For years after Daniel's disappearance, the woman says, when Martyn still lived here, people would stand outside the house yelling abuse and throwing stones. She was surprised Martyn stayed as long as she did. "Torture," she calls it. When she saw her moving out, the woman phoned the housing commission and said, "I know no one else will take the house, but I will."

The history of the house didn't bother her. "Every house has a history," she says, and besides, the little boy's remains weren't found here. "I've never had any bad vibes or anything like that," she says. "But every now and then things will move and stuff like that, you know, like a little lost soul." The woman says she has her own troubles and asks not to be identified.

The town of Myrtleford sits on the Great Alpine Road, 273 kilometres north-east of Melbourne near the northern foothills of Mount Buffalo. It is a working town that was built on timber, tobacco and hops, with a big Italian population; not so pretty as Bright, further along the road. But in winter, the mountains in the near distance are snow-capped and fat cattle graze in rolling fog-covered valleys, while in spring, the alpine rivers rush and the wildflowers bloom. It was in spring, 10 years ago, that Daniel Thomas, aged just two years and eight months, was killed in an unsolved crime that continues to torment all of those it touched.

The toddler was reported missing on Friday, October 17, 2003. Aboriginal on his mother's side, he was in the care of Martyn, a 36-year-old mother of three living on welfare in the squat brown house on Standish Street. Daniel's mother, Donna Thomas, had moved in with Martyn seven weeks earlier but on that day, as she had been for the previous two days, she was 143 kilometres away in the Victorian town of Shepparton.

Four years and five months later, on the morning of March 18, 2008, the little boy's remains were found when a woman, Jodie Simpson, discovered her dogs playing with a small human skull they had dragged from beneath the house she was renting in Lawrence Street, Myrtleford, not far from the town cemetery.

The house had once been rented by Donna Thomas but was vacant at the time of Daniel's disappearance. In May 2008, DNA tests proved the remains were Daniel's. Both Mandy Martyn and Donna Thomas were described by police as "persons of interest". Both denied any wrong-doing. In April 2010, Victoria's Office of Public Prosecutions concluded there wasn't enough evidence for anybody to be charged.

For the past three years, a coroner's inquest has been promised, but delayed, by the toll of the Black Saturday bushfires in February 2009 and by several changes of coroner. But a brief of evidence, seen by Good Weekend, has been prepared and a hearing now seems imminent.

In statements made 10 years ago, Martyn's children shocked police with their descriptions of life inside the house in Standish Street. Mark-John, 7, Daniella, 10, and Jacqueline, 12, said that as punishment Daniel would be given cold baths, tied up, tied to his bed to prevent him getting up, placed in a cupboard with his arms and legs bandaged to prevent him getting out, and gagged. The allegations were made against both their mother and Thomas, who says the claims about her are untrue and denies ever harming her son.

Police were also told that on at least one occasion Daniel was locked under the house at night. One senior police officer says the child was locked under the house "with the dog faeces".

Ten years after the toddler's death, Daniel's father, Kevin Ruffels, lives with his elderly mother Dorothy in a small unit in Myrtleford, 200 metres from where his son disappeared and 900 metres from where his remains were found.

They sit in chairs side by side, cats mewing at their feet. A photograph of Daniel - one of the two they have - is on the mantelpiece, along with a poem, written by a visiting nurse, that speaks of the lonely call of the currawongs in a sleepy alpine town and falling autumn leaves and hearts that wept when "the little fella" was found.

Ruffels is angry that the case has not been heard by a coroner. "It's always in your thoughts, every day," he says. "It's in the too-hard basket and they just don't care. All we want is to know how he was murdered, why he was murdered and who did it and then it will be all put to rest. There is a person out there who did it, running around free."

Mandy Martyn lives in a small, remote northern Victorian township, with her fourth child, a five-year-old daughter. A broken white piano stands on the porch, swings in the back. People say she lives quietly. She opens the door only for a moment, refuses to be interviewed, and then stands in the backyard yelling, "F... off!" A sympathetic neighbour says she is "a broken woman who has been to hell and back" and wants nothing more than to live out her days in peace and anonymity.

Donna Thomas lives in the border city of Wodonga, where she is circulating a petition to have a coronial inquest take place. She says her son's death has been forgotten, partly because he was Aboriginal. "I've got no faith in the justice system at all," she says. "I think if Daniel was a white child, he would have had his case solved years ago."

Donna Thomas was born in Traralgon, eastern Victoria, in 1970. Welfare authorities removed her from her mother, Leila Mansell, when she was a baby and she was raised in foster care, where she says she was abused "physically, mentally and emotionally". When she was 22, her own first child, Bianca, was removed by welfare authorities. She met Ruffels when he was driving taxis in Melbourne and she was living as a carer with a blind couple while doing a course at Dandenong TAFE. He was their regular taxi driver.

They lived together for a while, Daniel was born in February, 2001, and they separated just after his first birthday. Ruffels returned to his home town, Myrtleford, and Thomas followed with Daniel two months later "to try and get him involved in Daniel's life and get him to be the father he never was".

While Ruffels says they remained "good friends", Thomas says he struck her more than once. Ruffels admits he hit her "years ago" when they lived in Melbourne and after she followed him to Myrtleford; he says he struck her accidentally "when she was blind drunk" and intending to drive and he was wresting car keys away from her.

Thomas met Martyn through the Mungabareena Aboriginal Corporation. An Aboriginal worker had told her there was "another Aboriginal lady" living in Myrtleford, both of them had young children and Thomas was struggling with Daniel, who was in and out of hospital with atopic eczema so severe that his legs sometimes needed to be supported by splints. Martyn said she might be able to help. Thomas thought, "That'd be good."

Thomas says the last time she saw her son was about 5am on Wednesday, October 15, before she caught the 5.30am bus to Shepparton, 143 kilometres away, to attend a nursing course at the TAFE, which she says she enrolled in to get a better understanding of Daniel's condition. She says she looked into his bedroom, saw that he was asleep and never saw him again.

She says she knows her phones have been tapped by police who suspect her of knowing more than she has said, but that she has nothing to hide and never harmed her son.

She claims that Martyn once showed her where Daniel had kicked his way out of a cupboard he had been locked in and says Martyn's daughter Daniella told her she had heard the child crying under the house during the night.

Asked what action she took, Thomas says, "I just had to walk away. I didn't know how to deal with it. I was absolutely shit-scared of Mandy. I tried to get out of her house that many times and she said, 'No, you're not going anywhere because you'll dob [me into] the police or welfare.'

"I kept saying, 'No, I won't, I won't, I'm just going home, I'm just taking my son home, I want to go back to my place.' And she would say, 'No, you're not going anywhere, you're not taking him anywhere.' "

Martyn at first told police that the last time she saw Daniel he was in the front yard "chasing rabbits". Then she changed her statement and said that she left him home alone for more than two hours while she took her children to a doctor's appointment in Wangaratta, 46 kilometres away, and never saw him again.

In her few public comments and in her two statements to police, Martyn has denied any wrong-doing. In her first statement, made just after midnight on October 18, she told police that Daniel was on "time out" punishment on the morning he disappeared, for not sitting still near the TV. "When they are naughty, they have to sit near the TV, but they cannot look at it," she said. "He wouldn't sit still and that's why he got time out in the bedroom. First they start out with time out near the TV, then if they are mucking around like he was they go into the bedroom and if they cannot stay in there, they sit on the cold floor in the bathroom."

Martyn said that after bathing Daniel, she put him back into his bedroom and that he stayed there with the door closed. She said when she checked on him around 12.20pm, he was asleep and she decided to leave him sleeping, alone in the house, while she took her three children to Wangaratta for an appointment with a paediatrician.

"He was asleep and I figured I would only be away an hour or two and he would be awake when I got back," she said. "I figured he would be waking up just about the time we got back. He sleeps about two or three hours. Ten minutes before we left I checked on Daniel. He was asleep and I shut his door so he wouldn't get out." Martyn said she could not recall whether she locked the front door, but said it was unlocked when she returned home between 2pm and 2.30pm. Daniel's window was also open.

In that first statement, Martyn said that when she returned home, Daniel was quiet "so I knew he was up to no good". She said she opened the bedroom door and found him playing with her son's things, told him he was on more time out, cleaned the bedroom while he sat on the bed, and gave him a Vegemite sandwich.

She said she let him out of the room about an hour later and they were out the front of the house when there was a commotion involving her children and dogs in the backyard. She said she went to attend to that, "and left Daniel in the front yard chasing rabbits". When she returned to the front yard, 15 or 20 minutes later, he was gone. She "started freaking" and went up the road to her friend Tina Shannon, who was not home, but whose partner, "Monkey", called police. Phone records would show the call was made at 3.38pm. In her statement, she said Daniel had a bandage on his head "because he kept running into everything".

Martyn changed her account in a second statement, later on October 18. In that account, she said that when she and the children returned home, she had expected Daniel to be in his bedroom, but he was not. She said her daughter Jacqueline went into his bedroom and called out, "Where's Daniel?" She said the story she told about being distracted by her children fighting in the backyard was a lie she made up because she was worried her children would be taken from her.

Myrtleford police sergeant Paul Evans had just returned from a course in nearby Beechworth when Martyn raised the alarm. With 36 years on the job, he is the only police officer still in Myrtleford who was there in October 2003. Evans believed it was likely the toddler had wandered off, but Martyn's manner jarred with him. "If it was me, I would have been really upset, but she wasn't presenting hysterically upset," he says.

He says that in the months and years that followed in Myrtleford, police received hundreds of calls from soothsayers and mind-readers. "They would wave teeth on chains above a map of Myrtleford and say, 'The body's there', or 'Check near running water', or 'Check at the railway station' that hadn't been there for 40 years," he says.

He says the disappearance "put a dark spot on the town" and the feeling of failure weighed heavily on all of those who searched for him. "We threw our heart and soul into trying to find him," he says. "We never gave up."

In Wangaratta, Detective Senior Sergeant Lindsay Cummings was walking into the police station for the start of the evening shift when he got the call that there was a missing toddler. Having since left the police force after 38 years, he sits on a bench at the local baseball field dredging up bad memories.

Cummings was there the day Daniel's remains were found, buried under a house he says had been thoroughly searched, top and bottom, after the disappearance. "It was a sad day," he says. "Even though it was a discovery of evidence, it was still sad that you had a two-year-old' s body, still in his pyjamas, under a house." In the small bones, no cause of death could be determined. He stares out onto the baseball field: "Poor little bugger."

Veteran homicide detective Rowland Legg was paged by his online supervisor at 10.37pm Friday, October 17, 2003. He was told that a child was missing in Myrtleford in suspicious circumstances. At the time, Legg and his team were heavily focused on solving the murder of gangland figures Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro, who had been gunned down at the Cross Keys Reserve in North Essendon on June 21, 2003. They believed they were close to getting a result and had learnt that another gangland killing was imminent.

At 4.30pm on Saturday, October 18, Legg was directed to take his crew to Myrtleford and was told that the Moran-Barbaro case would be handed over to the new Purana Taskforce. As they left for Myrtleford, Legg and his team were disappointed and annoyed by the switch. They arrived at police headquarters in Wangaratta at 10pm, were briefed until 2am and started in Myrtleford at 8.30am the following day. Legg quickly formed a view that the child had not wandered off and that the search for Daniel was likely a search for his body.

Day and night, police and emergency workers scoured an area honeycombed with mine shafts and wells. The lights of the searchers were like fireflies in the town. They searched everywhere a small boy might be, in dams, drains, pits, plantations, rubbish bins, sewerage ponds and, because Daniel was an Aboriginal boy, they searched through caves at a sacred site. They lifted lids on broken graves in the cemetery. A biologist was brought in from Melbourne to re-examine blood traces that were found in the house in Standish Street. Police speculated that Daniel might have died days before he was reported missing.

Mandy Martyn was questioned three times by detectives over the next two months. The interviews lasted for hours and she said little. She abused hungry media packs, at one point erupting: "The only [expletive] who's mourned for this baby is me."

In July 2007, Legg went back to Myrtleford with every available detective when a tip-off suggested Daniel's remains might be found in bushland at a place called Slaughter Yard Creek. The search found only animal bones. Legg was not there when Daniel's remains were found, but he says police searched the Lawrence Street house with a "particular focus" because Thomas had lived there previously. He says a police dog was put under the house that ought to have found the remains if they were there and he believes it's at least possible they were moved. A forensic examination, conducted in Adelaide, and also forming part of the evidence prepared for the coroner, revealed three different soil types on the child's pyjamas.

In a cafe in Melbourne, Legg sits talking about the murder of children. "Taking a life is the ultimate crime and you always want to bring someone to justice," he says. "But it is particularly harrowing in the case of a child."

On a rainy day, Donna Thomas stands by a small grave in a cemetery in the border city of Albury talking to her dead son, Daniel Michael Brandon Thomas. A plaque remembers a boy with a "cheeky giggle" whose mother loved him "to the moon and back". She says she needs to bring him more toys, and that she thinks his spirit has made friends with the stillborn child in the grave alongside him. Thomas says she often feels his spirit close to her. "Hey, little man," she says. "I love you, baby, I miss you too much. We'll get our answers, we'll get our answers."