Daniel Morcombe trial: What the jury wasn’t told about Brett Cowan
HE twice went to jail for snatch and rape attacks on young boys, lost count of how many other children he’d abused and carried out violent and depraved sexual fantasies on the women he dated.
This was the side of predator Brett Peter Cowan the jury deciding his fate could not be told.
The Courier-Mail can now reveal Cowan’s sadistic past, including that he began abusing children from the age of nine and once told police he’d been sexually active since the age of eight.
BRETT COWAN GUILTY OF MURDERING DANIEL MORCOMBE
The 44-year-old former tow truck driver and father-of-three was today convicted of Australia’s highest profile child abduction case when a jury found him guilty of murdering Sunshine Coast teenager Daniel Morcombe.
Brett Peter Cowan abducted and killed Daniel Morcombe. He had a history of deviant behaviour and had been jailed twice for abusing children Source: Supplied
The 13-year-old vanished while waiting for a bus under the Kiel Mountain Rd overpass near Woombye on December 7, 2003.
Cowan was arrested eight years later following a sophisticated undercover sting that ended with him leading them to Daniel’s remains.
It can now be revealed that Cowan:
TOOK a seven-year-old boy from a playgroup and molested him in a toilet block, putting his hands around the boy’s throat when the distraught child threatened to tell his mother;
LEFT a second child, aged six, with horrific and life-threatening injuries after raping him in Darwin;
ADMITTED to abusing up to 30 children while a child himself by luring them into the change rooms of a local swimming pool;
SEXUALLY assaulted children in the lead-up to Daniel’s disappearance in a series of incidents not reported to police;
FORCED a girlfriend into a bizarre and violent kidnap and rape role play years after killing Daniel; and
SUBJECTED partners to violent sex acts, including repeatedly choking one into unconsciousness.