I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin podcast: How Ian Kennedy caught Anita Cobby’s killers
The gang-rape and murder of beauty queen Anita Cobby will never leave the cop who caught her killers. He tells Gary Jubelin on his I Catch Killer’s podcast how he did it. LISTEN NOW
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So, detective, how exactly did my client end up with this large mark on his face?
“Well,” said Ian ‘Speed’ Kennedy to the barrister in the NSW Supreme Court, “probably from me standing on his head.”
Over four decades in the police, homicide detective Ian ‘Speed’ Kennedy spent a lot of time in the witness box being grilled by barristers representing the crims he was trying to lock up.
In the case of Michael Murphy, one of the men he locked up for the brutal 1986 gang-rape and murder of nurse Anita Cobby, Murphy’s barrister wanted to know whether the arrest had been gentle enough.
Kennedy felt he had nothing to be ashamed of, and in this week’s episode of new podcast I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin, the veteran cop recounts the arrest of Murphy and his brother Gary with a disgust for their crimes that has not faded over the decades.
The men, in company with three others, had each viciously raped Cobby in a cow-paddock after abducting her as she walked home from the train station. She was found in the paddock with her head nearly severed.
In the weeks afterwards receiving intelligence the brothers were at a residential home, Kennedy and his team rose before dawn to surprise them.
“(Another officer) smashes the door in. I’m number one, I go in first, I look to the right and number two behind me looks to the left, he covers me. I had a shotgun. We walked in a small hall and then there was a lounge room. Gary and Michael Murphy were sitting on the lounge and Michael had a little kid sitting on his lap,” he says.
“I said: ‘Michael, put the kid down and lay down face down on the floor’. I stood on his head, I waited until everything was quiet, I handcuffed him and we took him away.”
“When I got questioned about … standing on his head, the (lawyer) said to me: ‘Did Michael Murphy have any marks on him?’ I said: ‘Yes he had a large mark on his cheek, and they said: ‘I don’t suppose you know how he got it?’, expecting me to say: ‘No I’ve got no idea. I said: ‘Well probably from me standing on his head. I told him to lay down and there were people running around and I wanted to stabilise him. If I concentrated just solely on him someone could come out of another door and surprised me, there was people running past me, people screaming.”
Kennedy’s work on the Cobby case came after a stint with the notorious armed holdup squad in the days of Roger Rogerson. “I was impressed with Roger as a policeman before he went crook,” Kennedy says now. “He got things done in terms of solving vicious crimes.”
Kennedy qualified as a hostage negotiator and found himself one day perched near the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge negotiating with a man who’d fallen in love with his male parole officer but wanted to kill himself after the relationship went sour.
The pair were dozens of metres above the roadway, with the Harbour another 50 metres below that. “I was looking up at him thinking: ‘If he decides to dive down, he’ll take me with him’,” Kennedy says.
After hours of pleading with the man to come down, Kennedy was getting desperate.
Finally he said: “Hey mate, do you follow football at all?”
The man said he did.
“Who do you follow?”
“Newtown.”
“‘You may as well jump, they’ve got no chance of getting in the semis’,” Kennedy said.
“He laughed. I said: ‘You laughed, that shows me you’re not as sad as you think you are, you’ve still got a sense of humour, I’ve got people who can look after you, you’ve just got to trust me.”
The man came down.
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In the “stick-ups”, as the armed holdup squad was known, Kennedy found himself at the centre of a celebrated 1984 gunfight on a packed commuter drawbridge.
An armed robber who had conducted a spectacular year-long spree of bank heists was finally pinned down in the CBD while he attempted his fourth robbery of the day, a Commonwealth Bank.
The offender, Hakki Atahan, took five male bank staff hostages and forced them into a Datsun, forcing one of the hostages to drive through police roadblocks and lead scores of police on a wild car chase through the city.
“We ended up going down to the Spit Bridge and we called ahead and asked for the Spit Bridge to be raised. We were following the crook and said we’re in pursuit, we rang the radio and said: ‘Get in touch with the people who run the Spit Bridge and get ‘em to raise the bridge and we can corner him down the bottom’,” Kennedy says.
“We came roaring up the outside on the wrong side of the road,” he says.
“There was a gunfight between the crook and us and the crook got shot dead but he fired a shot at one of the guys I was with and the pellet bounced off the top of the (Detective Steve Canellis’) shotgun and lodged between his eyes, just above the top of his nose. His nickname now is Beady Eyes,” Kennedy says.
Listen, subscribe or follow I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin at truecrimeaustralia.com.au, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast
Pre-order his book here.
Originally published as I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin podcast: How Ian Kennedy caught Anita Cobby’s killers
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