Where is Daniel Morcombe? | 6. Trust, Honesty, Loyalty

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Speaker 4 This episode contains graphic descriptions of child abuse, abduction, sexual abuse and violence. Please listen with care.

Speaker 6 As the door opened, I felt like a gush of wind came through. It looked exactly like the sketches.
And I turned to Bruce and I said, that's him.

Speaker 5 He comes in as witness through the court area. Sort of what a dog that is.

Speaker 5 He initially refused to answer questions, which was fine. He said he'd spanked a joint that morning.
At lunchtime, he had another joint.

Speaker 5 I'd put a scenario directly to him that he had abducted Daniel, that there'd been some sort of struggle that had resulted in Daniel's death or that he'd intentionally done it.

Speaker 5 You know, he just kept being belligerent, I didn't do it, and all that sort of stuff. I finished my questioning saying, all of this shows that, you know, you did this, didn't you?

Speaker 5 He thought he was so good. I think think he thought he was better than everyone else, and that he could handle this no matter what we threw at him.

Speaker 5 Got some really good hits on him, and I think it was all entirely fair.

Speaker 7 Kellen spent a day and a half in the witness box, and he was absolutely stripped naked for the monster he really is.

Speaker 5 It made it absolutely clear in my mind that he was the person responsible for Daniel's death.

Speaker 4 It's April 1st,

Speaker 4 2011.

Speaker 4 Day 19 of Daniel Morcombe's coronial inquest. After spending the last two days on the stand, Brett Peter Cowan is excused and driven to the airport by Detective Grant Linwood.

Speaker 4 They check Brett in for his flight back to Perth, then head to security. The detective is relieved that this is goodbye.

Speaker 4 For the last few days, he's had to closely monitor the child predator's every move.

Speaker 4 There's a bounce in Brett's step as he heads for his gate. Grant Linwood calls out to him,

Speaker 5 Don't come back to Queensland, Brett. Haha, and he gives me a thumbs up, and I sort of give him a thumbs up.
I meant it too, don't come back.

Speaker 5 You know, it's like I want to go home and have a shower after being with him.

Speaker 4 Qantas Flight 767 is set to depart at 8:10 p.m.

Speaker 4 Brett's headed back to Western Australia a free man.

Speaker 4 I'm Matt Angel, and from Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, this is Where is Daniel Morecombe?

Speaker 5 Episode 6.

Speaker 4 Trust, honesty, loyalty.

Speaker 4 Remember that moment just before the inquest's first adjournment in October 2010 when the Queensland Police Service Solicitor recommended that no POIs be called to give evidence?

Speaker 4 Bruce, Denise, and Peter Boyce hadn't been able to shake it, especially given the thorough knowledge that they now now had of the investigation, there were deficiencies, and to reject an opportunity to address those deficiencies seemed ludicrous.

Speaker 4 So, following that first adjournment, the trio requested a meeting with Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson.

Speaker 7 The three of us met Commissioner Atkinson privately in his room at police headquarters, and we expressed our concern that there had been insufficient reviews done on certain persons of interest,

Speaker 7 especially Cowan. But very fortunately, Bob Atkins and the Commissioner agreed that more work needed to be done.

Speaker 4 Soon after this, Detective Inspector Mike Condon brought additional detectives in to dot some I's and cross some T's. Detective Grant Linwood was one of those detectives.

Speaker 4 But this wasn't his introduction to the case.

Speaker 5 I was in uniform when Daniel Morcombe was abducted. Like every plainclothes officer in my career as a young detective, I'd attended to little job blogs.

Speaker 5 I'd been up to the Sunshine Coast with the flying squad doing door knocks. When I was at the prison, our corrective services unit, we used to get files to talk to prisoners about Daniel Morcombe.

Speaker 5 So that was a common thing, you know, someone would ring up and blame a prisoner or whatever.

Speaker 4 The experience had a profound effect on the young detective. He told his fellow constables that someday, he was going to help crack the Daniel Morcombe case.

Speaker 4 Later, in 2008, Mike Condon launched a massive massive review into Douglas Jackaway, the lead suspect at the time. Detective Linwood was one of the many officers brought in to assist on that review.

Speaker 4 And now, seven years into the investigation, Daniel's case had once again found its way into his life.

Speaker 5 We were conducting some investigations into a couple of the persons of interest that were appearing before the ongoing cronial inquest.

Speaker 5 We were tasked to have a look at a connection between a person of interest named Brett Peter Cowan

Speaker 5 a gentleman that lived next door to the Morecombe's who owned a sandblasting business.

Speaker 4 It was a fairly menial task and it turned out to be nothing. Linwood could have easily just looked into the connection and awaited his next orders, but that's not his style.

Speaker 4 Linwood wasn't the type of detective to cut corners. So he began by reviewing everything investigators had ever collected on Cowan.

Speaker 5 There was never any formal direction to do a review. The review was sort of an ad hoc thing we just sort of decided to do.

Speaker 4 One of the first things Linwood clocked was the size of Cowan's file. It was noticeably lighter than some of the others.

Speaker 5 There was not a lot of interest in Cowan and I say that because I was a detective senior constable on my own doing it with no other support or

Speaker 5 you know corroborator or normally we send a cast of thousands to go do anything.

Speaker 5 What I can tell you with absolute authority is that when we started in November, December of 2010, nothing had been done since 2006 because we went and got the folders and literally blew the dust off them where we found them.

Speaker 5 Nothing was in play and nothing was happening at that point.

Speaker 4 Peter Johns, attorney and counsel assistant at the inquest, made a similar assessment.

Speaker 5 The 33 people of interest I got, they were broadly, not exactly, but broadly ordered from the most highly suspected to the least. Cowan was person of interest, seven.

Speaker 5 The police might deny that's how it was done, but clearly

Speaker 5 the size of the files gradually reduced.

Speaker 4 Grant Linwood's voluntary review of Cowan was enlightening.

Speaker 5 After reading all the stuff, I was really concerned. This is a very low-risk victim, but what they call a very, very high-risk crime.
You know, broad daylight, side of a major road.

Speaker 5 You know, you've got Cowan, who is confident, lives in the area. He's in the right place at the right time.
You know, he's changing his story. He changed his appearance in the days afterwards.

Speaker 4 Linwood believed this guy deserved some serious consideration. But Mike Condon disagreed.

Speaker 5 I said to people, I think he's right for him. I think he's done it.

Speaker 5 I can remember a particular conversation with the assistant commissioner where I told him what I thought, and I was told that no way a blue car wasn't involved.

Speaker 5 And my recollection is, you're an idiot or you're wrong, but I certainly told him in certain terms that I was wrong.

Speaker 4 Here's the incredible truth of the matter. Cowen had never been a priority for police,

Speaker 4 which, once you know his full background, is jaw-dropping.

Speaker 4 Brett Peter Cowan began offending while still in elementary school. By 18, he had sexually abused as many as 30 children, and many went unreported or prosecuted.
But not all of them.

Speaker 4 In 1987, after being caught breaking and entering, An 18-year-old Cowan was fulfilling court-ordered community service outside of a Brisbane child care center.

Speaker 4 The kids were playing all around him as he repaired pipes near a toilet block. He asked the children if any of them wanted to see a golf ball.

Speaker 4 And then he took one of the small boys into that toilet block and molested him.

Speaker 4 The child told his attacker that he was going to tell his mother. In response, Cowan wrapped his dirt-covered hands around the boy's throat and threatened him.

Speaker 5 And then goes back to doing his work.

Speaker 5 And it's only when the kid identifies him that he gets arrested.

Speaker 4 The arresting officer noted that Cowan hardly reacted as they took him into custody. He was totally relaxed.
Immediately after being released on bail, Cowan fled.

Speaker 4 A year later, he was caught in Sydney and stood trial.

Speaker 4 The jury found Cowan guilty of indecent dealing, but they didn't feel sodomy had been proven.

Speaker 4 The judge vehemently disagreed. He trusted the child's account of what had happened.

Speaker 4 Still, Cowan was sentenced to just two years in prison. 14 months later, he was out.

Speaker 4 Six years after that offense, in 1993, Brett Cowan struck again.

Speaker 4 He had moved over 2,000 miles away to the Northern Territory, where he lived in a Darwin caravan park with a girlfriend. Cowan was home alone one day when someone knocked on the door.

Speaker 5 Little boy comes along. Have you seen my sister? No, no, but come with me.

Speaker 4 Cowan told the six-year-old that he'd helped find her.

Speaker 4 Instead, he lured the boy to a burnt-out car in the bush.

Speaker 5 Just done horrific injuries to him, and by all accounts choked him to the point of unconsciousness thinking he's dead and thrown him in a wrecked car.

Speaker 4 When the child regained consciousness, he staggered into a nearby service station, naked and covered in blood.

Speaker 4 Back at the caravan park, a group of residents had formed a search team. Cowan joined them.
He even told neighbors that he was going to hunt down the man responsible.

Speaker 5 He's on record with the police at the time saying, I hope you get the bastard or something like that, you know. Cool as a cucumber.

Speaker 4 But the victim remembered his attacker, and the description he gave police helped them link the crime to Cowan.

Speaker 4 And he folded.

Speaker 4 Attorney Peter Johns was rattled by what Cowan had done to the boy.

Speaker 5 When

Speaker 5 we got the medical records on that case, it showed that the boy had patechial hemorrhaging. So that's when you get blood spots in your eyes.
And that's a sign of a person being choked.

Speaker 5 The woman who was manning the service station at that time says that when he first came in, she thought he'd been in a car accident.

Speaker 4 The six-year-old had a punctured lung, lacerations all over his body, including at the base of his scrotum.

Speaker 4 widespread repeated strikes of both blunt and sharp force. He had been sodomized with what officials believed was a stick, and then raped.

Speaker 4 I know it's hard to hear the details of these assaults, but they're relevant. Because the judge overseeing the trial knew these details.
He even said that he believed them to be accurate.

Speaker 4 And yet, Brett Peter Cowan was convicted of grievous bodily harm, deprivation of liberty, and gross indecency.

Speaker 5 Nothing in relation to rape, nothing in relation to the penetration, nothing in relation to the choking.

Speaker 4 He was sentenced to seven years in prison, with the possibility of parole at three and a half. And exactly three and a half years later, Cowan was out.

Speaker 4 So let's talk big picture for a moment.

Speaker 4 Brett Cowan had a grisly history. He was a twice convicted child sex offender.
Psychologists and parole reports assessed that he was a pathological liar and serial predatory pedophile.

Speaker 4 He stood trial for two horrendous rapes of little boys. For these crimes, Cowan received a cumulative sentence of just nine years behind bars.
But he served only four and a half of them.

Speaker 4 In my opinion, that is absolutely fucking unforgivable.

Speaker 4 The Task Force Argos detectives that I spoke with helped me understand what had happened here.

Speaker 4 Back when these crimes occurred, prosecutors would often accept reduced charges. For starters, authorities wanted to avoid putting traumatized child victims through the stress of a trial.

Speaker 4 But another reason for reduced charges was that the evidence was sometimes shaky. If a conviction by a jury didn't seem like a sure thing, going to trial posed a risk of the offender walking free.

Speaker 4 Accepting convictions on lesser charges, it wasn't ideal, but it could at least keep predators off the streets for some amount of time.

Speaker 4 Now I want to zoom in on Daniel's case, because there's another important takeaway here.

Speaker 4 In 2003, Brett Cowen's criminal record only showed the charges that he had been convicted of, right?

Speaker 4 Charges which fell at the lower end of the scale in terms of seriousness.

Speaker 4 Regardless, I assumed that investigators on Daniel's case would have known the extensive details of those crimes. Surely they were in the case files.
But according to Peter Johns, that wasn't so.

Speaker 5 The police had not fully dragged out all of the information relating to those previous offences.

Speaker 5 What we did was to drag up all of the documents relating to each of those incidents.

Speaker 4 Given when the crimes took place, these records, witness statements, medical reports, they weren't electronic. But the coroner's office worked to obtain them.

Speaker 5 That showed that in both cases that those offences were way, way more serious than the criminal history suggested. They showed that Cowan was not just an opportunistic child molester.

Speaker 5 He was a violent rapist.

Speaker 4 Those details, the strangling, the lacerations, what he did to those boys.

Speaker 5 None of that was on his criminal history and none of that was known to the Queensland Police until we dug up that material.

Speaker 4 But Detective Grant Linwood disputes this claim.

Speaker 5 That's definitely not correct. The police definitely had those details because the photographs from the Northern Territory crime and the detailed reports were in that folder of material we got.

Speaker 4 If Grant Linwood is right, and police did have the full details of Brett Peter Cowan's past offenses, then how could anyone look at Cowan in 2003 and not think that he should be a prime suspect?

Speaker 4 And if Peter Johns is correct, If Operation Bravo Vista detectives never obtained the detailed case files from those crimes in their entirety, then that would be an oversight of epic proportions.

Speaker 4 Either way, if you ask me, there were some major missteps here by investigators.

Speaker 4 Brett Cowan scans the rows as he moves through the cabin.

Speaker 4 He drops into his seat in row 42.

Speaker 4 His time in Brisbane, at the inquest, it's over.

Speaker 4 A good-looking guy in his 30s approaches and takes his seat beside Brett.

Speaker 4 He's edgy, mohawk, sun-kissed, a tight, athletic body.

Speaker 4 Brett eyes him.

Speaker 4 Then, unable to resist, introduces himself.

Speaker 4 His name is Joe Emery. He tells Brett he's thinking of moving to Perth and wants to check it out before he pulls the trigger.
He'll be staying at a motel in the city. The two men hit it off.

Speaker 4 They spend the next five hours chatting about Western Australia, work,

Speaker 4 family.

Speaker 4 Brett does what he does best and lies about his visit to Brisbane, saying he was there to visit his kids.

Speaker 4 Then Cowen steers the conversation back to where Emery's gonna stay in Perth.

Speaker 4 He invites him to crash at his place, just while he finds his feet.

Speaker 4 Emory declines. But they exchange numbers and make plans for the week.
Brett's gonna help him find a second-hand car.

Speaker 4 They part ways.

Speaker 4 But it's the beginning of a strange friendship.

Speaker 4 A dangerous friendship.

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Speaker 4 The coronial inquest adjourned for the weekend following Brett Peter Cowen's testimony. Peter Johns had successfully exposed Cowen's past and scrutinized the gruesome details of his crimes.

Speaker 4 Some of his most perverted tendencies had been put on full display for the world to see.

Speaker 4 At one point, Cowen smirked as he told the court that he couldn't have done anything to Daniel because 13 was too old for him. He liked six to eight-year-old boys.

Speaker 4 Cowen's time on the stand changed everything.

Speaker 5 That took Cowen from a bit player to

Speaker 5 clearly the main suspect.

Speaker 4 As a result, the direction of the proceedings took a hard turn. And when things resumed on April 4th, the spotlight was firmly on Cowan.

Speaker 5 We now knew he was a violent man, very much with a history of actual abduction, not just opportunistic touching. And then we come to his alibi.

Speaker 4 Back in December of 2003, just two weeks into the investigation, Task Force Argos detectives Dennis Martin and Ken King had visited Brett Cowan at his home in Birwa, just a little over 20 miles south of where the Morecomps lived.

Speaker 4 He had walked them through his whereabouts on December 7th. The timeline went as follows.
1.30 p.m.

Speaker 4 Cowan leaves his house in his white Mitsubishi Pejero four-wheel drive. He travels along Nambor Connection Road, the same road where Daniel stood beneath an overpass, waiting for the 1.35 p.m.
bus.

Speaker 4 2 p.m.

Speaker 4 Cowan arrives at the home of Frank Davis, a man lending him a mulcher for tree trimming. 2.20 p.m.

Speaker 4 Cowan and Davis chat and load the mulcher into his four-wheel drive. After about 20 minutes, Cowan leaves.
Approximately 3 p.m.

Speaker 4 Cowan returns to his home in Birwa.

Speaker 4 It was a credible alibi.

Speaker 4 But when detectives Martin and King began conducting interviews and retracing Cowan's alleged movements, they found some discrepancies.

Speaker 4 Call records showed that he'd left his house closer to 12.50,

Speaker 4 not 1.30. He'd overstated the amount of time it took him to travel each way.

Speaker 4 And Frank Davis told police that Cowan was only at his house for a few minutes, not 20. They simply loaded the mulcher into Cowan's vehicle and he took off.

Speaker 5 Cowen had been right from the beginning trying to sort of fudge his times. He'd been, oh, I was there for ages having a chat and came straight home.

Speaker 4 He tried to really blend this time period just didn't make sense taking these discrepancies into account martin and king had discovered a roughly 45 minute window of unaccounted for time a window that fell somewhere between 2 and 3 p.m

Speaker 4 based on the countless eyewitness statements police had made a determination on the precise time that bus 1a passed by daniel the precise time the boy was last seen 2 15 the people on the bus see one man standing behind a boy matching Daniel's description.

Speaker 5 At 2.18, they're not there.

Speaker 4 And Cowan's return trip home from Frank Davis's house to Birwa?

Speaker 4 It would have had him traveling under that infamous overpass at approximately 2.05 p.m.

Speaker 4 Precisely when Daniel Morcom would have been standing there.

Speaker 5 Of the people in that list, he was the only one where we could say, yes, this guy was at the scene. with Daniel.
He admitted to that because he

Speaker 5 thought that the cameras on the freeway would have picked him up. As it turned out, those cameras weren't working, so he probably could have said he wasn't, but he'd already admitted he was there.

Speaker 4 Many senior investigators had always discounted Cowan. They believed that the 45-minute gap didn't leave enough time for him to abduct a boy, murder him, and dispose of the body.

Speaker 4 Given his past two offenses, Grant Linwood and Peter Jones both strongly disagreed.

Speaker 5 I thought, well, I guess he could have. He had gone on on each occasion from zero to rapid escalation and offending in only a matter of minutes.

Speaker 5 In the Darwin case, where he had abducted a boy from a caravan park, sexually assaulted him, left him in that burnout carp, and then Cowan had returned to the caravan park like nothing had happened.

Speaker 5 That whole process had taken like 15 minutes. So each time he'll just be going about his life, it's like a snake going.
you know, past a wounded mouse.

Speaker 5 He just will offend and then quickly go back to doing nothing and calm as pie till he's

Speaker 5 confronted.

Speaker 4 But there was something else. Something that happened in May of 2006 and breathed new life into the missing 45 minutes of Cowan's alibi.

Speaker 4 Two and a half years after Daniel disappeared, Rhett Peter Cowan and his ex found themselves embroiled in a custody battle for their two children.

Speaker 5 Basically, his wife was trying to say, he shouldn't see his kids because he's a suspect for Daniel Morcombe. You know, he's a potential pedophile and and he's a suspect.
Shouldn't see his kids.

Speaker 4 And Cowan's rebuttal?

Speaker 5 He says, no, no, I was really at my drug dealers. I just didn't want to say that to the police.

Speaker 4 Cowan told the family court in 2006 that he couldn't be guilty in the Morecambe case because at the time of the abduction, he was at his drug dealer's house.

Speaker 5 He'd never told the police that.

Speaker 5 If he had that simple alibi, and if he was buying some marijuana and you're being looked at for, you know, potentially the most serious child abduction murder crime in Queensland, you wouldn't just say that.

Speaker 4 Officials from the family court clocked the new detail and contacted QPS detectives to notify them.

Speaker 5 And that, as I understand it, is the reason why he was reinterviewed in 2006.

Speaker 4 Cowan implied to detectives that he had lied to police in previous conversations because he was trying to protect his drug dealer.

Speaker 4 He said the truth was this. After picking up the mulcher at Frank Davis's house, he drove to the dealers in Birwa.

Speaker 4 He was there for at least 30 minutes. They chatted, drank coffee, and then he went home.
The new alibi put Cowen at his dealer's house for about half an hour, somewhere between 2 and 3 o'clock.

Speaker 4 Following this interview, detectives reached out to that dealer, a woman named Sandra Drummond. She lived with her partner, Kevin Fitzgerald.

Speaker 4 They asked her if she could confirm Cowan's alibi from that December afternoon back in 2003.

Speaker 5 She's gone, I don't know. Might have been.
Who knows? We're all having a smoke. It was years ago.
Wouldn't have a clue. And that's where it had been left.

Speaker 4 When the inquest resumed on April 4th, the Markham's attorney, Peter Boyce, tore into police over their handling of Sandra Drummond. For starters, her 2006 interview hadn't been done on the record.

Speaker 4 And Kevin Fitzgerald?

Speaker 5 The partner, husband, they didn't interview him. I think this is unforgivable.

Speaker 4 But Grant Linwood could understand why, in this instance, police didn't speak with Fitzgerald.

Speaker 5 This gentleman, by his own admission, had had head injuries, been a prolific cannabis user for something like 30-odd years. He didn't know what day of the week it was, but he might tell you anything.

Speaker 4 Nearly everyone believed that Brett Cowan was lying about his alibi. Investigators just had to prove it.

Speaker 4 So with the inquest underway in Brisbane, Detective Limwood and his partner, Detective Emma McIndoe, set out for Birwa to question Sandra and Kevin.

Speaker 4 Maybe they couldn't rely on their memories of a single afternoon eight years prior, but seasoned investigators had methods.

Speaker 5 You see this practice done a lot with historical child sex offences, like where they might say to a victim, what date did this happen on? They go, I don't know. Well, what can you tie it to?

Speaker 5 Well, I do remember I was on my little red bike and I got that on my sixth birthday.

Speaker 5 And I remember I was at the old house with the green roof and we can prove from records that that house was only purchased in a certain year. So things like that.

Speaker 5 You try and identify other aspects of their lives that you can get a date from.

Speaker 5 So using that approach, we thought, what is everything we can think of to work out what Sandra Drummond was doing on the 7th of December?

Speaker 4 They started rolling through questions with her.

Speaker 5 We said, what does Sandra do? Where does she go? You know, do you play sport? No. Do you have a social thing? No.
Do you work? No.

Speaker 4 Then she thought of something.

Speaker 5 Her grandson's birthday is the 8th of December.

Speaker 4 The day after Daniel disappeared.

Speaker 5 And she thought, oh, maybe I was at his birthday party on the 7th, because that's the day for his birthday.

Speaker 4 She remembered that the party was at a McDonald's. So Linwood and McIndoe went to that McDonald's.
They tried to obtain any records of party reservations from 2003.

Speaker 5 Ultimately, no. That's another anodicy of nothing, but stuff like that all over the place.

Speaker 4 They went back to the drawing board. Back to Sandra.

Speaker 5 And then we thought, what do you do on weekends? Where do you go? She just throws up, oh, sometimes I go to the RSL.

Speaker 4 The RSL, Returned and Services League of Australia. Anyone listening to this in Australia, you know what this is.
But for the rest of us, I asked Peter Johns to explain.

Speaker 5 They're sort of like, I suppose, mini-casinos. Yeah, they're predominantly bars, clubs where people get together, but they'll have a section that has slot machines, pokey machines, as we call them.

Speaker 5 Everyone in Australia has been to one of these things.

Speaker 4 Drummond's daughter had worked at the RSL in 03. She ran the two o'clock raffle on Sundays, which, it turned out, Sandra and Kevin were usually there for.

Speaker 5 We said, oh, okay, so we went down the RSL. We were looking for sign-in books, CCTV, anything that would show her perhaps being there.
And they didn't have anything like that.

Speaker 4 But they did have one thing.

Speaker 4 Their old payroll records.

Speaker 5 And it showed that the daughter had been working on 7th of December.

Speaker 4 So, on Sunday, the 7th of December, 2003, at 2 p.m.,

Speaker 4 Were Sandra Drummond and Kevin Fitzgerald at home having coffee with Brett Peter Cowan?

Speaker 4 Or were they at the Birwa RSL where they spent most of their Sunday afternoons watching Sandra's daughter run the raffle?

Speaker 5 And then on a whim, you know, what else you got? And they had these player reward loyalty cards.

Speaker 5 We know that when you play the Pokies in Australia, do you have a card that is slot through the machine each time because, you know, there'll be some process by the more money you turn over this machine, you'll get a rewards that allows you to buy drinks or something on this card.

Speaker 4 Kevin had confirmed that they always played the Pokies and always inserted their rewards cards. So Linwood pressed further with the RSL.

Speaker 5 Anyway, where are the records of that?

Speaker 4 The RSL searched. They didn't have them.
But Linwood and Macindo had one more idea. They contacted Max Gaming, the company responsible for the slot machines and rewards program.

Speaker 4 Maybe they had records.

Speaker 5 We got the police to ask them for it. They said, look, we just don't have the material.
We don't have records going back that far.

Speaker 4 And then an unexpected surprise.

Speaker 5 An engineer at the company had gone back to the off-site storage and gone through all their material and found the hard data.

Speaker 4 That data? It included the precise time to the second that any reward card had ever been inserted and removed from one of their machines. And it gave police the break they so desperately needed.

Speaker 5 Sunday, 7th of December, 2003, at about 2.22 p.m., Sandra's in machine number, whatever it was, 10, and Kevin's in machine number 11.

Speaker 4 The couple couldn't have been with Brett Peter Cowan on the afternoon of Daniel's abduction because they were at the RSL at exactly the same time Cowan claimed to have been at their house.

Speaker 4 The timestamp was irrefutable.

Speaker 5 That's as good as you're ever going to get. Now it's a tiny thing, but it shows he's lying.

Speaker 5 And right in that middle of time, he's not at her house like he's claimed.

Speaker 4 Cowan's alibi had been blown to bits.

Speaker 4 2,600 miles away, in a caravan in Perth's eastern suburbs, Brett finishes up a hot shower. He wraps a towel around his waist and exits the bathroom.

Speaker 4 His new friend, Joe Emery, is there, watching TV, waiting for Brett to finish getting ready.

Speaker 4 Brett drops his towel with intention, but Emory says nothing, clearly not interested.

Speaker 4 In the weeks since the flight from Brisbane, the men have chatted regularly. run errands together, got Emery set up with a car.
He found work in town, so he's staying.

Speaker 4 One thing Brett's noticed, whatever Emory does for a living, the guy is always flush with cash.

Speaker 4 As Brett gets dressed, the flicker of the television catches his eye.

Speaker 4 The morning news is on. Coverage of the inquest.
The Morecames.

Speaker 4 They stand in front of something. A mannequin of some kind.

Speaker 4 It's on fire.

Speaker 4 The anchor comments on the scope of the Daniel Morcom investigation.

Speaker 4 Brett, affectless, turns to Emery and asks,

Speaker 4 Think they'll ever find the guy who did it?

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Speaker 4 The inquest once again adjourned that April 6th. The witnesses had been called.
The POIs questioned. For investigators, it was a battle won.
But the war was far from over.

Speaker 5 We still don't have a body. We still don't know what happened to Daniel.
We know he's lying. We know he's in the right place.
We know he's got the right M.O.

Speaker 5 It ticks every box, but

Speaker 5 unless he admits it, we can't prove it. We could not have charged him with no body and gone to trial with that.

Speaker 4 What happened next was unclear to Bruce and Denise Morecombe. What was clear? They were ready for some catharsis.

Speaker 7 On a piece, a square of paper with a pen, I wrote P-O-I,

Speaker 7 person of interest, B-BQ, barbecue,

Speaker 7 DMF, Daniel Morcombe Foundation House,

Speaker 7 10 a.m.

Speaker 5 tomorrow.

Speaker 4 As they left the courthouse that day, Bruce slipped the coded message to journalists.

Speaker 4 The next day, at 10 a.m., over 30 members of the press arrived for a barbecue at the Daniel Morecombe Foundation headquarters.

Speaker 6 They all turned up.

Speaker 7 And that's when we burnt the effigy.

Speaker 10 In a symbolic release from seven years of pain, the parents of missing Sunshine Coast teenager teenager Daniel Morecombe have burned an effigy of a person of interest in the case.

Speaker 7 You know, the diesel's tipped on his head and

Speaker 7 Denise has got the lighter and she flicked the cricket lighter, the disposable lighter, and started lighting his testicles.

Speaker 6 I started on his groin and it just went bang.

Speaker 10 The Morecamp say the burning represents the closing of a chapter after five weeks of evidence at a coronial inquest.

Speaker 6 I think we must have looked a bit crazy. I think we were standing there laughing going, ha ha ha ha.

Speaker 5 Yeah, we did.

Speaker 7 I'm sure some people thought we'd lost our marbles, but we didn't care.

Speaker 5 I care.

Speaker 10 The Morecoms say they're confident they're getting closer to finding the person who took their son.

Speaker 4 The coronial inquest had run for 22 days over the course of nearly six months. Months filled with challenges for Bruce and Denise Morecombe.
The Daniel Morecombe Foundation's funds were drying up.

Speaker 4 An unprecedented monsoon flooded the offices. And one of the last remaining pieces of Daniel was torn from their lives when his cat, Mittens, was struck by a car.

Speaker 4 But worst of all was the quiet that followed that 22nd day in court.

Speaker 7 Weeks, months went by,

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 7 it was incredibly frustrating.

Speaker 4 No updates from investigators, no check-ins, just

Speaker 4 quiet.

Speaker 4 The couple were sure that they had stared into the eyes of the man responsible for the loss of their son. And yet, it seemed nothing was being done.

Speaker 7 I remember sitting there numerous nights thinking, well, if police don't solve this, maybe I'll go and ask him a couple of questions myself.

Speaker 7 I knew Cowan was in Perth. I knew he was in a caravan park.
I just wanted to ask him face to face, you saw the boy on the side of the road in the red t-shirt.

Speaker 7 We know your history of offending against children. We know your violent record against those children.
You didn't say you were standing at the back of Daniel, but we know.

Speaker 5 I wanted to ask him, what did you do?

Speaker 7 I was going to fly to Perth?

Speaker 4 Just days after getting evicted from Perth's Crystal Brook Caravan Park, Brett loses his job. Then the Courier Mail and Sunday Times start running the headlines.

Speaker 4 The man at top of Daniel's suspect list. Child offender

Speaker 4 Child sex offender lives here.

Speaker 4 Luckily, the papers never use his real name. Just POI7.

Speaker 4 So his new mate, Joe Emery, he shouldn't catch on.

Speaker 4 Ironically, Emery's been feeling bad for Brett. It's obvious he's struggling to make ends meet, so Emery loans him some cash.

Speaker 4 A few weeks later, He introduces Brett to a friend of his, a guy named Paul Fitzsimmons.

Speaker 4 But everyone just calls him Fitzy. He's short, wears his blonde hair in a ponytail, curses like a sailor.
Fitzy and Emery work together.

Speaker 4 And Emery's thinking, if Fitzy's good with it, maybe they can bring Brett in on things, throw him some opportunities. Fitzy's wary of the idea.
He doesn't know this guy from Adam.

Speaker 4 But Emery vouches for him. Next thing Brett knows, he and Emery are sitting in a car outside the airport.
Brett holds a picture of the man they're waiting to ID.

Speaker 4 The moment the man exits the terminal, Emery makes a call.

Speaker 4 And that's that.

Speaker 4 Brett's handed 150 cash, quick, easy money, and there's a lot more where that came from.

Speaker 4 Brett knows what he's just taken part in, that his new friends run in shady circles, and he's all for it.

Speaker 4 One job becomes two. Two become four.

Speaker 4 Emory and Fitzy can see Brett's commitment and loyalty. So they start introducing him to more of their guys.
He tells the gang his name change is official. He is not legally Brett anymore.

Speaker 4 He's Shadow Nunya Hunter.

Speaker 4 Shadow, the name of a dog he'd had. Nunya, as in Nunya Business.
And Hunter? Well, he doesn't fucking know. He heard it somewhere and thought it sounded good.

Speaker 4 So, that's what they call him. Shadow.

Speaker 4 Soon, Brett's making deliveries, running cash, being handed solo surveillance gigs. He takes part in large-scale burglaries and drug hauls.
And as the jobs get bigger, so do the paydays.

Speaker 4 The more Brett witnesses this group's reach, the more he understands what he's stumbled into. These people are powerful.
They own cops and court officials.

Speaker 4 They traffic sex workers and run counterfeiting schemes. They deal in arms and blood diamonds.
This isn't just a small-time gang. It's a goddamn criminal enterprise.

Speaker 4 A national syndicate, a brotherhood, which lives by a motto.

Speaker 5 Trust,

Speaker 5 honesty, loyalty.

Speaker 4 And Brett has been brought into the fold.

Speaker 4 For the first time in as long as he can remember, Brett feels like he is a part of something bigger, and it's beyond his wildest dreams.

Speaker 4 Brett's last interaction with his friend, Joe Emery, is at an upscale restaurant with the gang.

Speaker 4 Apparently, Emery's landed himself in some trouble, with the kind of people you never want to land yourself in some trouble with.

Speaker 4 So Arnold, the man at the top, the boss, the Brotherhood's kingpin, he's getting Emery out, protecting him, sending him off to London with 10K and a new identity.

Speaker 4 Brett's disappointed, but he's got work to think about.

Speaker 4 It's August when Brett learns of the massive ecstasy shipment that's in the works. It'll be his biggest job to date.

Speaker 4 His cut alone is 100K, and he can't stop daydreaming about what he's going to do with it. But the dream is about to be cut short.

Speaker 4 Brett and Fitzy are in the car, headed out of town for a job when Fitzy's phone rings. It's Arnold, the boss.
He's just flown in from the East Coast.

Speaker 4 He's there to see Brett, and it needs to happen now.

Speaker 4 At 12.35 p.m. on August 9th, 2011, Brett Peter Cowan and Paul Fitzsimmons enter the Swan River Room suite at the Hyatt Hotel in Perth.

Speaker 4 Their boss, the man they call Arnold, he's already inside with a few other gang members. Arnold's stout and bald.

Speaker 4 He carries himself with calm authority, but Brett can sense the menace dripping off of him. This is a man used to being in control.

Speaker 4 Brett heads for the couch and sits down. He's perched on its edge, anxious.
Arnold talks with the others for a moment.

Speaker 11 get yourself something odd or whatever, and I'll give you the bug as soon as I can sort her out.

Speaker 4 What you're hearing is the live audio from when this happened.

Speaker 4 Arnold crosses the room and sits on the opposite side of the couch from Brett.

Speaker 4 The distance between them speaks volumes.

Speaker 4 Arnold turns his full attention to Brett as the last of the gang members exits.

Speaker 5 How you got, buds?

Speaker 11 What's been happening?

Speaker 4 Brett's heart is racing.

Speaker 4 After all, he thinks he's sitting across from the head of a criminal enterprise. But Arnold isn't who he says he is.

Speaker 4 He's not the head of a criminal enterprise at all. Arnold is an undercover cop.

Speaker 4 In fact, Brett's fellow gang members and all of the criminals they've been in dealings with, the crooked cops and bot court officials, the drug dealers and sex workers, the arms brokers and smugglers, the nearly 40 people Cowan's interacted with these past four and a half months.

Speaker 4 Every single one of them are undercover cops.

Speaker 4 From the moment Brett Peter Cowan sat next to Joe Emery on that flight from Brisbane to Perth, he had been the target of what would become one of the most elaborate covert operations ever attempted in Australia's history.

Speaker 12 Unlock all episodes of Where is Daniel Morcombe ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge podcast channel.

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Speaker 12 Head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen.

Speaker 4 If you'd like to make a donation to the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, please visit danielmorecom.com.au.

Speaker 4 Where is Daniel Morcom is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. It was hosted, reported, and co-written by me, Matt Angel.
Joe Barrett is the managing producer and co-writer.

Speaker 4 Grace Valerie Lynette is the associate producer. Additional production support from Tiffany Dimack.

Speaker 4 The series was sound designed, composed, and mixed by Garrett Tiedemann. Our studio engineer is Trino Madriz.

Speaker 4 Fact-checked by Tracy Lofgren-Lee. A special thanks to Ashley Ann Krigbaum and Doug Slaiwin.
And our operations team, Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, and Destiny Dinkle.

Speaker 4 Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Deen, Vanessa Gregoriadis, and Matt Scher.

Speaker 4 Sony's executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch. For Pace Hetter Productions, the executive producer is Jessica Rhodes.
Allison Momassey and Brian Daly are the associate producers.

Speaker 4 For Mad Jimmy Productions, the executive producers are me, Matt Angel, and Suzanne Coote. Consulting producers are Dan Angel, Lee Parker, and Andrew Fairbank.

Speaker 4 If you enjoyed Where is Daniel Morcombe, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.

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