Brett Peter Cowan was convicted in the Supreme Court of Queensland at Brisbane on March 13, 2014 of the murder of a Sunshine Coast boy, Daniel, together with two further offenses. All three counts were charged as having occurred on December 7, 2003 at Glass House Mountains, a small town in the hinterland behind the coast. The next day the court sentenced him to life imprisonment and fixed his parole eligibility at 20 years, five years beyond the minimum then set for murder in Queensland. Queensland's Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal against conviction, and the Attorney-General's appeal against the sentence, on May 21, 2015. On March 11, 2016 the High Court of Australia refused him special leave to appeal, and with that refusal the case left the criminal courts.
Cowan had been known to police as a person of interest within two weeks of the boy's death. He was interviewed in 2003, again in 2005 and again in 2006, and each time he denied any part in it. No direct evidence tied him to the crime for nearly eight years. What brought him to trial was a confession made in Perth in August 2011 to undercover police officers who had spent four months persuading him that they were members of a powerful criminal organization. The way that confession was obtained, and whether a jury should ever have been allowed to hear it, became the central legal question of the case, argued before a trial judge, two judges of the Court of Appeal and a bench of the High Court.
Cowan was born in Bunbury, Western Australia, in September 1969. By the time the investigation turned toward him, he already had a long record. He had convictions in Queensland from the age of 17, mostly for property, drug and fraud offenses, which drew short sentences. The record also included dishonesty offenses such as stealing and false pretenses. He held irregular jobs and left some of them out of boredom.
The more serious part of his history involved children. In 1989 a Queensland court sentenced him to two years' imprisonment for an offense against a child committed in 1987. In 1994, in the Northern Territory, he was sentenced to an effective term of seven years' imprisonment for further offenses against a child, committed at Darwin in 1993. The Court of Appeal later described his offending against children as having escalated over time.
He served part of the Northern Territory sentence before transferring to Queensland so that he could complete a treatment program for sexual offenders. He was released in 1997 or 1998 and spent two and a half years on parole on the Sunshine Coast. In mid-1999 he moved to Beerwah, a town in the hinterland a short drive from Glass House Mountains, and he lived there until early 2004. He picked up further minor convictions in 2004 and 2006. By 2011 he was living in Western Australia, in Perth.
The boy lived at Palmwoods, on the Sunshine Coast. In March 2014 a Queensland jury found that Cowan had murdered him on the afternoon of Sunday, December 7, 2003.
The State Coroner, who delivered formal findings on the death in 2019, found that the boy died that same afternoon, and that the police response in the hours that followed could not be said to have contributed to his death in any way, and that the only person responsible for it was Cowan.
The Queensland Police Service opened its investigation on the morning of December 8, 2003. A major incident room was set up at the Maroochydore police station the next day. Over the years that followed, investigators created more than 22,000 job logs, each one a piece of information or a physical exhibit that had to be followed up and recorded. More than 100 officers worked on the case, and more than 10,000 people were interviewed. The written police report on the inquiry, with its annexures, ran to more than 10,000 pages. The State Coroner later called it, by any measure, the largest criminal investigation in Queensland's history.
The inquiry gathered more than 33 persons of interest, a number that had grown to 35 by 2010. Some of them confessed to the crime, and none of those confessions led anywhere. The coercive powers of the state's Crime and Misconduct Commission were brought in, and 14 people were summoned to give evidence at its hearings. Much of the early effort went into tracing a blue car that a large number of witnesses described, and the coroner later concluded that the emphasis on that car was justified by the number of witnesses who reported it.
Cowan came into the investigation through an intelligence operation that the Sunshine Coast District Intelligence Office had set up before December 2003 to gather information on child sex offenders living in the district. Officers from Task Force Argos, the state's specialist unit for crimes against children, worked through the names on that database, and Cowan was among them. He drew attention because of his two earlier convictions for offenses against children.
Two officers from Task Force Argos spoke to him on December 21 and 22, 2003. He told them that he had driven from Beerwah to Nambour that afternoon to borrow a piece of garden equipment from a friend, and back again. He cooperated with police, and the people he named supported parts of his account. One of the two officers later said that he came away regarding Cowan as a strong suspect, and the pair briefed the incident room on December 22. The coroner found that their concerns were heard, and that investigators followed up on Cowan's vehicle within days.
The police interviewed him again on July 6, 2005, and established that he had set out earlier than he first said, which put him in the area at about the relevant time. On September 14, 2006, when officers raised the possibility that he had not been back in Beerwah before three o'clock that afternoon, he produced a new explanation: he said he had stopped on the way to see an acquaintance in Beerwah, where he often spent half an hour. The acquaintance confirmed that he visited often but could not say whether he had come that day.
For years that account could not be disproved. An officer who reported on Cowan in 2010 said that he had been fairly satisfied with Cowan's explanation of his movements, and that in his view there were then more factors pointing away from Cowan than toward him. Police at the 2010 inquest hearings had largely accepted that Cowan would have had too little time to commit the crime. A detailed review of the evidence on Cowan by another officer, completed in early 2011, set the stage for the alibi to be tested in open court.
In early 2010 the Queensland Police Service sent the State Coroner a report on the investigation, making plain that officers suspected the boy was dead and that the death was likely to have been violent or otherwise unnatural. The coroner accepted jurisdiction over a suspected death and, after receiving submissions, decided that an inquest was in the public interest. The inquest into the boy's suspected death opened in Brisbane on October 11, 2010.
It sat for 23 days before it was adjourned in August 2011. Evidence was taken from more than 60 witnesses, including police officers, eyewitnesses, persons of interest and their associates, and 760 exhibits were tendered. After hearing from investigators about each of the main persons of interest, the coroner directed that six of them be called to give evidence. Cowan was the only one of them to whom the allegation that he had killed the boy was put directly.
He gave evidence on March 31 and April 1, 2011, the 18th and 19th days of the inquest. He had flown in from Western Australia, where he was then living. He had no lawyer, and he was not warned of his right to claim privilege against self-incrimination. Over the two days he was cross-examined at length about his criminal history and about the alibi he had given in 2006. The evidence of the two people he had named made his account untenable: both had been elsewhere in Beerwah at the time he claimed to have been with them. The coroner later found that this effectively disproved his alibi during his cross-examination. When he was excused on April 1, Cowan remained the main focus of the police investigation, and he still had not admitted anything.
The operation that followed began the same day. On April 1, 2011, on Cowan's flight back to Western Australia from the inquest, an undercover police officer befriended him. Over the following months he was drawn into what seemed to be a criminal gang. Every member of it was a police officer. Thirty-six undercover officers from Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria took part.
Over about three months Cowan took part in 25 staged scenarios. Each appeared to involve a crime, and they grew more serious as the weeks went on, but no offense was actually committed in any of them. He was paid for his part. The members of the supposed gang kept returning to the same themes: honesty, loyalty and trust. They told him that the organization was powerful, that it could fix problems for its members, including through connections inside the police, and that he was free to leave at any time. The scenarios were planned to build toward a meeting with the gang's boss, and toward a large job that would earn Cowan about $100,000.
The inquest gave the police a lever. At the request of the police, the coroner agreed on June 3, 2011 to time a notice recalling Cowan to the inquest so that it suited the operation. The notice, requiring him to return to give further evidence on October 26, 2011, was signed on July 29, 2011. Undercover officers raised it with him on August 4, in the same conversations in which the big job was discussed, and the police later said that they meant to use the notice to keep pressure on him. The Court of Appeal treated the notice itself as validly issued.
On August 9, 2011 Cowan met the boss in Perth. The boss told him that the organization could help sort out his problem with the inquest, but only if he told the whole truth, so that the organization knew exactly what had to be dealt with. Up to that point Cowan had maintained that he had nothing to do with the boy's death. At that meeting he confessed, in detail, to the crimes.
The courts that later examined the confession found that he made it for his own reasons. He wanted a false alibi to use when the inquest resumed, he wanted to stay in the gang, and he wanted his share of the big job. The meeting was recorded on video.
On August 10, 2011 he flew to Queensland with undercover officers. On August 13, 2011 he was arrested and charged. He made no admissions to the officers who arrested him and declined to be interviewed. The inquest, which had been adjourned on August 13 under section 29(3)(a) of the Coroners Act 2003, was adjourned again once the coroner learned that he had been charged.
After the inquest, Cowan had changed his name to Shaddo N-Unyah Hunter. Both names appeared on the indictment.
Cowan was charged with murder and with two further offenses arising from the same events, and was committed to stand trial in the Supreme Court of Queensland on indictment No. 323 of 2013. In November 2013, over several days, the trial judge heard pre-trial applications under section 590AA of the Criminal Code. The defense abandoned an application for a permanent stay of the prosecution and pressed two others.
The first sought to exclude everything Cowan had said to the undercover officers, including admissions by words or conduct, and all the evidence that flowed from those statements. The defense argued that the confessions were not voluntary, and that in any event they should be excluded in the court's discretion as unfair. The second sought to exclude evidence of his earlier offending against two other boys.
In a ruling delivered on December 12, 2013, the trial judge refused the first application and granted the second. On the confessions, she found that undercover officers posing as criminals were not persons in authority, and so could not induce an involuntary confession in the legal sense; that the methods the police had used were not improper; and that Cowan had made his admissions in the exercise of a free choice. The defense conceded that the admissions were not unreliable. The judge did not accept Cowan's evidence that police had told him he had to talk or be arrested.
On the earlier offending, the judge applied the test set by the High Court in Pfennig v The Queen, under which evidence of that kind is admissible only if, viewed in the context of the whole prosecution case, there is no reasonable view of it consistent with innocence. She found real differences between the earlier offenses and the charged ones, noted that the earlier complainants' recollections had changed over time, and took account of the fact that other people with histories of offending against children may have been in the area at the time. She called the question finely balanced, and concluded that the prejudice of the evidence outweighed its probative value. The jury would never hear of Cowan's earlier convictions. The ruling was published only after the verdict.
The trial opened on February 10, 2014 in the Supreme Court at Brisbane. Six potential jurors were excused that morning over concerns about whether they could be impartial, and a jury of 15, including three reserves, was empaneled before the lunch break. Cowan, then 44, pleaded not guilty to all three counts, under both of his names. The prosecution read out a list of 158 people who might be called as witnesses, and the trial was expected to last up to six weeks. Before the evidence began, the judge explained what the jury would have to consider, including the elements of murder and of the alternative of manslaughter.
The prosecution's case rested on the confessions. Jurors watched the secretly recorded meeting in which Cowan described the crimes to the gang's boss. In closing, after four weeks of evidence, the Crown argued that he had confessed again and again, that he knew things only the person responsible could have known, and that confessions of that kind were unlikely to be made unless they were true. The Crown asked the jury to set aside the evidence about the blue car, which, it said, did not match the registration details witnesses had given.
The defense asked the jury not to be overwhelmed by the confessions and to weigh all of the evidence. Its case was that Cowan had confessed falsely because he believed the men he was talking to belonged to a powerful criminal gang that could make him money, and that he had told them what they wanted to hear in order to keep his place. The defense also pointed to another man who had been among the persons of interest and who was never charged. The Crown answered that no evidence placed that man at the scene.
The trial judge directed the jury that there was no direct evidence linking the other man to the offending, and that the defense hypothesis had to be excluded beyond reasonable doubt before the jury could convict. Defense counsel asked for a further direction on the prosecution's burden of proof, and the judge refused it. That refusal became one of the grounds of appeal.
On March 13, 2014, after deliberating for almost eight hours, the jury of six men and six women returned unanimous verdicts of guilty on all three counts.
The sentencing hearing followed the next day, March 14, 2014. For murder the only penalty available was life imprisonment, and the question was when Cowan would first become eligible for parole. The default was 15 years. The Crown asked for longer, relying on the criminal history the jury had not heard. The defense argued for leniency on the basis that he had not intended to kill.
The judge fixed his parole eligibility at 20 years. Her reasons, as the Court of Appeal later summarized them, rested on his criminal history, the gravity of the offending, the need for punishment, community protection, denunciation and deterrence. She noted that fixing a date for parole eligibility does not mean release on that date, which would be a matter for the parole authorities. His health problems, including emphysema, could be managed in custody and did not warrant a lighter sentence. On the two further counts she imposed concurrent terms of three and a half years and two years. She declared 945 days of pre-sentence custody as time already served. On that sentence, Cowan will first be eligible to apply for parole in 2031.
The Attorney-General of Queensland said the same week that he was reviewing the penalty and taking advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions. He then appealed, arguing that a 20-year period was manifestly inadequate.
The two appeals were heard together in Brisbane on November 26 and 27, 2014. Cowan appealed against his conviction in CA No 77 of 2014, and the Attorney-General appealed against the sentence in CA No 53 of 2014. Three judges sat. Before judgment was delivered, the Chief Justice withdrew from the case on May 7, 2015, and under section 31 of the Supreme Court of Queensland Act 1991 the court was constituted by the two remaining judges, the President of the Court of Appeal and a Judge of Appeal. Each gave separate reasons, and they agreed on the orders.
Cowan's first ground was that the confessions, and all the evidence derived from them, should have been excluded. His lawyers argued it two ways. Under section 10 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1894, a confession induced by a threat or promise held out by a person in authority is inadmissible, and they contended that the cross-examination at the inquest had been exactly that kind of inducement, and that the police had then used the notice recalling him to the inquest to turn up the pressure. In the alternative, they argued that the court's discretion should have been used to exclude the confessions for unfairness, as an abuse of process or on grounds of public policy, because he had repeatedly declined to make admissions and the state had used the coronial process to overcome that refusal.
The President rejected both arguments. The coroner and counsel assisting had not acted improperly and had held out no threat or promise. Even if the inquest had amounted to an inducement, the confessions came four months later, in another state, to people Cowan believed were his criminal associates. "I am satisfied the appellant made the confessions, not because of any threat or promise held out at the inquest," she wrote. The court also rejected a narrower argument that section 10 could apply only to confessions made to persons in authority, holding that the section could reach some situations of that kind but did not reach this one.
On the discretion, the court found no illegality by the undercover officers, by the police generally, or by the coroner and his staff. Cowan had never exercised his right to silence: he had spoken to police voluntarily on many occasions and had simply denied involvement each time. The officers in Perth, the President wrote, "were not exercising the coercive power of the state when he confessed." She was not persuaded that fairness or public policy, separately or together, required the confessions to be excluded, and found that the trial judge's discretion had been soundly exercised. The Judge of Appeal agreed, adding that a positive, wholly exculpatory account went well beyond merely refraining from self-accusation.
The second ground concerned the jury directions about the other man the defense had pointed to. The court held that the directions, read as a whole, fairly explained the defense case and correctly stated that the hypothesis had to be excluded beyond reasonable doubt. "There has been no misdirection on a matter of law," the President wrote.
On the Attorney-General's appeal, the court recalled that it could intervene only if the sentence was so unreasonable as to reveal an error. The sentencing judge had taken every relevant matter into account, and no Queensland case had yet postponed parole eligibility beyond 20 years for a single murder. "The sentence is not manifestly inadequate," the President concluded. The Judge of Appeal agreed that no specific error had been identified. On May 21, 2015 both appeals were dismissed.
Cowan applied to the High Court of Australia for special leave to appeal against his conviction. The application was heard by three justices on March 11, 2016. His counsel argued that the coronial inquest had been flawed, that the questions put to him by counsel assisting had operated as a threat or promise about his alibi, and that those pressures had carried through into his confession to the undercover police. Counsel for the Crown answered that the inquest had been conducted lawfully.
The bench accepted that Cowan had been strongly encouraged at the inquest to tell the truth, but found that he had not been improperly influenced. It was not persuaded that the conviction should be reconsidered, and special leave was refused that day. No further appeal was open to him.
In March 2016, when the High Court refused special leave, Cowan was 46 and serving his life sentence in Queensland. In October 2026 he was still serving it in that state. Under the sentence imposed on March 14, 2014 he will first be eligible to apply for parole in 2031. Whether he is released at any point after that date is a decision for Queensland's parole authorities.
The question that decided Cowan's case was whether Australian law allowed a jury to hear a confession made to police officers posing as criminals. Two separate rules were in play. The first was statutory. Section 10 of Queensland's Criminal Law Amendment Act 1894 makes a confession inadmissible if it was induced by a threat or promise held out by a person in authority. Cowan's lawyers argued that the inducement came from the inquest, where the coroner and counsel assisting plainly were persons in authority, and that the gang had simply harvested its effect. The courts rejected that chain of reasoning on the facts: there had been no threat or promise at the inquest, and Cowan's confession four months later was driven by his own wish for a false alibi, a place in the gang and money.
The second rule was the court's discretion to exclude a voluntary confession that it would be unfair to use, or whose use would offend public policy. Here the Court of Appeal applied a line of High Court authority, including Tofilau v The Queen, R v Swaffield and Pavic v The Queen. The Court of Appeal found no illegality in Cowan's case and no exercise of a right to silence that the police had overridden, since Cowan had always chosen to talk and to deny.
Cowan's lawyers also relied on R v Hart, a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada on confessions obtained through operations of this kind. The Court of Appeal declined to follow it. It held that Canadian law had taken a different path from the Australian common law, that the High Court's decisions bound the Queensland courts, and that Hart would not have helped Cowan in any case: the reliability of his confession was not in doubt, and the Canadian case had involved threatened violence that was absent from the Perth operation. When the High Court refused special leave in 2016, the Queensland rulings on the confession stood as the final word in his case.
Cowan pleaded not guilty and denied the murder at trial. His defense was that the confession was false, given to keep his place in what he believed was a criminal gang and to earn money from it. The jury rejected that defense, and every court that later examined the confession upheld its admission.
At trial the defense pointed to another man who had been a person of interest and who was never charged. The trial judge directed the jury that there was no direct evidence linking that man to the offending, and the Court of Appeal held that the directions on the point were fair.
1987: Cowan commits an offense against a child in Queensland, for which he is sentenced in 1989 to two years' imprisonment.
1993: He commits offenses against a child at Darwin; in 1994 the Northern Territory imposes an effective seven years' imprisonment.
1997 or 1998: Released after transferring to Queensland for a treatment program; serves two and a half years' parole on the Sunshine Coast.
Mid-1999 to early 2004: Lives at Beerwah.
December 7, 2003: The boy dies at Glass House Mountains.
December 8 and 9, 2003: The Queensland Police Service opens its investigation and sets up a major incident room at Maroochydore.
December 21 and 22, 2003: Task Force Argos officers interview Cowan.
July 6, 2005: Cowan is interviewed again.
September 14, 2006: Cowan gives police his alibi of a visit to an acquaintance in Beerwah.
October 11, 2010: The inquest into the boy's suspected death opens in Brisbane.
March 31 and April 1, 2011: Cowan gives evidence at the inquest; his alibi is undermined.
April 1, 2011: The covert operation begins on his flight back to Western Australia.
June 3, 2011: The coroner agrees to time the recall notice to suit the operation.
July 29, 2011: The notice recalling Cowan to the inquest on October 26, 2011 is signed.
August 9, 2011: Cowan confesses in Perth to the undercover officers.
August 13, 2011: Cowan is arrested and charged; the inquest is adjourned.
November 2013: Pre-trial hearing on the admissibility of the confessions and the earlier offending.
December 12, 2013: The trial judge admits the confessions and excludes the earlier offending.
February 10, 2014: Trial opens in the Supreme Court at Brisbane.
March 13, 2014: Jury returns guilty verdicts on all three counts.
March 14, 2014: Life imprisonment, parole eligibility after 20 years.
November 26 and 27, 2014: Court of Appeal hears both appeals.
May 7, 2015: The Chief Justice withdraws from the appeal bench.
May 21, 2015: Court of Appeal dismisses the conviction appeal and the Attorney-General's sentence appeal.
March 11, 2016: High Court refuses special leave to appeal.
April 5, 2019: The State Coroner delivers findings.
2031: Cowan's first eligibility for parole.