Murder, Life imprisonment
In the first of a series on Australian murders in which a sentence of life imprisonment without parole was ordered, we examine the brutal killing of a young woman named Anita Cobby, at 10pm on a February evening in 1986. Five men including three brothers were eventually convicted of her murder – the men were Leslie Joseph Murphy, Michael James Murdoch, Gary Steven Murphy, Michael Patrick Murphy and John Raymond Travers. The circumstances of the offending were later dramatised in an Australian movie called The Boys.
Ms Cobby was out walking in the outer Sydney suburb of Blacktown when a car occupied by the five men pulled over and she was forced to enter the car. They used money from her handbag to purchase petrol while she was trapped and silenced by the men in the back seat of the car. They took her to a paddock where she was assaulted and sexually violated by the men in combination, in a most comprehensive way, until she died of a cut throat.
Travers pleaded guilty to the murder in March 1987. His plea was broadly publicised, as could be expected in such a notorious case. However the headlines came too early as the other accused were still facing trial – in the course of one article Michael Murphy, who was still facing trial at the time of the publication, was described as a prison escapee of no fixed address. The jury was discharged, the trial proceeded afresh, and this sequence became the subject of a High Court appeal (see (1989) 167 CLR 94) – unsuccessful on that ground, though succeeding on others, resulting in a redetermination of the matter by the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal. The case was sufficiently notorious that even in legal publications it is annotated as R v Murphy (the Anita Cobby case). Other grounds of appeal relating to pre-trial publicity and the prejudice caused by the jury being shown pictures of Ms Cobby’s body in situ were dismissed (see (1987) 37 A Crim R 118 (CCA NSW)).
A notorious case for its time, and a grotesque cautionary tale about the power of five depraved men in combination.
