Anita Cobby

Anita Lorraine Cobby (née Lynch) (2 November 1959 – 2 February 1986) was a 26-year-old Australian woman from Blacktown, New South Wales, who was kidnapped while walking home from Blacktown railway station just before 10:00 p.m. on 2 February 1986, and subsequently sexually assaulted and murdered.

Two days after being reported as missing by family, Cobby's body was discovered by a man in the boiler room of his farm in Prospect, NSW.

Anita Lynch was born in Sydney on 2 November 1959, to Garry Bernard Lynch, a graphic artist with the Royal Australian Air Force, and Grace "Peggy" Lynch, a nurse.

As a teenager Anita participated in beauty pageants, including winning the Miss Western Suburbs Pageant in November 1979, and had a promising career as a model.

However, she decided instead to follow in her mother's footsteps into nursing.

Anita met her future husband, John Cobby, while studying for her nursing degree at Sydney Hospital.

They married on 27 March 1982.

At the time of her murder in 1986, the couple had separated and Anita was living with her parents in Blacktown.

According to John, he and Anita were on good terms and, when she was murdered, had been planning to reconcile.

Cobby worked in Sydney and commuted daily from her home in Blacktown.

On the day of the murder, she finished work at Sydney Hospital at 3 p.m. and met friends for dinner in nearby Redfern.

Cobby then caught a train from Central railway station to Blacktown station.

Arriving at Blacktown, she would usually ring her father who would pick her up.

On the day of her death, she most likely decided to walk home after finding the phone to be out of order and no taxis available at the taxi rank.

Aside from her killers, only two witnesses saw Cobby after she left the train station.

Cobby was walking alone from the station along Newton Road, Blacktown around 10 p.m., when the gang of five men drove up beside her and stopped their stolen white HT Holden Kingswood.

Two men leapt from the car and dragged her into the vehicle, as she kicked and screamed.

A teenage boy, his younger sister, and his mother heard someone screaming from the street in front of their house and had gone outside in time to see Cobby forced into the attackers' car.

The boy ran across the road to help, but the car drove off before he reached it.

Returning home, he telephoned the police to report what he had seen.

A few minutes later, their neighbour and his girlfriend arrived home and, after being told of the abduction, drove off to search for the car.

They eventually drove down Reen Road (now known as Peter Brock Drive), Prospect and stopped by the now-empty Holden, where the man used a spotlight to search the adjacent paddock.

Seeing nothing in the paddock and believing the car he was looking for was a different model Holden, he returned home.

The attackers later stated that they had hidden in the long grass to avoid the spotlight and waited for the man to leave.

Once inside the car on Newton Road, Cobby had been ordered to strip off her clothes but refused, begging her attackers to let her go and saying she was married and also menstruating.

Her attackers punched Cobby repeatedly, breaking her nose and both cheekbones, before forcing her to perform fellatio on all five men.

The attackers then drove to a service station to purchase fuel using money stolen from Cobby's purse.

Cobby was then driven down Reen Road to the secluded paddock, while being held down in the car, raped repeatedly, and being continually beaten by her five attackers.

They then dragged the brutally beaten Cobby into the paddock along a barbed wire fence, where they dumped her and continued to sexually and physically abuse her for some time.

According to his taped confession, one of the attackers, John Travers, then became concerned that Cobby could identify them because she had seen their faces and heard their names, and convinced the other attackers to kill her.

Urged on by the others, Travers slit her throat, almost severing her head.

When Cobby did not return home, her family initially thought she was staying overnight with a friend, but after learning that she failed to appear at work the next day, they reported her missing on 3 February.

On the morning of 4 February, her naked body was found in the paddock by a farmer investigating what his cows were milling around.

Investigations led to the arrest of five men, who were later convicted of her abduction, rape and murder on 10 June 1987.

Each was sentenced to life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole, on 16 June 1987.

Upon arriving to the location of her body, it was clear to authorities that Cobby had sustained a prolonged and vicious attack, with multiple sharp puncture wounds and cuts, as well as lacerations from being rolled in and dragged through barbed wire.

She had obvious signs of being beaten, kicked and struck, mainly from the bruising, cuts and abrasions covering a large percentage of her body.

Cobby’s cause of death was ultimately a result of a slit throat, an act which the medical examiner noted ‘nearly decapitated’ her.

The forensic pathologist who performed her autopsy additionally noted that Cobby was ‘likely still conscious’ at the time of her throat being cut, and estimated it would have taken ‘between 2-3 minutes’ for her to bleed to death.

The murder received widespread media coverage, condemnation and attention, including an impassioned local and national campaign to reinstate the death penalty, at the time, for the worst of Australian offenders.