Anita Cobby’s widower in same hospital as wife’s killer

The widower of murdered former beauty queen Anita Cobby was in the same Sydney hospital as one of his wife’s killers, unaware that the depraved inmate was recovering from a prison bashing just a few hundred metres away.

The widower of murdered former beauty queen Anita Cobby was in the same Sydney hospital as one of his wife’s killers, unaware that the depraved inmate was recovering from a prison bashing just a few hundred metres away.

“It’s just as well I didn’t know or I would have tried to do something,” John Cobby said on Thursday, when The Daily Telegraph told him that he was at Prince of Wales Hospital at the same time as killer Gary Murphy.

John Cobby at Bronte Beach in 2015. Picture: Tim Hunter

Mr Cobby spent more than a week recovering from a chest infection recently at the Randwick hospital, where Murphy had been transferred after he was bashed by up to six inmates in a shower block at Long Bay jail last month.

Anita’s widower knows the layout of the hospital intimately, having worked there as a nurse for more than a decade until recently.

He said that although he was severely ill at the time, if he had known that Murphy was so close he didn’t think he would have been able to help himself.

“I have dreamt for years and still do about killing them. It never goes away.”

Convicted murderer Gary Murphy leaves Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick under the guard of corrections officers on Thursday. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Sixty-one-year-old killer Murphy was well enough to be transferred back to Long Bay on Thursday and was escorted by two Corrective Services officers by wheelchair into a secure van.

It was the first time Murphy had been seen outside prison in 33 years, after a judge stamped his file and those of co-offenders Michael and Les Murphy, John Travers and Michael Murdoch, “Never To Be Released” for Ms Cobby’s abduction, rape and murder on February 2, 1986.

I visited John, a friend of mine for years, while he was in hospital but was careful not to let him know about Murphy because I believed he would try to kill him.

Anita Cobby, who was abducted, raped and killed by five men when she was 26.

While there was a blaze of publicity about Murphy being taken to St Vincent’s Hospital, it was never reported he had been transferred to Prince of Wales, where Corrective Services has a highly secure medical facility for sick prisoners.

Murphy was moved just after 11.30am on Thursday back to Long Bay, where he will initially join the likes of convicted rapist and murderer Arthur “Neddy” Smith and serial killer Ivan Milat in the prison hospital wing.

On February 21 this year his brother Michael, 66, died from liver cancer.

The other Cobby killers, Les Murphy, Travers and Murdoch, are still in jail.