Two days later her beaten and bloodied body was discovered in the middle of a farm in the Western Sydney suburb of Prospect, the extent of her injuries shocking even the most hardened of homicide detectives.

Cobby, 26, had been severely beaten, repeatedly raped and had her throat cut before she was dumped in the field. Her injuries suggested she had been dragged through a barbed wire fence on the way to her final resting place.

Sadistic teenage rapist John Travers and four members of his gang would eventually be caught and put away for life for the horrific abduction and murder, with a judge recommending Travers never see the outside of a prison again.

The crime rattled the city and detectives investigating Cobby’s murder were initially stumped as to why the young nurse had been targeted.

Retired Detective Inspector Ian Kennedy, who headed the homicide investigation, said his team worked tirelessly on the Cobby case but were initially hampered by a lack of evidence.

During the case “we basically worked three or four weeks in a row, 11 hour, 12 hour days - emotionally, up and down, it was a rollercoaster,” he said.

“We had been very frustrated that nothing at the scene was very forthcoming, it was clean, there was no clothing. Don’t forget this was before DNA too.”

A reluctant teen beauty pageant winner, Cobby had rejected a promising career as a model to study nursing.

She had no known enemies and wasn’t involved with drugs or the party scene.

Following a heartbreaking split with husband John the year before her death, Cobby had dedicated herself to her job and spent long hours at The Sydney Hospital where she worked.

After finishing her shift on the afternoon of February 2 1986, Cobby and two friends from the hospital went to a restaurant in Redfern for dinner.

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One of the nurses dropped Cobby off at Central Station just before 9pm so she could catch a train back to the home she shared with her parents, Garry and Grace Lynch, in Blacktown.

Her usual practice was to call her dad to pick her up from the station after work, but as she often stayed at friends’ places in the city if she had to pull a double shift he didn’t think anything of it when he didn’t receive a call that night.

But when staff from The Sydney Hospital called Mr Lynch the following morning asking if he knew why Anita hadn’t come into work, he began to worry and when there was no word from his daughter by that afternoon, the panicked dad lodged a missing persons report.

Any hope Cobby would walk through the door was shattered the following day when police were contacted by Prospect farmer John Reen who had found the body of a young woman on his property.

When detectives arrived at Mr Reen’s property they were met with a horrific scene.

Deep bruises covered the young nurse’s entire body and she had several broken bones where she had been beaten.

She was naked except for her wedding ring and there were signs she had defensive wounds that pointed to a tragic fight for life.

Autopsy results would find Cobby was still alive when her throat was slit in a final act of extreme brutality.

Police launched a huge investigation but they had very little to go on.

Their first break came when a teenage girl came forward to say she had witnessed a young woman being dragged kicking and screaming into a car near Blacktown train station.

When the girl told her brother what she had seen he tried to follow them in his car but was unable to locate it.

With other leads drying up the state government soon announced a $50,000 reward - which was quickly doubled to $100,000 - for information that led to the arrest of the killers.

A week after Cobby’s body was found, an informant came forward and pointed police in the direction of Travers and his sick gang.

Another gave police a number of locations the teenager could be found and Travers, Mick Murdoch and Les Murphy were arrested in dramatic dawn raids.

The trio denied any involvement in the murder but police believed they had their men.

It would be Travers’ sick need to boast about his crimes that was his undoing. He asked police if he could speak to a friend, who would come to be known as Miss X, and he told her everything.

It wasn’t the first time he had boasted about his vicious crimes to Miss X - he had taken great pride in telling her of a previous rape and bashing of a gay teenager in Perth he had had a relationship with.

Police wired up Miss X and got the whole horrifying account of what took place on February 2.

When it was announced that Travers, Murdoch and Murphy had been arrested for Cobby’s murder, the public outrage was immediate.

An angry mob of hundreds gathered at Blacktown Police Station calling for the death penalty for the trio.

Murdoch and Murphy had turned on Travers and in the process it was revealed that Murphy’s two brothers - Gary and Mick - had also been involved in the abduction.

When those two were arrested even more people flooded to the police station leading cops to set up SWAT teams to ensure the safety of the suspects who they feared might become victims of a crowd intent on blood.

Despite each confessing to playing a part in the brutal abduction, rape and murder of Anita Cobby, all five suspects initially pleaded not guilty when the case went to trial.

Travers would plead guilty before proceedings began, but the shocking details of what really happened that night would be played out in court as the remaining four gang members went before a judge.

All five men were involved in beating and raping Cobby throughout the horrifying ordeal.

She was stripped, tortured and abused before being dumped in the Prospect field barely alive. The men had returned to their stolen car ready to leave when Travers decided he needed to kill their victim so she couldn’t identify them.

He returned to the paddock and without any hint of remorse, slit the young nurse’s throat and asked away.

In handing down life sentences to the five men, Justice Alan Maxwell described the crime as “one of the most horrifying physical and sexual assaults. This was a calculated killing done in cold blood.”

He than marked their files ‘never to be released’.