Crime reporter Mark Morri recalls the explosive reaction to Anita Cobby’s murder
Sydney exploded in a fit of rage outside Blacktown Police Station when the men responsible for killing Anita Cobby were arrested. READ CRIME WRITER MARK MORRI’S RECOLLECTION OF THE TIME.
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Sydney exploded in a fit of rage outside Blacktown Police Station when the men responsible for killing Anita Cobby were arrested.
It was 1986 and I have never seen the city so angry — before or since. Three weeks earlier, Anita’s naked body had been found in a paddock.
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Much of what she endured was too horrific to be made public but it was revealed her fingers were broken as she fought the pack of rapists before the leader John Travers slit her throat and left her to die. The outrage was palpable in every suburb.
This was a beautiful young woman, a nurse and a charity queen snatched by a pack of animals as she walked home along a busy street.
It was an affront to the safety of women across the country. It wasn’t just the loss of innocence but a theft of freedom that angered men and women alike.
“By the time we got to Blacktown Police Station a crowd of three or four hundred people were out the front,’’ retired detective Ian Kennedy said yesterday.
“They were rocking the car and they would have killed them if they had got to them,’’ he said. Placards with ‘hang the bastards’’ were sprinkled through the crowd.
“Never have I seen such a mob react to a crime before or since.’’
It was a murder more than any in Sydney which seemed to get into the psyche of Sydney and galvanise it against these men who had committed such an horrendous crime.
Even the crooks were looking for them and giving information to the police.
LIFE SENTENCES
When the killers were found guilty and sentenced to life in jail with the added words by the judge “NEVER TO BE RELEASED” there was literally dancing in the streets.
The brutality, the savagery and cruelty that was inflicted on Anita cut a wound so deep in Sydney that the scar has never healed.
Surprisingly it was the men who were hit with the fear more than the woman, with men leading the charge to kill the five men, John Travers, Michael Murdoch, and brothers Michael, Gary and Les Murphy.
“It brought home to many men how vulnerable women can be. Women already had that fear of not feeling safe walking at night,’’ said Karen Willis OAM, executive officer of Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia.
Likewise, the sheer randomness of Anita being violently dragged from a street hit home for many men.
“Most violence against women and deaths happen in the home. This was so public and random,’’ Ms Willis said.
For the first time the reporting concentrated on the offenders and their evilness.
“There was no suggestion that the victim was in anyway responsible for the attack. No one said why was she walking in the dark or that her clothes were provocative.
“It really concentrated on the violence of the offenders against the victim.’’
Perhaps it was her beauty, her profession and the passion in which her parents fronted the media day after day that made Sydney so enraged.
Barely six months after knocking on the door of Garry and Grace Lynch’s home in Blacktown to report on Anita’s death I was walking the stairs of a block of units in Bondi to interview
Tess Knight about the disappearance of her nine-year-old daughter Samantha.
Again the city went into overdrive as they searched for the missing girl who vanished in broad daylight while going to buy an ice-cream.
ANOTHER HORROR
It was soon evident that Samantha Knight, just like Anita Cobby, had been snatched from the street by someone intent on harming her.
And just like when Anita was murdered, the city went into overdrive, gripped by fear and paranoia. But his time that someone was stalking and abducting their children.
However, unlike Anita there was no relief in knowing that the perpetrator had been locked up and taken off the streets like her killers.
That would take 15 years to resolve with the confession of Michael Guilder that he abducted, drugged and eventually killed Samantha.
There have been senseless brutal murders of young women since and the abductions and unspeakable acts committed upon young children, but it was these two cases which in so many ways took the carefree innocence away from so many at the time and their fear and paranoia has been handed down the generations.
Originally published as Crime reporter Mark Morri recalls the explosive reaction to Anita Cobby’s murder
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