Daniel Morcombe was 13 years old when he was abducted and murdered in 2003. He lived on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia.
Daniel was born on 19 December, 1989 to his parents Bruce and Denise. Daniel was a twin – his brother is Bradley. They also had a brother, Dean.
The family lived in Palmwoods which is a rural town in the Sunshine Coast area in Queensland. As of 2021, the population of the town was 6,357. The area is known for the pineapple and other fruit that grows there.
Daniel and Brad were best friends. “Daniel was quiet and shy with people he didn’t know, but to his family and friends he was warm and friendly and fun – just nice to be around,” said Brad.
“He used to pick flowers for Mum on the way home from school just because he liked to put a smile on her face.”
The brothers loved riding their bikes and they had miniature horses, named Sorrento and Bullet. They loved caring for and riding the horses.
Birthdays and Christmas were always a special time for them, too. “There’d be two piles of presents, one for each of us, and we’d take turns to open them. We’d meet at the school bike rack after the bell and ride our bikes home together. We didn’t leave each other’s side.”
Bradley has spoken to the media about the day that Daniel went missing, which was Sunday, December 7, 2003. I believe it was summer holidays at the time, so school was finished for the year.
The Morcombe boys had been picking fruit to save some money. That morning, they had planned to pick passionfruit at a neighbour’s property. It was a rainy day so they had to start later than planned.
By the time they had finished, Bruce and Denise were about to leave the home to attend a Christmas party.
“We’d just started school holidays, so we were happy to do our own thing,” Brad said. “ Dean and Daniel spent the morning wrestling in Mum and Dad’s room, and then Daniel decided to go shopping. He tried to get us to go with him to Sunshine Plaza, the local shopping centre in Maroochydore. Dean was going to ride his bike to a friend’s house and I remember that Daniel begged me to go with him, but I wanted to go the next day, on the Monday. I don’t really know why. I was just happy to be at home that day.”
Daniel had a shower and got ready to goto the shops. He put on a red Billabong t-shirt. He said he wanted to get a haircut and to buy Christmas presents for his family. He had saved $150 from fruit picking and he had the cash with him.
“I was at the computer when he left,” said Brad. “I heard him say goodbye over my shoulder, but I didn’t turn around. I didn’t really look at him as he said goodbye. He just walked out, off on his own.”
Daniel left the home and walked around 20 minutes to the bus stop at Kiel Mountain Road overpass. He waited for the bus there. He was planning to goto the Sunshine Plaza Shopping Centre.
A bus approached and Daniel tried to flag it down, but the driver did not stop. The bus driver was a man named Ross Edmonds and he later spoke about why he did not stop. He said that his bus had broken down that afternoon. His supervisor Jeff Norman organised a new bus for him, but that meant he was running late for his route.
“Jeff told me, he said: ‘you just go direct to Maroochydore, we’ll do the pick-ups’,” Ross said. They organised a second bus to pick up passengers so that Ross could get back on schedule.
Ross spoke about seeing Daniel try to flag the bus down. “He (the boy) lifted his finger … and I pointed to him (to indicate) there was another bus coming.”
Ross used the bus radio to tell the other driver that someone was waiting under the overpass and he continued on his route.
“Jeff told me he would pick anyone
up that was around,” he said.
Jeff’s bus came past the overpass within two minutes of the first bus, but there was nobody waiting at that point.
A local resident, Belinda Russell, was in the area at the time. She said she saw a “fairly young-looking boy with black hair” wearing a red T-shirt and “fairly white shoes” in the shadow of the Kiel Mountain Road overpass about 12.30pm to 1pm. She saw the boy try to flag the bus down and she saw the bus drive past him. Other witnesses reported seeing a scruffy looking man standing near the boy at the time.
Belinda said that shortly after that, she saw a sky blue sun-faded four-door sedan. The vehicle pulled sharply in front of her and was moving around violently.
“I could see a person which I thought was male in the back seat,” she said.
“He was punching and moving violently in the back of the seat, slightly to the right.”
Belinda was concerned that someone in the car was being beaten up. She tried to write down the car registration on the shopping list that she had with her, but her pen did not work.
Daniel’s parents became alarmed when he did not return home and they contacted police. A full investigation began the following day, December 8.
A major incident room was established at Maroochydore Police Station on December 9. The investigation involved over 100 police officers. During the course of the investigation, over 10,000 people were interviewed and over 22,000 job logs were created. Each job log represented a piece of information or physical evidence.
The police report would end up being over 10,000 pages long.
Brad spoke about the aftermath of Daniel’s disappearance. “It was incredibly difficult,” he said. His mother was crushed and distraught. “Dad was a bit stronger, trying to hold the family together. Dean was at work a lot of the time, trying to carry on, and I was at home by myself with Mum and Dad for the rest of the school holidays.”
Brad went back to school six weeks after Daniel’s disappearance. “That was a hard day,” he says.
“Normally, we’d have gone together on the bus, but Mum and Dad took me in the car. I remember walking in through the gates at the school knowing Daniel wasn’t beside me.”
According to the coroner, the investigation into Daniel’s case was the largest criminal investigation in Queensland history.
The police did things like place a full size model of the man that witnesses had seen at the bus stop with Daniel, at the site he disappeared from. After this happened, more than 300 tips were received.
“Our greatest hope, in those early days, was that there would be a quick and happy outcome,” said Brad. “We hoped that he would just one day walk through the front door, unexpectedly. We hoped he’d just arrive, out of the blue, and walk in the front door. But as time passed, that became less and less likely and, finally, about a year after, we began to accept that it probably wouldn’t happen like that.”
Denise kept Daniel’s room exactly as he had left it for years after he disappeared. She even kept some pyjamas folded on his bed, ready for when he came back.
“Mum kept the door closed a lot of the time, especially as time went on,” Braid said. “It was hard to look in there. Sometimes, I’d go in there and think, about us and where he might be, about what was happening. I felt a little closer to him.”
Denise finally packed his room away in 2006. “I put his clothes and things into boxes and stored them away,” she said. “That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. When we moved houses, I brought the boxes with us.”
By December 2008, the government had offered a reward of $250,000 for information in the case. Over $750,000 had also been donated privately.
In July 2009 (almost six years after he disappeared), Daniel’s parents called for a coronial inquest into his disappearance.
If you’re not familiar with what a coronial inquest is:
An inquest is a court hearing conducted by a coroner to gather information about the cause and circumstances of a death. An inquest isn’t a trial and there is no jury. It’s not about deciding whether a person is guilty of an offence or civilly liable.
Daniel’s parents said they requested the inquest as they thought it was time to ‘apply the legal blowtorch’ to some persons of interest in the case.
Bruce said at the time that recent publicity in the case had outed several key persons of interest.
“Most of that information is not new to us or new to police,” Mr Morcombe told the media.
“We’ve been able to keep those lines of inquiry out of the public arena, which police always say is helpful to the investigation.
“Now that they’re in the public arena it’s time for the state coroner to apply the due legal process to work through Daniel’s police case file and see what he can make of those persons of interest.”
Bruce said that he hoped the coroner’s ability to speak to key people ‘at the pointy end of the investigation’ under oath would lead to some movement in the case.
The inquest began the following year, on 11 October 2010. In August 2011, the inquest was adjourned. For a case of this size, it was a long, drawn out process. Despite the inquest running for ten months by that point, there had only been 23 hearing days. Evidence had been taken from 60 witnesses, including police officers and persons of interest. 760 exhibits were presented during the inquest.
By the time the inquest started, the Queensland Police Service had identified 35 persons of interest.
The coroner heard the evidence from investigators regarding the persons of interest. It was then ruled that six of them should be called to give evidence at the inquest. One of the people called was a man named Brett Peter Cowan.
Brett was born on 18 September, 1969, which would make him 34 at the time that Daniel disappeared. He was a local resident of the Sunshine Coast.
Brett had a lengthy criminal history. He first started offending when he was a child, aged around 9 or 10. His first conviction came in 1989 after he molested a seven-year-old boy in the public toilet of a playground. He was sentenced to two years for indecent dealing.
Four years after that, he had moved to Darwin in the Northern Territory. He was living in a caravan park. He molested a six-year-old boy in a violent attack. The child was left with a punctured lung. Brett left the child to die in an old car in the bush. The child managed to escape, and walked naked and bleeding to a service station (gas station) for help. The child’s eyes had haemorrhaghed from strangulation and police thought he had been run over by a car.
Brett denied any involvement in the attack until police said they had DNA evidence that linked him to it. He pleaded guilty in September 1993 to gross indecency, grievous bodily harm and deprivation of liberty and was sentenced to seven years in jail.
Brett was released on parole in 1998 and he moved to the Sunshine Coast. He became involved in the Christian Outreach Church. He met a woman named Tracey Moncrieff through the church. They got married in 1999 and had a child together.
The couple were living in Beerwah in 2003 when Daniel went missing. They divorced in 2004.
Brett was a suspect very early on in Daniel’s case. He was first interviewed by police two weeks after Daniel vanished.
Brett changed his name after Daniel disappeared to Shaddo N-Unyah Hunter.
When Brett appeared in front of the coroner he said “I had nothing to do with Daniel’s disappearance, nothing at all.”
Police conducted a ‘Mr Big’ operation in relation to Brett and his involvement in Daniel’s case.
Mr. Big (sometimes known as the Canadian technique) is a covert investigation procedure used by undercover police to elicit confessions from suspects in cold cases (usually murder). Police officers create a fictitious grey area or criminal organization and then seduce the suspect into joining it. They build a relationship with the suspect, gain their confidence, and then enlist their help in a succession of criminal acts (e.g., delivering goods, credit card scams, selling guns) for which they are paid. Once the suspect has become enmeshed in the criminal gang, they are persuaded to divulge information about their criminal history, usually as a prerequisite for being accepted as a member of the organization.
Queensland detectives disguised themselves as loan sharks and brothel madams. They managed to convince Brett that they were all members of the same criminal gang. They invited him in 2011 to join their fake gang. He was paid to stand over prostitutes and he was made to pay fake bribes to fake customs officers.
This went on for months and he was then invited to take part in a big operation. They told him it was worth $100,000. They told Brett they were worried though because they knew police had been watching him as a suspect in Daniel’s case.
The gang members promised to buy Brett an alibi and help him clean up the crime scene. They said they would do this so other ‘gang members’ would not feel the ‘heat’ from having him around.
Brett then confessed that he had snapped Daniel’s neck after he abducted him from the bus stop. He said he had stopped and offered to drive him to the shopping centre and that is how he got Daniel in the car.
Brett said that he wanted to molest Daniel and had not planned to murder him. He drove Daniel to a macadamia farm in a secluded area. He said he offered Daniel a drink and then tried to pull his pants down. Brett said he panicked when Daniel tried to flee. He dragged Daniel’s body into the bush in an old sand mining area and covered it up with branches and leaves.
After his confession, Brett was charged with Daniel’s murder in August 2011. Along with the murder charge, he was also charged with child stealing, deprivation of liberty, indecent treatment of a child under 16, and interfering with a corpse.
Detectives used the confession to figure out the area where Daniel’s remains had been dumped. On 21 August, 2011, they found two shoes and three human bones at a site in the Glass House Mountains. The shoes were similar to the ones Daniel had been wearing on the day he disappeared. They also found underpants and a belt. Police would end up finding 17 bones, including a rib, hip, leg, arm and vertebrae.
Police used DNA from Daniel’s toothbrush to confirm the remains belonged to him.
Daniel’s family held a funeral for him in December 2012. More than 2,000 people attended.
Brett’s trial began on 10 February, 2014. It ran until 7 March that year. 116 witnesses gave evidence and over 200 exhibits were presented. Brett pleaded not guilty and declined to give evidence at the trial.
His defence argued that he’d made up the confession because he badly wanted to be part of the crime gang.
His barrister Angus Edwards tried to argue that another convicted child sex offender Douglas Jackway, was to blame for Daniel’s death, and that Douglas may have told other criminals where he’d placed Daniel’s body, and that those criminals may have passed details onto Brett.
On 13 March, 2014, Brett was found guilty on all charges. He was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
He was also sentenced to three-and-a-half years’ imprisonment for indecently dealing with Daniel, and two years for interfering with his corpse, those sentences to be served concurrently. Judge Roslyn Atkinson said “I don’t think you should be released in 20 years’ time”.
Brett appealed his sentence, His legal team argued “… that the confession elicited through an undercover sting by police was inadmissible as evidence at trial”. On 21 May 2015, the appeal was dismissed. The former Queensland Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie had appealed to have Brett’s 20-year minimum sentence increased. This was also dismissed.
Daniel would be 35 years old if he was alive today. Since his murder, his family have established the Daniel Morcombe Foundation.
Today we build a future where children are safe from harm and abuse and can have the opportunity to thrive.
We would like to see a future where all children and young people are provided with education, protection and support to be safe from abuse and risk of harm.
The Daniel Morcombe Foundation provides personal child safety education to children and young people to prevent abuse and promote lifelong health and wellbeing. We support educators, parents and carers through the provision of resources and education and also directly support young victims of crime.
Every year, the foundation holds a ‘Day for Daniel.’’
Australia’s largest child safety education and awareness day
Day for Daniel
Friday 31 October, 2025
Held annually on the last Friday of October, Day for Daniel honours the memory of Daniel Morcombe. We ask all Australians on this very special day to Wear Red, Educate and Donate.
This year, the Queensland government is set to introduce ‘Daniel’s Law.’ This law will mean that a publicly accessible sex offender registry is available. It would allow parents to search the names and photos of the offenders.
“It (a public sex offender register) is not a silver bullet because if you haven’t been caught you won’t be on the register,” Bruce said.
“But that doesn’t mean it’s not a great step in the right direction. We think it is important to keeping Queenslanders safe.
“It will be important in the domino effect to get all of Australia up and running with a Daniel’s Law.”
Under Queensland’s law, the register would have three tiers, including a public website with names and photos of offenders who breach reporting obligations.
The public would also be able to apply to find out which high-risk offenders live in their area.
Under the third tier, parents and guardians would be able to inquire about adults who have unsupervised time with their children.
“To ordinary mums and dads out there please, don’t fall into the trap of thinking ‘that won’t happen to me’,” Bruce said.
“A publicly accessible sex offender register will be helpful. But at the end of the day you must look after your kids, make sure you are one step ahead of who they are chatting to online.”
SOURCE LIST
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Daniel_Morcombe
https://www.smh.com.au/national/morcombes-parents-call-for-inquest-20090705-d8qr.html
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-13/brett-peter-cowan-has-a-lengthy-criminal-history/5318564