Anita Cobby: Letters of love and loss

With tears pouring down his face the grief-stricken husband of murdered nurse Anita Cobby poured out his love for her in a letter to her sister Kathryn just weeks after her death

WITH tears pouring down his face the grief-stricken husband of murdered nurse Anita Cobby poured out his love for her in a heartrending letter to her sister Kathryn just weeks after her death.

John Cobby left for America the day after he was helped from the church crying “don’t take her, please don’t take her’’ when Anita was buried at Michinbury Cemetery on February 9, 1986.

It was just a week after her beaten and raped body was found in a paddock at Prospect in western Sydney.

“Anita is never out of my thoughts. I love her like I couldn’t imagine any other person on earth or heaven could,’’ he wrote to Kathryn in March of 1986 from Michigan.

“Anita is my love and my only love. She is with me now and she will always be with me. I know that as a fact.’’

Kathryn Szyszka, the sister of murder victim Anita Cobby. Picture: John Appleyard

John Cobby and Anita’s sister, Kathryn have taken thirty years to share the letters he wrote in the wake of the murder which detail not only the love he had but also the pain he endured, and still does to this day.

CHAPTER ONE: ANITA COBBY - THE SAVAGE MURDER THAT ROCKED SYDNEY

CHAPTER TWO: ANITA’S HUSBAND JOHN SPEAKS FOR FIRST TIME IN 30 YEARS

He also details his complete breakdown in the US, at one point writing that “the doctors were a little worried about my consistent wish to execute the people involved in Anita’s murder”.

It was only months after those killers — John Travers, Michael Murdoch and brothers Gary, Michael and Les Murphy — had been caught that he would return to Australia.

John’s pain is evident in one early missive where he writes: “I had a dream where I met her standing over a grave and went up to her and asked whose grave was it and she said ‘That it was hers and although she is dead she is always going to be with me as we both stand here now above my grave. I’m not really gone’.”

He also asked Kathryn not to tell him any of the details about his wife’s death — a practice he kept for nearly three decades in which he avoided all TV and newspapers references about Anita. He had also changed his name to John Francis months after her murder.

“Please don’t tell me about what has gone down in regards to the police and their findings. I’m not ready for that yet,” he wrote to Kathryn.

“I wish I could have been a better husband to Anita and a better son-in-law to your parents. God knows a better brother-in-law to you guys,’’ he added. That particular page still bears smudges from John’s from the tears.

For years his sister Gaynor Cobby would warn him about any publicity surrounding her death and he would avoid all forms of media.

The Cobby Clan: From top left to right: Kim, Gay, Julie, Pop Cobby, Greg and Sharan. Bottom left to right: John, Karen, Mark, Nana and Louise.

John decided after 30 years to tell his story in a book, Remembering Anita Cobby, where he relives his life with Anita, who he had been married to for four years and only split from six weeks before her death. They were to be reunited the week she died.

Apart from coping after her brutal murder, his emotional account also includes the fact that the Anita lost a baby.

He tells of the night he came home from work when Anita broke the news just weeks before their wedding in 1982.

“It was about nine weeks into the pregnancy and it hurts us like hell, especially Anita,” he said. “She was pretty upset ...it might sound strange but we weren’t devastated. We were both nurses and knew these things happen for a reason..maybe there was something wrong with the baby.

“Besides were thought we had a lifetime to have kids.’’

John Francis changed his name back to Cobby last year.

Remembering Anita Cobby by Mark Morri and published by Random House.