Top cop's eerie coincidence with Daniel Morcombe's killer

News.com.au

13-05-2025

Last week, Bruce and Denise Morcombe, the parents of Daniel Morcombe, who was tragically abducted from a Sunshine Coast bus stop in 2003 and brutally murdered, released a documentary about the case, and everything that has come after.
Don't Waste It: The Daniel Morcombe Story, marks 20 years of the Morcombe Foundation, the charity that sprung up in the horror-filled aftermath of his death, in the hopes of keeping kids safe under Daniel's legacy.
And while Bruce Morcombe describes the film as 'a story of positivity and hope, in spite of its heavy content', one top cop who was closely involved with the murder investigation has expressed his belief that Daniel's murder could have been prevented, had an horrific and eerily similar case he was involved in two decades earlier, had a different outcome.
Retired homicide detective Daren Edwards appeared this week on Gary Jubelin's I Catch Killers podcast, where he detailed the extraordinary circumstances in which he was involved in the arrest of murderer and child molestor Brett Peter Cowan – not once, but twice.
In September 1993, while living at a Darwin caravan park, Cowan lured a six-year-old boy into an abandoned car yard and raped him. The child was so severely injured when he wandered, dazed and scared into a local petrol station, that police initially assumed he had been hit by a car.
'There was a BP service station, and the caravan bark surrounded it, but it was isolated, there was no other housing around or anything like that,' recalls Edwards.
'It was early days of using DNA, but the Northern Territory was quite advanced in those days, and the initial examination by the crime scene officer said there was what they believed was semen on (the victim's) underpants. So we realised if we could get DNA we would get some evidence against the actual offender.'
As the team went through the caravan park seeking DNA samples from all the residents, it quickly became evident that Cowan was the only male resident who refused to give a sample.
After a background check revealed Cowan had a former conviction for child molestation in Brisbane in 1987, in which the child had testified against him, Cowan quickly confessed to the latest rape – claiming that in spite of the horrific injuries the child had sustained, including evidence that he had been choked – had not intended to kill him.
Edwards doesn't buy that.
'He didn't get that long at all,' he says in disgust. 'I think he only got about four years. Cowan saw a need to say something because he realised that there was evidence of him deliberately choking that boy out. And the only reason you would choke that boy out was really to kill him.'
Edwards believed Cowan had been intending to kill the child to prevent him being able to testify against him, as his former victim in Brisbane had.
Nearly 20 years later, working on the Sunshine Coast, Edwards was part of the team that, after an eight-year investigation including one of the most impressive stings in modern police history, finally took down Cowan for the murder of Daniel Morcombe.
Cowan, after being convinced he was being initiated into an elite criminal gang, had agreed to show the gang's boss where he'd hidden Daniel's body, on the proviso that the boss' alleged links with high level police would grant him immunity for the crime.
The 'gang members' were in fact undercover police officers, who were prepared to arrest Cowan on the spot as soon as they'd uncovered Daniel's remains.
'Out of 1000 acres of bushland, for him to be able to take them to that spot and go, 'I chucked his body over there' … I think we found his skateboard shoes initially, and some bones,' Edwards says, adding that the fact that he was present for both arrests was 'a full circle moment.'
'To be there again, that many years later, when he's arrested again for a crime where he talks about strangling … that's what he did to that little boy in Darwin,' Edwards adds sadly.
'It was a strange set of circumstances.'
But coincidence aside, one thing still plagues the ex-cop still.
'We were all pretty annoyed (during the trial for the 1993 rape) that they hadn't run with charging him with attempted murder,' he says.
'And you know, a lot of the guys said that things might have been different if he had been serving eight or nine years for attempted murder in Darwin. (Daniel's murder) might not have happened. It's a stretch of the bow, I know, but a lot police still have that attitude, and maybe the Morcombes do too.'