“I told him no, to leave her. But there was no way. The four of us walked away and he approached the car covered in blood, and said: 'I cut his throat.'" Michael Murphy's confession, pointing out the ringleader of the plot, further unnerved Detective Kennedy who, after learning the autopsy report, knew that the young man was lying unreasonably.
The boy, in connivance with four other boys, had beaten, raped and tortured the young Anita Cobby to death and dumped her naked and mutilated body in a meadow. The gang rape at the hands of the beauty queen's Pack shocked public opinion and what happened was described as “the most savage and diabolical murder ever known.” Since then, their names have been part of national infamy.
Before perpetrating this barbarity, the five boys were small-time criminals, barely eking out a living in the western suburbs of Sydney. John Travers, the leader of the Pack, had an unstructured childhood in foster families and continuous admissions to juvenile centers for fights and theft, in addition to problems with alcohol and a tendency toward bestiality and animal abuse. It seems that he even enjoyed cutting the throats of animals after forcing them sexually.
His great childhood friend and accomplice, Michael Murdoch, had an adolescence very similar to John's with addiction to drugs such as cannabis and continuous admissions to juvenile detention centers.
For their part, the Murphy brothers, Michael, Gary and Leslie, were not misguided as far as a criminal career was concerned, since they belonged to a family of criminals well “known to the police.” The Murdochs, apart from having bad tempers and being extremely violent, were dedicated to robberies, mainly of vehicles.
And, one day, while they were hanging around the Doonside hotels smoking joints and drinking alcohol, John and Michael bumped into them. From there, they hit it off and formed a gang.
The group began to commit crimes together and carry out small assaults, but their final blow came when one night they decided to attack and kidnap a young woman who was returning home alone. That's when they became a pack of wolves.
Anita Cobby, née Lynch, was a 26-year-old nursing graduate who worked at Sydney Hospital and was separated from her husband at the time of the crime. During her adolescence, the victim had entered several beauty pageants, winning one of the contests, Miss Western Suburbs, in 1979. Although she had a promising career as a model, Anita decided to follow in the footsteps of her mother Grace, who was a nurse. .
On the night of the car, around 10:00 p.m. on February 2, 1986, Anita finished dinner with her colleagues at the hospital (her shift had already ended), and headed to her parents' house, where she lived after the divorce. She took the train and, upon arriving, she called her father from a booth to come pick her up at the station. It was her usual routine.
However, a few meters from her, an HT Holden Kingswood car with five occupants inside spotted the young woman at the public telephone, slowed down and, suddenly, two young men ran out to grab her and force her inside. Anita began to scream and tried to resist her attackers.
At that moment, a boy heard the young woman's screams from the other side of the street and ran to see what was happening. Despite not arriving in time to identify the occupants, he did manage to see the make of the vehicle with which they fled. Immediately, the witness's mother called the police and several patrol cars showed up in the area a few minutes later.
By then, the young people had hidden with the lights off in the middle of a meadow so as not to be seen. That worked for them, because the authorities were unable to locate them in time to avoid the tragedy. Once the danger of being captured had passed, John, Michael and the Murphy brothers beat the victim with clubs and brutally raped her, one after the other, and without stopping beating her. The ordeal lasted about two hours.
At one point and, according to the statements of those involved, John slit Anita's throat to prevent her from identifying them: the nurse had seen their faces perfectly. After the murder, they abandoned the naked and battered body near a wire fence, next to a cow meadow and fled. Two days later, a farmer found the body.
Due to the severity of the injuries and the woman's near decapitation, police were only able to identify Anita by her signature “Russian” style wedding ring. The nurse still carried him, despite having been separated for a while.
From that moment on, the news of the cruel murder spread massively and public opinion went into shock: it was urgent to search for the author or authors of that barbarity before anger took over the people. For this reason, the New South Wales government even offered a reward of $50,000 for anyone with any information leading to an arrest.
Meanwhile, investigators recreated the murder with a police officer who pretended to be the victim that night: they needed passengers and potential witnesses to remember any details to solve the case. Three weeks later, a police informant gave the location of a stolen Holden, the same vehicle used by the murderers, which focused the investigations on those involved.
The police realized that they all had a long history of violence and petty crime, and that one of them, John Travers, boasted of carrying a knife. On February 21, John Travers and Michael Murdoch, 19, and Leslie Murphy, 22, were arrested at the home of a relative of the ringleader.
John was charged with the theft of the vehicle and taken to the police station for questioning, while Michael and Leslie were released on bail. Now, the police knew that the two minors (in the United States the age of majority is 21) were hiding something, so they convinced Travers' aunt to wear a microphone and extract a confession from both her nephew and his friend. Michael.
On February 24, 1986, as an angry crowd gathered outside Bankstown court, the three boys were formally charged with the murder of Anita Cobby. But the other two members of the Pack were missing, Gary and Michael, aged 28 and 33 respectively, who were still fugitives from justice.
Thanks to the media coverage of the case and the fact that their faces appeared on the covers of all the newspapers and news programs in the country, a citizen gave the tip and pointed out the place where they were hiding. Once captured, there was an image that went around the world: that of Gary Murphy with his pants wet in the crotch.
Then came the contradictory statements and accusations, always directed towards the same person, John Travers. Michael Murphy wanted to make it clear to Detective Ian Kennedy during questioning: Travers had slit Anita's throat. “He's a maniac,” he told her.
The atmosphere that was felt at that time in the community was one of indignation and rage: demonstrations were held where people called for the restoration of the death penalty.
On March 16, 1987, the trial against the five defendants began at the Darlinghurst Supreme Court, in what came to be called “the trial of the century.” The press took up a large part of the seats in the room, no one wanted to miss a detail when it was the turn of the alleged murderers to speak.
Prosecutor Alan Saunders described Anita Cobby's ordeal in detail as "sustained degradation, brutal and unbridled lust culminating in one of the most savage brutal murders the State has ever known." And he called the defendants “heartless cowards.”
The defense of the accused, except that of John Travers, focused on pointing out the ringleader as the only one guilty of the death of Anita Cobby and, therefore, acting on his own and being the only one to carry the weapon and cut off the victim's neck. However, the court held everyone responsible for the murder. Travers as the author of the crime, but the rest as accomplices to the crime given its seriousness.
Thus, on June 10, the jury found John Travers, Michael Murdoch and the Murphy brothers guilty of charges of sexual assault and murder, and they were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
During the reading of the verdict, Chief Justice Alan Maxwell said through tears after taking a sip of water to compose himself: “This was a cold-blooded, calculated murder. “The Executive should grant the same degree of mercy that it granted to its victim.” The sentence revolutionized the courtroom and the bailiffs had to intervene to restore order.
The Beauty Queen Pack disbanded and entered different maximum security prisons in New South Wales, where four of its members remain to this day and remain unrepentant for the murder. The only one who is no longer alive is Michael Murphy, who died of liver cancer in 2019.
