ANITA COBBY: THE HORRIFIC MURDER OF A BEAUTY QUEEN
MORE THAN 30 YEARS LATER, MANY PEOPLE VOW TO KEEP HER LEGACY ALIVE
It was the crime that shocked the nation, when 26-year-old nurse and former beauty queen Anita Cobby was horrifically murdered while walking home on February 2, 1986.
More than 30 years later, people still remember Anita’s tragic story, but Deb Wallace has vowed to keep the young woman’s legacy alive.
Despite announcing her retirement from the NSW
Police last month, Deb plans to continue to work where it all started – helping victims of homicide.
She was just a few years into her career at Blacktown police station, in Sydney’s west, when she found herself at the centre of the investigation into the murder of Anita Cobby.
Anita didn’t usually walk home after work. In her regular routine, once she’d arrived at Blacktown station, she would call her father from the nearby phone booth and he would pick her up.
But on that fateful night after dinner out with friends,
Anita discovered the phone booth had been vandalised and decided to walk home instead.
That decision would see her life ending in the most horrific way.
Anita was approached by an HT Holden Kingswood, which slowed beside her and stopped.
Two of the five men inside the car jumped out and pulled her into the vehicle, where she was robbed, bashed and raped repeatedly before her throat was cut almost to the point of decapitation.
Two days after she was kidnapped, Anita’s naked body was found in a paddock in Prospect. Her corpse showed horrific injuries.
The gruesome murder was quickly solved. Led by Detective Sergeant Ian Kennedy, police took just three weeks to track down, arrest and charge the five men responsible.
One of the policewomen at the centre of the investigation was Deb, who had just started her career in the force.
“When I saw the team on the Anita Cobby case and their passion, commitment and dogged determination, I wondered if I could be one of them,” Deb told the The Daily Telegraph.
“I was met by the then Station Sergeant Joan Stedman, who was one of the original policewomen,”
Deb added.
“She pulled me aside and said, ‘Never compromise your integrity or your femininity. Be true to yourself and be proud to be a policewoman, you’re not a policeman’.
“It was really good advice that I’ve tried to live up to for the past 37 years.”
Deb was part of the team that brought the three Murphy brothers, Michael, 33, Gary, 28, and Leslie, 23, John Travers, 19, and Michael Murdoch, 19, to justice for the callous crime.
Travers, the suspected ringleader of the group, had a sadistic history and was known to engage in bestiality with animals before slitting their throats.
The trial lasted 54 days and on June 10, 1987, all five were found guilty of sexual assault and murder.
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. The Executive should grant the same degree of mercy they bestowed on their victim.
“The circumstances of these prisoners and the circumstances of the murder of Anita Lorraine Cobby prompt me to recommend that the official files of each prisoner should be clearly marked, ‘Never to be released’,” he added.
Michael Murphy died last February of terminal cancer aged 66. The four remaining killers remain behind bars, forever remembered for their disgusting crime.
More than 30 years after her death, Anita’s husband, John Cobby, still blames himself.
“I should have been there with her,” John told The Daily Telegraph. “I rang her on the Sunday morning and I asked if she wanted to be picked up from work but she told me she had already organised going to dinner with some friends and to stay with her parents,” he added.
“I blamed myself for her dying and still do.”