Denise Morcombe stood at the end of her driveway and scanned her leafy street in Queensland's Sunshine Coast hinterland.
It was late afternoon on the first Sunday of summer in 2003 and her son was due home any minute.
The 13-year-old had left on his own a few hours earlier to catch a bus to the local shopping centre.
He'd planned to get a haircut and buy Christmas presents for his family with money he'd saved from his fruit picking job.
More than a decade later the mother-of-three would tell a Brisbane court how she looked for his familiar figure when she went to take the rubbish out about 4.30pm.
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"I didn't see Daniel or anyone," she would say.
Denise Morcombe didn't know her son was already dead.
What happened to him would baffle Queensland police for more than seven years and become one of Australia's highest profile missing persons cases.
Daniel's story resonated with parents around the country as the Sunshine Coast community rallied behind his heartbroken parents.
Within five months of Daniel's disappearance, police had received more than 4000 tips from members of the public via Crime Stoppers.
Detectives set up a major incident room and interviewed dozens of witnesses who'd seen a dark-haired boy in a red T-shirt by the side of the road.
Many would sit in the witness box more than 10 years later and wrack their brains to recall what they'd glimpsed from their passing vehicles on the afternoon of December 7, 2003.
It became clear that Daniel had been abducted soon after 2pm, after the bus he was waiting for had broken down less than a kilometre from his stop.
The driver of the replacement bus, who was in a rush, had driven straight past the schoolboy without stopping.
The bus driver would later tell a Supreme Court jury in Brisbane he'd believed a third bus would collect the boy and a man who'd been standing nearby.
"He (the boy) lifted his finger like that and I pointed to him there was another bus coming, tried to indicate there was another bus following," Ross Edmonds said.
But when the third bus came by, between two and five minutes later, the boy and the man were gone.
Despite the massive public response, it seemed no one had witnessed Daniel's abduction and the police investigation eventually stalled.
The Morcombes couldn't bear to do nothing as they waited for a development, and channelled their grief into educating other children about how to keep themselves safe.
Their message would eventually become part of the Queensland school curriculum, but the foundation also served another purpose - it kept Daniel's name in the public domain.
"Try as you may to move on, you cannot because we must find the answers," Bruce Morcombe said in 2006.
In 2009, more than five years after Daniel vanished, the Morcombes wrote a letter that proved to be the turning point in the case.
The letter to the state coroner sought an inquest into the 13-year-old's presumed death - to "apply the legal blowtorch" to the dozens of suspects police had identified.
Thirty-three people of interest were grilled during public hearings in 2010 and 2011.
By the time the inquest finished detectives had just one in their sights.
Convicted pedophile Brett Peter Cowan's alibi had unravelled when his drug dealer told the inquest she was probably out on December 7, 2003, when Cowan claimed to have visited her.
Meanwhile, counsel assisting the coroner, Peter Johns, pointed out that Cowan had abducted and raped boys within a short timeframe twice before.
After Cowan appeared at the inquest in April 2011, police launched an extraordinary undercover operation aimed at tricking their target into a confession, and after four-and-a-half months they had their man.
Cowan, then 41, was taken into custody on August 13, 2011, seven-and-a-half years after he abducted and killed Daniel.
Audio recordings played at Cowan's trial revealed him matter-of-factly telling undercover police how he'd lured Daniel into his car, driven him to an abandoned house in bushland and snapped his neck.
"I never got to molest him or anything like that," he said.
"I panicked and he panicked and I grabbed him around the throat and before I knew it he was dead."
Seventeen weathered pieces of bone, a muddy pair of shoes and the remnants of some clothes were all that remained of the teenager when police and SES volunteers scoured the Sunshine Coast hinterland area where Cowan had led them.
Bruce and Denise Morcombe were finally able to lay their son to rest nine years to the day after he was taken from them.
The stoic couple attended every day of Cowan's month-long trial, determined to keep their vow to achieve justice for their son.
In the end it took the 12 men and women on the jury seven-and-a-half hours to find Cowan guilty of murder, indecent treatment of a child and interfering with a corpse.
He will be sentenced on later on Thursday.
