When his son's killer was arrested and charged, Bruce Morcombe picked up the phone and called one man.
That man was Peter Boyce, a Sunshine Coast lawyer, father-of-six and the person credited with cracking open one of the most high-profile missing person's cases in Australian history.
"I couldn't believe it," Mr Boyce recalls to ABC's Australian Story.
"I was jumping for joy (but) I was also really sad that we now knew that he'd definitely been killed."
"He" is, of course, Bruce's son Daniel, who was abducted from a Sunshine Coast bus stop in 2003.
His convicted killer, serial child sex offender Brett Peter Cowan, was sentenced in March 2014 to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 20 years for murdering the young teen.
But he may never have been put behind bars if not for Mr Boyce's fine-toothed legal work and dedication to a case he, in his words, "couldn't walk away from".
Mr Boyce met the Morcombes soon after they established the Daniel Morcombe Foundation in mid-2005.
"(He) put his arm around us and said, `I can help you guys out'," Bruce recalled.
It's a promise he ultimately kept when an inquest into the police investigation surrounding Daniel's disappearance began in 2010.
"He was like a wrecking ball to the police investigation," Courier-Mail reporter Kristin Shorten told the program, to be aired on Monday night.
By tirelessly probing the methods used, Mr Boyce was able to scrutinise the depth of the investigation and successfully push for a host of persons of interest to be called before the inquest.
One of them was Cowan.
The striking feature of his evidence was that he was the only person who admitted having driven past the scene on two occasions, Mr Boyce says.
So he seized on the detail and was eventually able to get Cowan to admit to lying to police about it.
"That was pretty vital evidence," the pro bono lawyer concedes.
What followed was a complex police sting to ensnare Cowan and get him to confess to killing Daniel.
When that happened, Bruce got the call his son's murderer had been found.
He then phoned the man who put the jammed wheels of justice back into motion.
"We now have a place that we can have a prayer (and) quiet moment with Daniel," the father explains.
"That's where Peter has made an incredible difference in our life and we're indebted to him for that."
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