‘The most savage, fiendish murder ever known’
How the Anita Cobby murder by five petty criminals changed Australia and turned the killers into the nation’s most reviled people.
Before they committed the brutal murder that changed Australia, Anita Cobby’s killers were nobodies, small-time criminals eking out useless lives in Sydney’s western suburbs.
But the events of February 2, 1986, called “the most savage and fiendish murder this State has ever known” cemented the names of the five men in national infamy.
Thereafter the three Murphy brothers, Michael, 33, Gary, 28, and Leslie, 23, John Travers and Michael Murdoch, 18, became the focus of hatred by a shocked nation.
What the five had subjected 26-year-old nurse Anita Cobby to in a paddock before Travers slit her throat, almost beheading her, had become public knowledge just days after her naked body was found.
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“Anita Lorraine Cobby suffered two hours of sustained degradation, brutality and unbridled lust,’’ prosecutor Allan Saunders, QC, told the Supreme Court jury in 1987.
“She was then callously murdered.’’
The men were described at the trial as “craven cowards”.
At the trial, Gary Murphy — who had famously wet his pants when police arrested him — along with his two brothers and Michael Murdoch all tried to point the finger of blame at Travers.
Travers, a psychopath who reportedly had sex with a goat before slitting its throat on his lawn in suburban Doonside, had pleaded guilty to avoid a trial.
The attempt to get off from a life in prison for murder by blaming Travers was the defence case presented by Michael Murphy, the eldest of the Cobby killers who has just died from liver cancer in Long Bay prison hospital
On his arrest, almost a month after Anita Cobby’s murder, the convicted criminal and attempted prison escapee immediately dobbed in Travers as the killer.
Detective Ian “Speed” Kennedy caught Michael Murphy at Glenfield in Sydney’s southwest on February 26, 1986.
Trying to paint himself as her would-be saviour, Murphy told Kennedy that Travers had decided to kill Anita because she knew their names.
“I said no, leave her,’’ Murphy told the detective
“But there was no way that he was going to leave her.
“The four of us walked away and he came up to the car covered in blood and said, ‘I cut her throat’.”
Asked if he had been concerned she might still be alive, Murphy claimed: “I didn’t want her to be killed. He’s (Travers) a maniac.’’
Murphy said Travers returned to the car covered in blood after killing Anita and started “big noting” himself, saying “I cut her throat. It’s me first one.’’
Michael Murphy’s blame game would not save him from life in prison, but it did provide a window on the events that led up to Anita Cobby’s terrible death.
The Murphy brothers were three of nine siblings to a family living in the Blacktown area in Sydney’s west.
Michael Patrick, Gary Stephen and Leslie Joseph Murphy came from a family “known to police”, and Michael was already infamous as the “give-up” for a 1978 prison escape.
In a phone call with his mother, Michael had revealed he would be getting out of jail that weekend, alerting authorities to a planned mass breakout through a tunnel underneath Parramatta jail.
All short men known for having bad tempers, Michael and Gary were both unemployed and their brother, Leslie, the shortest of them at just 155cm, was a maintenance worker.
Gary was hearing-impaired and a convicted car thief.
The two older brothers had met John Raymond Travers while drinking and smoking cannabis at hotels around Doonside.
Travers had a young sidekick, Michael James Murdoch, an unemployed Westmead teenager who idolised Travers, a cannabis smoker and alcoholic from a young age.
In and out of children’s court, Travers had been sent to a juvenile detention facility and expelled from school in year 10.
He boasted of having sex with animals before slitting their throats.
Travers sported a distinctive teardrop tattoo beneath his left eye.
Anita Cobby worked as a registered nurse but had made news as the winner of the Miss Western Suburbs beauty pageant in 1979.
She was close to her parents, Garry and Grace Lynch, and in 1986 had recently separated from her husband, John Cobby, and returned to live with the Lynches at Blacktown.
At 3pm on February 2, 1986, Anita finished work at Sydney Hospital and met friends for dinner.
She caught a train from Central to Blacktown station where, normally, she would phone her father for a lift.
The phone was out of order, no taxis were at the rank and at 10pm Anita embarked on the walk home along Newton Road, Blacktown.
Driving up the road in a stolen white HT Holden Kingswood with the Murphys and his mate Murdoch, Travers spotted Anita Cobby “and wanted her”.
The car stopped by her on the road and two of them leapt out and grabbed her, kicking and screaming, into the vehicle.
In a house across the road, a boy heard the screams.
He ran out in time to see someone being forced into a car but could not reach the vehicle before it drove off.
His mother telephoned police and their neighbour drove off to search for the car, actually spotting the empty Holden near a paddock off Reen Rode, Prospect.
But the five men were hiding with Anita in the grass and waited until the neighbour gave up and drove off.
While in the car, the Murphy brothers, Murdoch and Travers had punched Anita, breaking her nose and cheekbones, beaten her, raped her and forced her to perform oral sex on them.
They dragged her into the paddock off Reen Road and continued to beat and sexually assault her.
The entire ordeal went for up to two hours.
Travers would later confess he was concerned she knew their faces, had heard their names and could identify her assailants.
He told police the other men had urged him on, and he had killed Anita, before leaving her on a barbed wire fence.
When Anita did not return home that evening, Garry and Grace Lynch were not immediately alarmed.
She was a grown-up, she could have stayed with a friend, but when she failed to turn up at work they were worried.
On the morning of February 4, 1986, a farmer noticed the cows in his paddock were behaving strangely, milling in a group.
He investigated and found the naked body of a woman who had clearly met a traumatic end.
Anita Cobby was identified by her distinctive “Russian”-style wedding ring.
As news of the murder was broadcast, and the Lynches began giving interviews about the bewildering savagery inflicted on their beloved daughter, public anger grew.
Then NSW Premier Neville Wran described the killing as the vilest crime of the century and posted a $50,000 reward.
The horrifying details of Anita’s injuries were leaked to the media, quickening community sentiment.
As detectives searched for the killers, Constable Debbie Wallace dressed as Anita and re-enacted her last night alive.
The sighting of a woman being dragged into a Holden on Newtown Road and a tip-off regarding a stolen Holden sent police searching for the Murphy brothers.
They learnt the men had associated with Travers, who was reputed to always carry a knife.
On February 21, 19 days after they had abducted, raped and murdered Anita Cobby, Travers and Murdoch were arrested at a relative’s house and Les Murphy was found at Travers’s home.
Charged only with car theft, Murdoch was released on bail, while Travers was detained for further questioning.
While in police custody, Travers’s aunt was recruited to help detectives. Wearing a hidden microphone, she brought him cigarettes and spoke with him in the police cell.
She also spoke with the bailed Murdoch regarding the murder.
On February 24, 1986, as an angry crowd gathered outside, Les Murphy, Murdoch and Travers were formally charged with Anita Cobby’s murder at Bankstown Court.
The faces of Gary and Michael Murphy, still at large, were broadcast on television and on the front pages of newspapers.
Finally, a man called police saying two men fitting their description were hiding out in a flat at Glenfield, in southwestern Sydney.
Ian “Speed” Kennedy and another detective found Mick Murphy inside watching television.
Gary tried to flee but ran into a wall of police, who tackled him to the ground.
Soon after media captured the image of Gary with his wet jeans.
The five killers of Anita Cobby planned to enter pleas of not guilty at trial, but at the last minute Travers changed his to guilty.
After the first trial was aborted when The Sun newspaper revealed Michael Murphy had plotted the 1987 Parramatta prison escape, a second trial went ahead.
Evidence at the trial included Gary Murphy saying he had heard his brother Michael saying “do your own thing’’ to Travers before Anita was killed.
The court heard that on the night Anita Cobby died, Travers’s neighbour, Maxine Greensmith,
had noticed a “funny-smelling” fire burning in Travers’ backyard.
Ms Greensmith said she saw the five accused standing around it, drinking beer and talking in loud voices.
Some of the men later told police they had burned Anita’s clothing and belongings in Travers’s incinerator.
The court heard that Anita died within minutes of the final cut to her throat.
An autopsy showed she had three major and three minor lacerations across her neck.
Her other injuries included lacerations on her breast, leg, thigh, hands and fingers, abrasions over her back and multiple bruising on her head and body.
Garry Lynch told the court he had identified his daughter’s body at Liverpool mortuary two days after her murder.
On June 10, 1987, in the Darlinghurst Supreme Court, a jury found Anita Cobby’s killers guilty of sexual assault and murder and they were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Justice Alan Maxwell said, “This was a calculated killing done in cold blood. The Executive should grant the same degree of mercy they bestowed on their victim.”
Garry Lynch died, aged 90, in 2008, and Grace followed him, in 2013, aged 88.
The Murphy brothers have become wizened old men over 33 years in prison.
All four remaining killers are housed in maximum security prisons across New South Wales.
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