Chapter 19
Two Alight, One Extinguished
The disappearance and death of Daniel Morcombe
‘This is how stupid we were. We thought if we had boys they would be safe …’
Daniel Morcombe had long been to Australia what Madeleine McCann is to England – the most recognisable missing child in the country.
Tragically, Daniel’s remains were located in the Sunshine Coast hinterland in 2011; Madeleine, who was apparently snatched from her bed in Portugal in 2007, has never been found.
While Madeleine’s parents are still searching for their missing daughter, Daniel’s parents, Bruce and Denise Morcombe, continue a heartfelt crusade to teach children about their personal safety.
It has been a gut-wrenching journey for the Morcombes, who have made sure not only that we never forget the smiling face of their blue-eyed boy, but that we work together as a nation to make Australia a safer place for our children.
•••
It was an overcast December day when Daniel decided at the last minute to go shopping for Christmas presents for his family.
‘Daniel and his twin Brad and their older brother Dean used to pick passionfruit for the man next door,’ Daniel’s mum, Denise, recounts. ‘It had been a busy season, and Daniel had been saving money for Christmas.’ Usually the boys started fruit picking around breakfast time, but it had been raining so the man next door asked them to come by when the showers had eased. The slightly later start meant they wouldn’t make it in time to attend a work Christmas party with their parents, Bruce and Denise, who were successful regional managers for the well-known ‘Jim’s’ franchise.
After finishing work, Daniel, dressed in a red Billabong T-shirt, dark shorts and Globe brand runners, asked his twin brother, Brad, if he wanted to go shopping. Initially Brad said no, but changed his mind while taking a shower.
When Brad had finished in the bathroom, he noticed that Daniel had already left and was heading up the long driveway of the family property at Palmwoods in the lush hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. He figured it was too late to catch up.
It wasn’t unusual for Daniel to catch the bus to the Sunshine Plaza Shopping Centre alone; less than a fortnight shy of his fourteenth birthday, he was surely old enough to go by himself, and if he was ever going to be late home, he’d use his phone card to call his mum or dad.
Late, in Daniel’s case, was not eleven or twelve at night as it is for some teenagers; it was four in the afternoon. Daniel was no rebellious youth; he was a quiet, well-adjusted boy who loved riding ponies and motocross bikes with his brothers. ‘We thought it was a beautiful place to live…a small, rural community,’ Daniel’s dad, Bruce, reflects. ‘It was a good life.’
But that good life turned into a horror story when Daniel failed to return home that afternoon.
‘We got home at about four on that Sunday,’ Denise begins, her soft voice recounting the dreadful story yet again. ‘Dean wasn’t home and Brad was at a friend’s place. We spoke to Brad and he said that Daniel had gone down to the plaza.’
Denise drove to the bus stop to see if Daniel had caught the four o’clock bus but he hadn’t. Bruce went to the bus stop an hour later but Daniel hadn’t caught that bus either. ‘By then we knew something wasn’t right,’ Denise says. ‘It wasn’t like him at all. He would have phoned. He’d even shown me that he had a new phone card.’
Back home, Denise checked the bus timetable on the internet, and saw that the last bus to Palmwoods was the one that left at five o’clock, so she and Bruce drove back to the plaza in the hope that Daniel had simply missed the bus and was still there. ‘By this time I was panicking a little bit,’ Denise remembers haltingly.
When he wasn’t at the bus stop Denise phoned the bus company and asked the drivers if they’d seen her son. Again, she had no luck.
‘We didn’t know if he’d got hit by a car…we just didn’t know,’ she says.
Beside themselves, Denise and Bruce went to Maroochydore District Police Headquarters to report Daniel missing, but the officer in charge told them to come back the next day to file an official report. ‘We came home after the police told us to hang tight,’ Denise says, mystified as to why the police didn’t start looking for Daniel straightaway. They did alert other police stations via radio, but it was Bruce and Denise who began the search that night.
‘The property is 5 acres so we searched around it with torches…looking in the dam. We also went back to the underpass where Daniel would have waited for the bus, but we didn’t find him there either,’ Bruce recalls.
When Daniel had been gone the entire night, the grim reality started to set in. ‘Early in the morning, Bruce was just bawling in the bedroom,’ Denise says. ‘We just knew there was something wrong. You just had that feeling in your stomach…it just wasn’t like him not to phone.’
Thirteen hours after their first visit to the police station, Bruce and Denise reported Daniel missing a second time, at which time police undertook a massive search, combing the scrub around the underpass, canvassing motorists, and interviewing known child abductors and paedophiles in the area. But as the days rolled on, the gentle teenager was nowhere to be found.
Twelve days after he disappeared, Daniel missed out on his and Brad’s fourteenth birthday so it became a day of commemoration, not celebration. ‘To recognise his birthday we had a priest, some family friends…maybe ten people on the front lawn. It was a calm, still day,’ Bruce recalls. ‘A couple of prayers were read. The three boys’ baptism candles were lit in the middle of the table, then halfway through the reading of a prayer, one puffed out and the other two continued to burn. We wondered – what’s that all about? It was just a visual image that can’t be explained. We found it a bit haunting …’
Time continued to pass with no sign of Daniel, even though the Morcombes and Queensland Police saturated the media with images of the missing boy.
Early in the investigation, police believed they had a rough idea of what happened to Daniel but didn’t know where to find him. ‘Daniel’s case was a suspected abduction and murder,’ Denise says. ‘We knew early on that we’d probably never see him again.’
Patching together witness accounts from passers-by and the bus company, police learned that the bus Daniel hailed on the Kiel Road underpass, about 2 kilometres north of the Big Pineapple, drove past him without stopping. It was a replacement bus for another one that had broken down around the bend, and the driver had been instructed not to pick up any more passengers as another bus was on its way.
It was just a three-minute wait between the buses, but in that short time, Daniel vanished. ‘Denise and I have spent seven and a half years trying to fill in that three minutes,’ Bruce says.
The first possible clue as to what happened in those crucial few minutes came from motorists who noticed a man lurking in the shadows of the underpass, just behind Daniel.
Several witnesses also observed a square-shaped mid-eighties blue sedan nearby, while others also reported a whitish van in the area at the same time. ‘Many dozens of road-users saw Daniel,’ Bruce reveals. ‘Some said they felt something was wrong because he was dressed neatly but the shadows-man was not dressed in the same manner. They thought, “He doesn’t look like the lad’s father.”’
Some of the motorists noticed that Daniel had a stick in his hand, which he was using to draw pictures in the dirt while he was waiting for the bus. Then, as the first bus approached, he tried to hail it by raising the stick in the air. ‘Did Daniel suspect he was in danger?’ his dad wonders. ‘Was this a signal to say, “Please help me”?’
The Morcombes were convinced that someone knew the truth about Daniel’s disappearance, and with the help of the public, they hoped to find answers.
‘Right from the word go, we received letters, cards, food hampers, printing for flyers, and offers to help find him,’ Denise says. ‘Volunteers came forward to do things, people held fundraisers…one little girl even had a barbecue out the front of her home and raised $5. People have always wanted to help.’
The Morcombes seized upon the community goodwill and in May 2005 set up the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation designed not only to fund the search for Daniel, but also to help child victims of crime and promote child safety. The Foundation’s motto is ‘Protection, Safety and Opportunity for Children’, and it operates on donations from individuals and businesses around the country.
The Foundation quickly gained momentum, garnering support from high-profile names like Australia Zoo’s Terri Irwin, teenage sailor Jessica Watson and then Queensland Premier Anna Bligh. Under the Morcombes’ guidance, the Foundation established several fundraising and child safety awareness events, including the now famous ‘Day for Daniel’, the ‘Dance for Daniel’ and the ‘Ride for Daniel’, all of which continue to attract support from all sectors of the community.
‘We’ve had four or five Rides for Daniel,’ Denise says. ‘Bikers turn up and they want to help. We get a lot who are weekend riders but some are from clubs. They might look rough but they’ve got hearts of gold.’
The downside to all the community goodwill is that everyone recognises the Morcombes, and the temptation for people who have lost children to disclose their own tragedies can become draining. ‘Sometimes you just want to go to the shop and get the groceries and go home,’ Denise says. ‘But our lives will never be that simple again.’
The Morcombes’ lives became even more complicated in October 2010, when a coronial inquest sought to find out what had happened to Daniel, who was responsible, and how well the investigation had been handled. For the first time, the Morcombes saw the full police brief of evidence – including 18,000 pieces of information and 10,000 police interviews.
Part way through the inquest, the proceeding was adjourned so that the coroner could consider the way forward. With the hearing in hiatus, the Morcombes decided to take a much-needed break. They flew to the UK where they met with Gerry and Kate McCann, the high-profile parents of abducted toddler Madeleine.
The McCanns live in a small English village, north of Leicester, where they continue to hold out hope they’ll be reunited with their daughter. ‘We enjoyed a beer, shared each other’s tragedy and drew some parallels,’ Bruce says.
Their three-hour meeting at the pub went by quickly, so the McCanns invited the Morcombes to stay over at their place the following week. ‘We really understood each other,’ explains Denise. ‘The thing is, there are support groups for families of murder victims, but Daniel hadn’t been found, and there is no-one to support families of missing kids like him. So meeting the McCanns was a real help to us, just knowing that they understood where we were coming from and vice versa.’
‘We’ll probably be friends for life,’ Bruce adds.
Not long after arriving back in Australia, the investigation into Daniel’s disappearance went into overdrive.
The nation learned that undercover police had spent months watching the every move of forty-four-year-old former truck driver, Brett Peter Cowan, who had earlier been called to the inquest as a ‘person of interest’.
Cowan, a father of three, had been living in a van at Perth’s Crystal Brook Caravan Park with no idea that his neighbours were detectives whose specialty was covert surveillance.
After months of spying on Cowan, police arrested him over Daniel’s murder on 13 August 2011. He was also charged with deprivation of liberty, child stealing, indecent treatment and interfering with a corpse.
The Morcombes were flooded with messages from Australians everywhere, who wanted the family to know they held them in their hearts.
The next big breakthrough came when police mounted a search for the teenager’s remains in an area off Kings Road at Beerwah in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland.
Suddenly, it was all happening so quickly. Bruce and Denise visited the search area for a few minutes, where they gazed into the bushland and offered ‘a silent prayer’ for their missing son.
Soon after, the search party found a pair of shoes and some human bones. DNA tests were fast-tracked and revealed that the bones belonged to Daniel Morcombe, missing for eight years.
•••
No-one would argue that the Morcombes have been through more than most people can ever imagine. Now they have a lengthy court proceeding ahead of them that could prove just as gruelling.
Throughout it all, however, they have never lost sight of their goal to protect Australian children.
In September 2011, Bruce and Denise agreed to help devise a child safety awareness curriculum for Queensland schools, which former Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, hoped would be adopted Australia-wide. As part of the curriculum, which Bruce says is not about scare-mongering but ‘life-saving skills’, they are considering the introduction of a universal hand signal that children can use to get attention if they are in any kind of danger.
‘In fact, anyone at risk could use the signal,’ Bruce explains. ‘Even rock fishermen who are in need of help.’
It’s another great idea from the couple who were nominated, but missed out on, Australian of the Year awards in 2012. The Morcombes don’t do anything for themselves, though, it’s all for the kids, so they saw the award ceremony as just another way of getting people to talk about child safety.
Despite their dedication to the cause and the incredible energy they give to others, Bruce and Denise are still coming to terms with the reality that their son’s remains have finally been found. Daniel’s brothers, too, are still trying to cope with his loss. They generally keep a low public profile these days for self-preservation, but Daniel is never far from their hearts. Or arms, in Dean’s case.
‘Dean, who is two and a half years older than his brothers, dedicated an arm to Daniel,’ Bruce says. ‘It’s a tattoo that says “Never Forget – Memories” and is a life depiction of Daniel’s face.’
Winding its way up Dean’s arm, there’s also a red rose, and a permanent reminder of Daniel’s fourteenth birthday: three candles, one for each of the brothers.
Two are alight, and one extinguished.