A teenage boy's plan to pick passionfruit for pocket money at a neighbour's farm was delayed because of rain. His parents left for a function without him so he could start work when the rain stopped.

When the boy finished work, he decided to head to a local shopping centre to buy Christmas presents and get a haircut. A bus broke down before it reached the stop where the boy was waiting. A replacement bus zoomed past him. And a man in a white Pajero happened to drive past in the left lane, getting a fine view of a boy waiting for a bus that would never arrive for him.

An innocent, banal series of events. But the driver of the Pajero was the antithesis of innocent. He was drug affected. His brain and impulses functioned in a way that only a forensic psychiatrist could begin to comprehend. He had been molesting small children since he himself was a child. He had twice been jailed for sex crimes against little boys. And he saw Daniel Morcombe standing waiting for a bus under an overpass on the Nambour Connection Road at Woombye on the Sunshine Coast.

So many ''what ifs''. If it had not rained, if Daniel had decided to stay home rather than go shopping, if a bus had not broken down, if a child molester had driven in the right lane not the left … Daniel would be a 25-year-old, perhaps working as a vet - that's what he said he wanted to be when he grew up. Celebrating milestones with his twin brother, Bradley. Instead, he embodies the cliche ''a parent's worst nightmare''.

''Even today, I'm haunted by thoughts of how long he was actually held captive and what unspeakable things you did to him in those sheds at the end of Kings Road at Beerwah,'' father Bruce Morcombe said in his victim impact statement after Brett Peter Cowan was found guilty on Thursday of Daniel Morcombe's murder on December 7, 2003. ''Why was he really dumped without clothes? Why was his belt loose and not still looped through his pants?''

In a Perth hotel room on August 9, 2011, Cowan sat with a police undercover operative ''Arnold'' and confessed to Daniel's murder. But he denied molesting him. He said he panicked and choked him.

The following day Cowan led undercover officers to the location of his crime near an isolated macadamia nut farm, but the scattered bones that were found there would never give up their secrets about what really happened on the day Daniel decided to go shopping.

Cowan's confession during a masterful, complex police sting operation would become pivotal evidence in the prosecution case against him and, ultimately, lead the jury to ignore his not-guilty plea and to Justice Roslyn Atkinson's sentence of life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 20 years.

But the conviction and sentence do not give Bruce and Denise Morcombe their son back. Nor do they take away the fear.

''I know we're a helicopter generation of parents but this really plays into our fears,'' said one Brisbane mother after the verdict. ''You only have to think about Daniel Morcombe and you think, 'oh no, he can't catch the bus to school'.''

It's easy to reminisce about what was. You would ''live in a mango tree all day'', Condon said on Friday, remembering his own childhood.

''[But] you'd be horrified for a kid to get on a pushbike and ride 10 kilometres to the shop these days.''

Sitting at a boardroom table in police headquarters, wearing a red ribbon on his highly decorated chest, he mused on the matter of parenting in a world where monsters lurk.

''You've got to strike a balance because if you want to put them too much in a box, they tend to rebel.''

Condon has been a Morcombe family confidante since the investigation's early days.

He is too familiar with all of the case's horror - and all of its weirdness. Cowan's bizarre 2011 name change to avoid police must top the list. His new name was ''Shaddo N-unyah Hunter'' - ''Shaddo'' because it was the name of his dog, And ''N-unyah''? ''Nunyah business'', he told undercover police.

It's impossible to learn about the police operation that created a faux underworld gang and convinced Cowan he was a part of it without thinking of a B-grade Hollywood movie: the operation's brothel madams and hookers, crooked customs officers and coppers, an Asian restaurateur called Eddie and illicit crayfish, the ''blood diamonds'' and black market firearms and the promised $100,000 pay-out to Cowan for his role in a ''big job''.

More weirdness came in the transcripts of the conversations between undercover operatives and Cowan. He's an ''opportunistic'' offender, he tells one of his gang ''friends''.

There are strange things from all sides of this story including the Morcombes' 2011 ceremonial burning of a mannequin in Cowan's likeness. But perhaps the freakiest thing of all: a vox pop video shot on the streets of Brisbane in 1999 and dug out after the verdict: there's Cowan, clean cut in a maroon collared shirt, answering an interviewer's questions, referring to himself in the third person: ''Brett's been in trouble before and everything but like I've been going to church all my life and um, yeah, just became a Christian about 18 months ago.''

There are so many victims in this story. The Morcombe family's pain is never-ending and obvious. We can only imagine the pain suffered by the family of the murderer: his three children, his parents and three brothers. They are, according to the case's arresting officer, Detective Senior Sergeant Stephen Blanchfield, ''fantastic people, salt of the earth … [Cowan's] mum and dad are just genuine good people and they've got a bad son somehow.''