Daniel Heazlewood looked like the epitome of success: he wore a $10,000 watch and seduced women with his own ‘dating guide’. But then his gruesome secret was exposed when he reportedly pulled out a crowbar
Daniel Paul Heazlewood lived a wealthy lifestyle, wore a $10,000 designer watch, dated women at expensive restaurants and learned to fly planes on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
Apart from his job as a roofer, no one really knew where the money came from, nor did they know the horrifying secret of Heazlewood and the life he had left behind 200km away on the Gold Coast.
Heazlewood had changed his name to Daniel Blake and wanted to charm women with the rules he had written in a “What Dating Dan Looks Like” list on a whiteboard.
The list included candlelit baths, beach trips in a 4WD, kissing and ‘biting… often’ and ‘any sex ranging from passionate to rough (high sex drive, lasts a long time)’.
His dating guide worked, and women thought “he seemed like the guy who had it all.”
‘He was muscular, neatly dressed and always had cash on him. Would eat and drink,” an acquaintance told Daily Mail Australia.
The truth about who he really was only fully emerged on Australia Day, when Heazlewood allegedly lost control and brandished a crowbar at one of his friends.
The police were called. It was not until almost a month later that a warrant for his arrest culminated in an appearance before the Maroochydore Magistrates Court and he was taken back into custody.
Daniel Paul Heazlewood was living the good 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-proclaimed dating guide included plenty of sex, biting, beach trips and affection
In reality, the ‘romantic’ tradie was a convicted murderer who took his own mother’s life because he was ashamed that she was a ‘bogan’. He then bought a shovel from Bunnings and put her body in the boot of his car, a court heard.
He was caught murdering his mother, Linda Sidon, only nine years after her death in 2009, and has never been able to say exactly where he dumped her body in the scrubland of the Numinbah Valley, 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, until his final arrest, few who knew him realized he was an ex-con who was on parole for manslaughter and interference with his mother’s corpse.
Now Daily Mail Australia can exclusively reveal Heazlewood is back in a Queensland prison, and friends have shared what could be the 37-year-old’s sinister secret about how he killed his mother.
Heazlewood is currently in custody at the Brisbane Correctional Center on the crowbar charge and is believed to have breached his parole for the charge relating to his mother’s death, which is only expiring April 2025.
He is due to appear in court early next month on one charge of ‘going armed to cause fear’.
Heazlewood murdered his mother when he was 22 years old in the Ashmore, Gold Coast duplex they shared on or about June 20, 2009.
He then kept it a secret for years, as if she had returned to her native New Zealand.
After killing her in what detectives initially described as murder, he bought agricultural lime in an attempt to decompose her flesh and bones because he had seen it ‘in a film’, a court heard.
Heazlewood lived a good life, but in reality he had murdered his mother and hidden her corpse in a forest grave
Heazlewood, now 37, was transferred from Maroochydore watchhouse to Brisbane Prison at Wacol after his parole was revoked at the end of 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 creek or waterhole.
It wasn’t until 2018 that he would admit to police that he killed his mother, but he claimed it was in self-defense, resulting in a minimum sentence of just four years and nine months.
In a police interview he said his mother had come at him with a butter knife during a fight and “I had my forearm like around her neck and we were arguing and then she stopped moving,” the court was told.
Heazlewood was eligible for parole and walked out of prison in February 2021, first to the Brisbane suburb of Carina and then 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 from the Gold Coast and was “starting over”, laughing off a new friend’s question when he was just in had been in prison. .
He started taking flying lessons and boasted about 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 couldn’t watch movies with drowning scenes.
He blamed his mother for the phobia, saying she made him watch a drowning video.
Heazlewood enjoyed dating women on the Sunshine Coast after his release from prison, but many claimed he was toxic
While he was dining out with women and taking flying lessons while out of prison, Daniel’s new friends had no idea he was on parole for killing his mother (above) and hiding her corpse.
The body of Daniel’s mother (left, police search for it) was left near Pine Creek Road in the Numinbah Valley (right), but police believe it may never be found.
But one of the people he befriended said they suspected there was another reason: that instead of his armed mother dying in battle, he had “drowned” her and left her in the water in the undergrowth abandoned.
‘I can’t help but have a bad feeling about it. I believe it is something sinister,” the friend said.
When authorities searched parts of the 116 square kilometer Numinbah Valley for Ms Sidon’s body following Heazlewood’s confession, they concluded it might never be found due to the fact that water levels had risen and her bones might have been washed away.
Heazlewood dated several women after his release from prison but proved “incredibly toxic” and was “emotionally abusive and manipulative”, they said.
When new friends eventually found out Daniel’s real name and Googled him, he admitted to killing his mother but made excuses.
One woman “went home and couldn’t stop vomiting,” but took pity on him after he told a story about “being abused as a child by both his mother and father, in and out of foster care.”
Heazlewood told his friends he hated his mother, who he called ‘a bogan’ and a ‘wh**e’
Party boy and steroid user Daniel Heazlewood came to despise his own mother before killing her and burying her body in bushland and keeping it quiet for years
However, Heazlewood’s stories of an abusive childhood do not fit the narrative and Ms Sidon’s family said he was never in foster care.
Mrs. Sidon, a 46-year-old cleaning lady, continued to house, feed and care for her son even as he grew up and began to despise her.
As a man in his early twenties, he boasted to friends that it would be “so easy to break her neck” and denigrated his mother as “a bogan, a whore and a ***.”
Ms Sidon had told her father in New Zealand that Heazlewood had ‘beat her up a lot’, and it was he who informed New Zealand authorities of her disappearance in late 2010.
Police charged Heazlewood with murder in 2015, but reduced the charge to manslaughter in 2018. was convicted by the Supreme Court of Queensland.
He served only 29 months in prison.
He faces a possible maximum sentence of two years if found guilty of the charges related to the alleged crowbar incident.
Daniel looked relaxed and happy with his mother when he was young, but he grew up despising Linda Sidon when she became socially isolated due to anorexia and depression.