John Cobby’s life came crashing down on the 4th February, 1986, hearing those tragic words on the radio. He was desperate, trying to trace his estranged wife who had been abducted a day prior. Driving along the coast, he heard on the radio, “The unclothed body of a woman has been discovered in a paddock in western Sydney.”
Anita Cobby’s Early Life
Born on 2 November 1959 to Garry Bernard Lynch and Grace “Peggy” Lynch, Anita was destined for a glamorous life on the ramp. She took part in several beauty pageants as a teenager, winning Miss Western Suburbs Pageant in November 1979.
Though she initially considered a career as a model, she changed her mind when her interest shifted to nursing, inspired by the profession’s kindness and empathy and by her mother’s example. When Anita was killed, she was living with her parents, Garry and Grace Lynch, in Blacktown, New South Wales.
A few months earlier, she separated from her husband, John Cobby, whom she had been married to since 1982, according to The Guardian. Reconciliation talks, however, were apparently underway.
A Walk Home Through Blacktown
Working as a nurse at Sydney Hospital, Anita routinely traveled from her family home in Blacktown to central Sydney for work, as she did on 2 February 1986. After finishing her duties at the hospital around 3 p.m., she went out for lunch with some colleagues in Redfern.
Towards the end of the day, she took the 9.12 p.m. train from Central railway station heading to Blacktown railway station.
As was her habit, Anita tried to call her dad immediately upon arrival so he could pick her up in his car. But in a cruel twist of misfortune, the station payphone had reportedly been damaged that day by vandalism. To add insult to injury, no taxi was available at the stand outside.
Anita had no other choice but to walk back home.
Anita’s Abduction
As she walked, Anita noticed a HT Holden Kingswood slowly come to a halt beside her. Before she had any chance to respond, two of the five men inside the car jumped out and forced her into the vehicle as she desperately screamed for help.
A teenage boy, with his younger sister and their mother, reportedly heard the screams and even witnessed Anita being dragged into the car. However, by the time the boy ran across the street to intervene, the vehicle had already sped away.
They quickly contacted the police and began searching for the car themselves. While driving along Reen Road in Blacktown, they eventually spotted an abandoned Holden parked beside a nearby paddock.
After the neighbors searched the paddock with a torch and found nothing, they assumed the car must be a different model and left. After their arrest, the assailants admitted they had hidden in the high grass to evade the limelight until the man left the scene.
The Last Hours of Anita Cobby
In the vehicle, Cobby was assaulted, beaten up, and raped in the most savage manner, all while the vehicle was on the move.
Her attackers reportedly punched Cobby repeatedly, breaking her nose and both cheekbones, eventually forcing her to perform disgusting acts of sexual gratification upon all five men.
Eventually, the assailants drove down to a nearby service station to purchase fuel with the stolen money. Anita was then driven to a secluded paddock, while being held down in the car, raped repeatedly, stifled, and continually beaten by her five attackers.
Dragging her out of the car, the miscreants pushed the brutally beaten Cobby into a paddock along a barbed wire fence, where they dumped her and continued to sexually and physically abuse her.
A taped confession of one of the five monsters, John Travers, reveals that although they had not initially planned to kill Anita, he later became concerned with the fact that she had seen all their faces, heard their voices, and could very well identify them at a later stage.
Thus, urged on by the others, Travers cut her throat, almost severing her head.
The forensic pathologist who performed her autopsy noted that Cobby was ‘likely still conscious’ at the time of her throat being cut, and estimated it would have taken ‘between 2-3 minutes’ for her to bleed to death.
Anita’s Body is Discovered
On the 4th of February, 1986, the lifeless body of Anita Cobby was found lying in a paddock close to Prospect, very close to the road where the neighbors had earlier been searching for the stolen Holden.
Anita had been brutally beaten until she was almost unrecognizable, her body bruised and battered by the cuts and slashes of barbed wire fences against which she was hurled.
Det. John Wakefield had been the Second-in-Charge of the Blacktown Police force when Anita’s body was discovered.
“A murder scene tells a story; the last moments and what they did to her will always stay with me. The look on her face, the state of her body… It shocked the man who owned the dairy where she was found. Nobody could expect to come across a body like that,” he said.
Understandably, the sheer brutality of the crime shook the entirety of Australia to such an extent that many Australians still remember exactly where they were when they first heard about it.
Radio stations and television broadcast continuous updates from the investigation, and as more gruesome details emerged, outrage ignited on a scale rarely seen before.
A Family Destroyed
For Anita’s family, however, the horror had only just begun. Her father, Garry Lynch, a graphic artist with the Royal Australian Air Force, was devastated beyond words. He would later describe the experience of identifying her body as something no family should ever have to endure.
Her friends and colleagues at the Sydney Hospital too were considerably, if not equally, distraught upon hearing the news. For some, it was difficult to picture the warm and caring nurse that they knew as the mangled corpse that had been found.
Hunting Anita’s Killers
Meanwhile, detectives from the homicide squad began what would become one of New South Wales’s biggest investigations. Statements made by local witnesses proved to be invaluable in the search, especially those involving the stolen green Holden Kingswood sighted during the kidnapping.
Reportedly, only two other witnesses apart from the people who had initially called the cops had seen Anita leave the railway station. To jog memories, a police officer dressed as Cobby traveled on the 9:12 pm train to Blacktown while her colleagues interviewed passengers.
Breaking the Case Open
After a tip-off from a police informant, police soon learned the Holden had been stolen. They traced the vehicle to a local family: the Murphy brothers, Les, Michael and Gary Murphy, and their friends John Travers and Michael Murdoch.
On 21 February, police arrested Travers and Murdoch at the home of Travers’ uncle and Les Murphy at Travers’ own house.
Police charged Murdoch and Murphy with offenses relating to stolen cars. Travers, who admitted to stealing the vehicle, was inconsistent when providing information regarding the murder and was therefore kept in police custody.
One of the most significant breakthroughs reportedly came when Travers’ girlfriend (later dubbed Miss X to protect her identity) secretly agreed to cooperate with investigators and wore a concealed recording device during her conversation with Travers while he was in custody. Those recordings later became a key part of the prosecution’s case.
As more information about the case became public, throngs of people surrounded the court building each day, clamoring for capital punishment to be restored in Australia.
“Hang the Bastards”
“One memory I’ll always have is of a very elderly lady in the crowd. She was very thin, had grey hair up in a bun – she looked a bit like a nun. She began screaming ‘hang the bastards’ and lunged at the car.
When I asked her to move back, she grabbed my coat and screamed at me, ‘Have you got a fu**ing daughter? I have, let me at them!”
“I understood the emotion. I looked at her and gently said, ‘Justice will be done.’ It was certainly a level of anger that I had never seen before and have never seen since.” Chief Inspector Gray Raymond would later comment.
In the aftermath, people seemed visibly flustered. Before the perpetrators were arrested, men were seen picking their wives from railway stations armed with baseball bats. ‘If we find them, we’ll cave their heads in!’ they’d say.
By late February 1986, police had begun to close in on the five men connected to the crime. Crucial forensic evidence recovered from the stolen Holden Kingswood, witness accounts of the abduction and intercepted conversations through Travers’ girlfriend further strengthened their case.
During investigations, the Murphy brothers and their associates reportedly began turning one another in during questioning, each trying to minimize their role in the killing.
Travers in particular brought immense attention upon himself after giving wildly contradictory statements about the night in question.
Eventually, police charged the five perpetrators with the abduction, rape and murder of Anita Cobby. Although the arrests brought immense public relief, rage remained palpable.
Fury in the Courts
The trial for the perpetrators commenced in the Supreme Court of New South Wales on 16th March, 1987. Right before trial, Travers changed his plea to guilty, after which Sydney newspaper The Sun published a front page story, carrying the headline “ANITA MURDER MAN GUILTY” alongside a large image of Travers.
Further, the story referred to Michael Murphy as an unemployed prison escapee of no fixed address, and gave details of his apparent escape from Silverwater Correctional Center, where he had been serving a 25-year sentence.
The jury was later dismissed because the published information could have been prejudicial and might have influenced their decision.
After 54 days of trial, on 10 June 1987, all five were found guilty of sexual assault and murder. On 16 June, they were each sentenced in the Supreme Court of New South Wales to life imprisonment plus additional time without the possibility of parole.
Justice Alan Maxwell, the presiding judge in the case, described the crime as, “One of the most horrifying physical and sexual assaults.” He further stated, “This was a calculated killing done in cold blood. The Executive should grant the same degree of mercy they bestowed on their victim.”
For Travers, however, this wasn’t a freak robbery incident turned awry, as Leslie Murphy had implied. “He had evil all over him. That’s what I remember the most, you could feel it..His eyes were completely dead. I’ll never forget that feeling of darkness,” a later prison-mate of his would note.
Not born into affluence, Travers often turned to petty crime to keep his family afloat. But his abnormalities went far beyond that. Witnesses mention, with veritable disgust, that he used to abuse birds before butchering and cooking them.
On several occasions, he’d been noted to acquire live lamb and sheep for a barbecue, and before slitting their throats, he’d perform despicable acts of bestiality, before butchering and roasting the carcass on a spit.
Pain to Purpose
Anita Cobby’s family remained understandably broken despite the conviction.
“They were just such lovely, beautiful people,” Mr Raymond, the case’s Chief Inspector, would later say. “I can still see Grace entering the room in her apron. Garry (Anita’s father) stared at me for a long time, and then grabbed my hands in his and said, ‘Gary, something good has to come out of something so bad.’ We all cried and cuddled.”
Faced with a nightmare that seemed entirely unbearable, Anita’s parents chose to focus their remaining years on reaching out and aiding other families struggling to cope with the realities of abduction and homicide.
They established the Homicide Victims Support Group with Christine and Peter Simpson, parents of Ebony Simpson, who was just nine years old when she was abducted after alighting from her school bus, before being raped and then tossed into a dam in Bargo and left to drown.
As members of an unlikely group everybody prays not to be part of, Anita and Ebony’s parents were united in their grief.
“I could wish it was someone else’s daughter, but I can’t, can I? They would then have to go through what we’re going through.” Garry Lynch would later comment, reflecting on the sad turn of events that had snatched his daughter away from him in a gruesome manner.
