26-year-old Anita Cobby was someone who lived her life with the intention of helping others while working as a nurse at Sydney Hospital in Australia. Anita was born Anita Lorraine Lynch on November 2, 1952 to parents Garry & Grace “Peggy” & was the apple of their eyes. She was extremely close with her family. As she grew up, she told anyone that would listen that she wanted to be a nurse just like her mother & it was a goal she never wavered from. In addition to these aspirations, she was also the winner of the Miss Western Southern beauty pageant in 1979 & had a promising career as a model, but she remained determined to become a nurse.
After graduating from secondary school, Anita enrolled in a nursing program through Sydney Hospital & in 1981, she met & fell in love with another student named John Cobby. John remembers thinking that there was no chance that Anita would be interested in him, believing she was too far out of his league, but they found that they shared a lot of similar interests. They went on their first date to a Lebanese restaurant & one year later, on March 27, 1982, the couple got married in a small ceremony with family & friends. A few years after their wedding, John won $10,000 at the horse races & the couple took a dream vacation to the U.S. Three years into the marriage, they found that they were no longer on the same page & made the difficult decision to separate.
As they spent time apart, they realized that they missed each other & were better together. By winter of 1986, they began to repair their relationship & again looked forward to a future together.
On Sunday, February 2, 1986, Anita worked her shift at Sydney Hospital & when she got off at 3 pm, she & a group of co-workers went to get some food together at a local restaurant in Redfern. At the time, Anita was living with her parents, Garry & Grace Lynch while she & John worked on their relationship. She got a ride to the Central railway station & boarded the 9:12 pm train towards Blacktown, the Sydney suburb where her parents lived.
Anita got off the train at about 10 pm & planned on using one of the pay phones at the Blacktown station to call her dad for a ride home as she typically did. What would end up being a tragic piece of this case is that the phones at the station had been vandalized & weren’t in working order that night. Typically, taxis were readily available but on this night, they were all in use. Having no other choice, Anita decided to set off on foot for the relatively short walk to her parent’s house.
As she walked down a quiet residential street, she had no idea that a car full of career criminals was taking a joyride in a car they had just stolen. Five men who were well known to local authorities as mean-spirited deviants just so happened to be near the Blacktown station. The ringleader was 19-year-old John Travers who was a sexual predator who took pleasure in abusing anyone weaker than himself, including animals.
After the group drove around for a while, they realized that the gas tank was hovering near empty. Not having any money between the group, they made the decision to find someone to rob. Just as this thought occurred, Anita just happened to round the corner as they were passing. They saw the gorgeous brunette & their intentions turned much more sinister. They pulled the car next to Anita & two of the men jumped out & grabbed her. She was shocked by the sudden attack & began to scream & struggle, trying to break free.
A nearby brother & sister happened to hear Anita’s cries & ran out of their house to investigate in time to see a group of men forcing a terrified woman into the stolen white HT Holden Kingswood car. The boy yelled out for them to let her go as he began running in their direction to stop them. Before he could reach them, Anita was forced into the car & the men sped off into the night. The boy began to chase the car but gave up as the taillights faded into the distance.
The siblings told their mom what happened & she called the police. As this was happening, their neighbor & his girlfriend came home, learned of the story & took off in their car in hopes of stopping them. Shortly after leaving, he saw a car that matched the description he had been given. It was parked on the side of the road in the rural area of Prospect, about six minutes from Blacktown. He jumped out of his car with a flashlight, hoping to save the woman before it was too late. When he shone his light into the car, he found it empty. Assuming he had the wrong car, he saw no signs of anyone nearby or in distress & made the decision to go home.
It turned out that he had found the correct car & only feet away, the men he was chasing were lying in the thigh high weeds, quiet & motionless. They had Anita pinned to the ground, hands covering her mouth in order to quiet her screams
After the man pulled away, Travers & his friends took Anita to a nearby field & forced her to take her clothes off in the car. She begged the men to just let her go, telling them that she was a married woman & was also menstruating. While in the car, her attackers took turns beating Anita & they struck her with such force that they broke her nose & both cheekbones. They forced her to perform oral sex on them & then drove to a gas station where they used money from Anita’s purse to refuel their stolen car. From there, they drove down Reen Road to a secluded field where they continued to assault Anita for nearly two hours. When they were finished, they dragged her badly beaten body from the car to an area next to a barbed wire face where they continued to attack her. Anita lay face-down in the grass, still conscious as her assailants stood over her, discussing their next plans. It was Travers who made the decision that since Anita had seen their faces, she needed to die. With that, Travers grabbed Anita by the hair & while the others cheered him on, he jerked her head back & slit her throat. The act was so vicious that it had nearly decapitated her.
From there, the group got into the stolen car & fled from the scene, leaving Anita’s body in plain view, having made no effort to conceal her. They drove to the house where Travers was staying & removed Anita’s belongings, including her purse & clothing from the car & burned them in an incinerator in the backyard. They hadn’t known that as they did this, a neighbor watched them through a window. The woman later told authorities that the items that they destroyed gave off a sickening odor.
In the meantime, back home in Blacktown, Anita’s parents began to worry when she hadn’t called from the train station since she should have been home hours earlier. But being an independent adult, they assumed their daughter had decided to spend the night at a friend’s house.
The next day, Monday, February 3, Anita’s family was notified that their daughter hadn’t come in for her scheduled shift at Sydney Hospital. They immediately went to the police station to file a missing persons report.
Twenty-four hours later, a farmer noticed that his cattle were gathering in one spot & when he went to investigate, he came upon the badly beaten body of a woman, her hands still clutching the grass. Officers were quickly dispatched to the scene & Anita’s distinctive wedding band allowed her to be quickly identified. After Anita’s body was found, the New South Wales government posted a $50,000 reward for any information that would lead to an arrest. In the goal of sparking someone’s potential memory from that night, a female officer dressed as Anita traveled on the same 9:12 pm train that Anita had taken back to the Blacktown station while her colleagues interviewed passengers.
When the homicide division was called in, the investigation started with police speaking with Anita’s estranged husband John. Because John was grilled relentlessly, he made a full confession. It was days later when physical evidence indicated that multiple perpetrators were involved, none of them John, that he was cleared from the case.
The investigation became sensationalized when a morning radio host got access to Anita’s autopsy report & read it on live air. The coroner had indicated that Anita’s hands & arms were covered in defensive wounds & one of her ears had been severed. Both her nose & cheekbones had been broken & she had been sexually assaulted multiple times by more than one offender. Listeners were horrified to hear the extent of the brutality that Anita had gone through & became determined to find her killers themselves. Even police who were involved in the case were deeply affected by what happened to Anita. The radio show host, John Lews, was interviewed in 2016 & said he did what he did because he felt that the public should know the full details.
With the case now public information, leads began pouring in from people eager to help catch these monsters. Several callers mentioned a group of men who were car thieves that loved to wreak havoc on others & the police noted the name John Travers coming up over & over. Police had also gotten information about the stolen car that brought up the name of four others in addition to John Travers.
A little less than three weeks after Anita was murdered, on February 21, Travers & his buddies, 18-year-old Michael Murdoch & 22-year-old Les Murphy were brought in for questioning not in relation to Anita’s case, but a car theft. Travers was taken into custody pending further charges while the other two were released the same day.
Shortly after his arrest, Travers called his aunt & asked her to bring him cigarettes. Little did he know, these cigarettes would give police the evidence they needed to solve Anita’s murder. After she brought in the cigarettes, she stayed & spoke with Travers for some time & by the time she left, she was convinced that he had been part of the abduction, rape & murder of Anita Cobby.
Because she wanted to do the right thing, the woman went to detectives who were working the case & told them that Travers had confessed to Anita’s murder & even named his accomplices. They felt she was telling the truth but wanted to hear Travers’ version of events. They asked the woman to go back in & get him to repeat his story & this time, it would be caught on tape.
The woman agreed to be fitted with a recording device on her next visit because she was so sickened by the brutal nature of Anita’s murder. On her next visit, with little effort, Travers gave the woman a blow-by-blow account of what happened the night of February 2. She also went to Michael Murdoch’s home & captured his version of events while wearing the recording device.
When detectives listened to the recording, they were sickened by the way Travers stopped to chuckle as he went over each gory detail from that night. He named Michael Murdoc & Les Murphy, who had been previously released & added two new names, Les’ brothers, 28-year-old Gary Murphy & 33-year-old Michael Murphy. As his conversation wrapped up, he made sure to tell his visitor that if she were to tell anyone, she would end up like Anita. The five men came from deprived backgrounds, were of below-average intelligence & generally hated by the community. They were known for violence & Travers was known to carry a knife with him. Between the five, they had over fifty prior convictions for offenses that ranged from armed robbery, assault, larceny, car theft, drug use & rape.
19-year-old John Travers was the oldest of eight children born from unmarried teenage parents & raised in poverty. He was addicted to alcohol & marijuana by age fourteen & because of the extent of their financial struggles, Travers turned to a life of crime to provide money to cover his family’s expenses. When his mom’s health began to suffer & she was placed in hospice care, he & his siblings were sent to live with a foster family. He didn’t discriminate with his violent sexual tendencies, attacking men, women & even animals.
18-year-old Michael Murdoch was a childhood friend of Travers’ & spent the bulk of his childhood in juvenile prisons where he experienced sexual assaults.
The Murphy brothers were three of nine siblings & the family was known to police. In 1978 Michael was in prison when he tried to escape. Michael & Gary were unemployed & Les worked in maintenance. Gary was a convicted car thief. The two older brothers, Gary & Michael had met Travers when they were hanging around hotels while drinking & smoking pot. Michael Murdoch served as Travers’ sidekick who he idolized. Travers was an alcoholic from a young age & had been in & out of court, sent to a juvenile detention facility & expelled from school in year ten. He was known to boast about having sex with animals before slitting their throats. He sported a distinctive teardrop tattoo under his left eye.
As the Murphy brothers learned that police were on to them, thanks to Travers, Gary & Michael attempted to flee the area. A man eventually called the police saying that men who fit their descriptions were hiding out in a flat in Glenfield in southwest Sydney. When Gary Murphy was arrested, he took off from the home where he was hiding, fleeing from the back door where he was tackled by officers. While he was being led away, officers noted that he had peed in his pants which the media got an image of. All men were taken into custody within twenty-two days of Anita’s murder.
As police expected, each of the suspects quickly turned on each other, but the one constant was that Travers had been the person to ultimately end Anita’s life. Regardless, all were equally responsible for her death. After being confronted with his taped confession, Travers & his accomplices all pleaded guilty & provided signed confessions. The defense claimed that the confessions were obtained improperly & by force.
During the trial that began on March 16, 1987 in Sydney, Travers & his buddies made no effort to hide their contempt in the room full of spectators. During opening statements, Alan Saunders of the Queen’s Counsel described what happened to Anita as “sustained degradation, brutal unbridled lust culminating in one of the most savage brutal murders the state has ever known.” The media called it the trial of the century. As the judge read their charges, the five men spoke amongst themselves & laughed.
Travers has called various prisons home over the years & on one transfer in 1996, he & another inmate attempted to escape from the prison van by using a hacksaw & kicking through the back door. The two were promptly stopped & charged. He’s often been involved in bloody fights during his time in prison.
In 2019, 66-year-old Michael Murphy died from liver cancer. That same year, his brother Gary was beaten by fellow inmates & he was sent to the hospital in critical condition.
Anita’s parents joined forces with Christine & Peter Simpson who were the parents of murder victim Ebony Simpson & in 1993, they created the Homicide Victims’ Support Group. 9-year-old Ebony was abducted, raped & murdered in 1992. The organization supports families that have lost a loved one to homicide. The Lynches also fought to seek harsher sentencing laws for violent crimes after Antia’s murder.
On June 10, 1987, the jury found Anita’s five killers guilty of sexual assault & murder & they were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. None of the five have ever shown an ounce of remorse for what they did.
For decades, John Cobby blamed himself for not being there to protect Anita. He ended up getting remarried but it ended in divorce.
Anita’s father Garry died in 2008 at age 90 from Alzheimer’s disease & his wife Grace passed away on July 1, 2013 at age 88 from lung cancer. At the time of Garry’s death, the couple had been married for 54 years. Anita was in the prime of her life when she was viciously taken from this world by five monsters.
References:
- Medium: Angels & Demons: The savage rape & murder of Anita Cobby
- The Guardian: Anita Cobby murder: ‘Everyone in the car that dreadful night had a passport to doom’
- News.com.au: ‘The most savage, fiendish murder ever known’
- Wikiwand: Murder of Anita Cobby
- Over Sixty: How Anita Cobby’s murder destroyed her husband’s life
- Survivors of Homicide
- Wikipedia: The murder of Ebony Simpson
