, bearing in mind that he was under the influence of drugs at the time. But as he dried out, more details came to light.

“While his involvement was quite limited in terms of the actual tortures, he obviously did assist greatly. Tahiata only gave us some of the story but Harrington was there (at the Kingston unit) from early morning and when all the tortures took place.”

Closer to the trial, investigators were also able to get into Daniels’ BlackBerry and access ‘damning’ messages, including one gloating: “It’s not what happened, it’s what they can prove.”

The messages, which also included Daniels and his fellow accused discussing police strategies and media reports on the horrific crime, in particular helped put Thrupp away for life.

Another key breakthrough for police were advances in telco software allowing investigators to access phones seized from suspects five years ago, before identities had to be provided to buy mobiles.

Officers who worked long and hard on the case were ‘very nervous’ when the jury went out.

“But when they came back in under two hours, it was a very good sign,” the source said.