Daniel Paul Heazlewood lived a cashed-in lifestyle, wearing a $10,000 designer watch, romancing women with dates at expensive restaurants, buying his own jet ski and learning to fly airplanes on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
Apart from his job as a roofing contractor, no one really knew where the money came from, nor did they know of Heazlewood’s terrible secret or the life he had left behind 200km south on the Gold Coast.
Heazlewood had changed his name – to Daniel Blake – and set out to charm women with the rules he set out in a ‘What Dating Dan Looks Like’ list on a blackboard.
The list included candlelight baths, beach trips in a 4WD, kissing and ‘biting … often’ and ‘any sex ranging from passionate to rough (high sex drive, long lasting)’.
His dating guide worked and women thought ‘he seemed like the guy who had it all. He was muscular, dressed nicely, always had cash on him. Wanted to win and dine, an acquaintance told Daily Mail Australia.
The truth about who he really was only came out fully on Australia Day when Heazlewood allegedly lost control and brandished a crowbar in front of one of his mates.
The police were called. It wasn’t until nearly a month later that a police warrant for his arrest culminated in an appearance at Maroochydore Magistrates Court and he was taken back into custody.
Daniel Paul Heazlewood was living the high life under a new name on the Sunshine Coast but is now back in jail after being arrested for allegedly brandishing a crowbar and causing fear
Daniel Heazlewood’s self-described dating ‘guide’ included lots of sex, bites, beach trips and affection
In reality, the ‘romantic’ tradie was a convicted murderer who had ended his own mother’s life because he was ashamed that she was ‘a bogan’. He then bought a shovel from Bunnings and put his mother’s body in the boot of his car, a court heard.
He was not caught killing his mother, Linda Sidon, until nine years after her death in 2009, and he has never been able to say exactly where he dumped her body in the Numinbah Valley scrubland southwest of the Gold Coast.
After serving just 29 months behind bars, Heazlewood left prison, changed his name and started a new life on the Sunshine Coast, where few who knew him until his latest arrest realized he was a former prisoner on parole for manslaughter and interfered with his mother’s corpse.
But Daily Mail Australia can exclusively reveal Heazlewood is back in a Queensland jail and friends have revealed what could be the 37-year-old’s dark secret in how he killed his mother.
Heazlewood is currently locked up in the Brisbane Correctional Center on the crowbar charge and has reportedly breached his parole for the charges relating to his mother’s death, which will not expire until April, 2025.
He is due in court on one charge of ‘going armed to cause fear’ early next month.
Heazlewood killed Linda Sidon when he was 22 years old at the Ashmore, Gold Coast duplex they shared on or about June 20, 2009.
He then kept it a secret for years, pretending she had moved back to her native New Zealand.
After killing her in what detectives initially described as murder, he bought agricultural lime in a bid to dissolve his mother’s flesh and bones because he had seen it ‘in a movie’, a court heard.
Heazlewood lived the high life, but in reality he was a convicted murderer of his own mother who had hidden her body in a bush grave
Heazlewood, now 37, was transferred from Maroochydore guardhouse to Brisbane Prison in Wacol after his parole was revoked in late February. Above is an old photo
He then drove 36 km to Pine Creek Road in the Numinbah Forest and dug a shallow grave in a stream or waterhole.
It would not be until 2018 that he would admit to killing Ms Sidon to police but claimed it was in self-defence, resulting in a minimum sentence of just four years and nine months.
In a police interview, he said Ms Sidon had come at him during a fight with a butter knife and “I had my forearm like around her neck and we were struggling and then she wouldn’t move”, a court was told.
Eligible for parole, Heazlewood left prison in February 2021, moving first to the Brisbane suburb of Carina and then on to Maroochydore.
He told people who befriended him on Instagram that the reason he only had about 30 followers is because he had just moved up from the Gold Coast and was “starting over” and laughed off a new mate’s query if he had just been in prison.
He began taking flying lessons and boasted of his intention to become a pilot.
One of his new friends revealed that the killer had a phobia of drowning, to the point that he could not watch movies or see visions with drowning scenes.
He blamed his mother for the phobia, saying she had made him watch a drowning video.
Heazlewood enjoyed drinking and dating women on the Sunshine Coast after his release from prison but is now back behind bars after police charged him with driving a crow bar in a Maroochydore car park
While he ate and ate women, rode his jet ski and took flying lessons in his life out of prison, Daniel’s new friends had no idea he was on parole for killing his mother (above) and hiding her body
The body of Daniel’s mother (left, police are looking for it) lies off Pine Creek Road in the Numinbah Valley (right), but police believe it will never be found
But one of the people he befriended said they suspected there was another reason, that instead of his mother dying in a fight where she had a knife , that he had instead ‘drowned her’, after which he disposed of her remains in water in the bush.
‘I can’t help but have a bad feeling about it. I think it’s something more sinister,” said the friend.
When authorities searched parts of the 116 square kilometer Numinbah Valley for Sidon’s body after Heazlewood’s confession, they concluded that it may never have been found due to the fact that water levels had risen and possibly washed away her bones.
Heazlewood dated several women after his release from prison but proved ”incredibly toxic” and was ’emotionally abusive and manipulative’, they said.
When new friends found out Daniel’s real name and were able to Google him, he admitted to killing his mother but made excuses.
One woman ‘went home and couldn’t stop throwing up’ but felt sorry for him after he told a story of being ‘abused as a child by both his mother and father, in and out of foster care’.
Heazlewood told friends he hated his mother, whom he called ‘a bogan’ and a ‘wh**e’
Party boy and steroid-taking Daniel Heazlewood grew to despise his own mother before killing her and burying her boy in a bushland hole and keeping it quiet for years
But Heazlewood’s stories of an abusive childhood do not add up to the narrative, and Ms Sidon’s family said he was never in foster care.
Mrs Sidon, a 46-year-old cleaner, continued to house, feed and support her son even as he entered adulthood and grew to despise her.
As a man in his early 20s, he bragged to friends that it would be ‘so easy to break her neck’ and disparaged his mother as ‘a bogan, a whore and ***’.
Ms Sidon had told her father back in NZ that Heazlewood ‘beat her a lot’ and it was he who alerted NZ authorities to her disappearance in late 2010.
Police charged Heazlewood with murder in 2015, but downgraded the charge to manslaughter in 2018, and he was sentenced in the Queensland Supreme Court.
He served only 29 months in prison.
Daniel Heazlewood faces a potential maximum sentence of two years if convicted of the charge related to the alleged crowing incident.
Daniel seemed relaxed and happy with his mother when he was young, but he grew to despise Linda Sidon as she became socially isolated with anorexia and depression