THE GANG MURDER OF ANITA COBBY

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case today is part two of the anita cobby case so if you didn't catch part one it was up a couple of days ago i'll leave it in the i card right here go watch that one and then come back here to watch part two because this one won't make any sense if you don't watch part one but before we get into that i just want to thank our sponsor for making this video possible skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of different classes on a range of different subjects from business productivity to lifestyle to creativity like music and photography video editing things like that i think i've mentioned this before on my channel but since around january time i have been on this whole like self-improvement journey i've worked on like my physical health with like diet and exercise and now i'm really on to kind of like my mental health and my mental wellness and i've used skillshare a lot to kind of help me with this 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giving you guys a discount the first 1000 of you guys to click the link down below in the description will receive 30 off of an annual premium membership even if you've already had your free trial with skillshare this discount is also for you so make sure you're going down there clicking the link don't let the spaces run out because this is a really good deal and you won't regret it thanks again to skillshare for sponsoring this video now before we get into this case i just want to give my usual disclaimer that i mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that i talk about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video again i just want to give you all the same content warnings that i gave for part one this will involve themes of sexual assault there might be very graphic details of injuries and also talk of suicidal thoughts and depression so if any of that is something that you don't want to watch feel free to click out this video i'm sure i'll see you again with another kiss that's a little bit more suitable for your headspace before we continue with the story i'm just going to give you a little bit of a summary of part one just to drag your memory and then we'll just flow straight into the rest of the case anita cobby was a 26 year old nurse from sydney australia she split up with her husband john cobby and moved back to blacktown with her parents and within six weeks of splitting up from her husband and moving back to blacktown with her parents anita went out for dinner with some friends and never returned home her body was sadly found two days later laying face down in a field and you could tell just from looking at her body that she had suffered the most brutal murder one of the most brutal murders i think i've ever researched at first the prime suspect in this case was her husband that she'd recently split with his name was john cobby and police put all of their energy into this man they truly believed that he had done this that he was the killer they brought him in for questioning after questioning and they were even getting physical with him like throwing him up against the wall demanding that he confess to this and he did he gave a false confession and even at the time police knew that this was a false confession i mean they got what they wanted they were telling him just confess you did this you killed this woman he confessed and then they were like um no actually i don't think he is the killer so police started looking into other possibilities even though at first they were so sure it was her husband now they were looking into taxi drivers in the area or sex offenders in the area and nothing was really coming up that was until they heard of a bunch of witness reports of people that all lived on the same street seeing and hearing something very concerning on the night that anita disappeared some people heard screams one person even looked out of their window and saw a group of men bundling a dark-haired woman into the back of a car and driving away so with all of these things put together a woman screaming being shoved into a car by a bunch of men and now anita being missing and later turning up dead police now believe that they had a bunch of witnesses to anita cobby's kidnapping so they start looking into these leads these witnesses that potentially saw this happening right in front of them on the street that day but police didn't get very far in that before something big happened in this case so in these kind of investigations all these really serious investigations police try and keep as much of it as possible private that means they don't tell the press exactly what happened to the victim they don't tell the press you know who they're looking for they like to keep the investigation strictly with the police so i'm sure you can imagine police's surprise to find out that anita cobby's autopsy had been leaked and read on live morning radio and the man that leaked this autopsy or at least the man that read this autopsy live on radio was one of the biggest radio hosts in the whole of australia at that time his name was john laws and live on air just on a thursday morning breakfast time radio people are just waking up just taking the kids to school this man leaks every gruesome detail of anita cobby's autopsy to the general public and this was shocking for so many reasons one the fact that this kind of content was even able to air on morning radio i keep emphasizing that this was morning radio and that's because that's the time when most families are listening that's when kids are getting ready for school in the morning the radio's just on in the kitchen or whatever people were also very offended that this man had taken it upon himself to discuss and detail all of the pain and torture that anita cobby had gone through on that night without police's permission without her parents permission without either of their knowledge as well they weren't even aware that the radio was gonna do this until they were sat there listening to it live and then of course there's also the fact that this could potentially really seriously affect police's investigation into this murder so now after the general public had heard all of the details of this they were even more scared than they originally were they all knew that anita had been kidnapped and later found murdered so everyone was terrified to say the least and now of course the general public they knew of anita's case but they didn't know just how horrifying it was and after hearing it on the radio the general public is sent into this absolute panic john laws the guy that did it the radio host said that he felt like the public ought to know everything he felt like it was his duty to inform the general public that people that are capable of doing this kind of thing are still out there they're still at large and people need to be aware and the saddest part of all of this was that anita cobby's own family didn't even know half of what was on her autopsy report police hadn't told her family because it was just so gruesome and so horrifying that like i said in the first part they didn't want anita's mother to see her body like that they were just trying to protect this family they didn't want them to have to envision all of these things that their daughter was going through in her final moments and her poor family had to find out what their beloved daughter had gone through the horrific ordeal that their daughter had suffered in her final moments at the same time as the rest of australia just listening to the radio but if there was anything slightly positive to come out of this breach it was that now the whole of australia felt even more connected to this case than they initially did now everyone was even more outraged they were even more horrified even more sorry for anita and her family that they were going through all this and people wanted to help they wanted to see the people that had done this to anita they wanted to see those people put down the same day that this autopsy was leaked on the radio people came together from all over australia different companies different people with money and eventually they all managed to raise 50 000 as a reward for anyone that could come forward and identify anita's killer people began campaigning for answers they were doing protests they were making signs they were trying to get interviews with police and with anyone that could connect to this case people were trying to solve it themselves they were that desperate to have answers for anita and eventually about a week into this investigation police got their next big tip and this came in the form of a tip-off from a police informant so like a snitch that police would work with and they told police about this group of guys that had stolen a car on the night of anita's disappearance and it just so happened that this stolen car perfectly matched the description that the witnesses gave of that card that they saw anita being abducted in so could this have been the same car you know could her killers have stolen this car and then gone and abducted her maybe this was gonna lead them to anita cobby's killers so police were originally given three names by this informant in relation to this stolen car and these names were john travers michael murdoch and leslie murphy and then later that informant came back to them with two more names so this was now a group of five and the other two were leslie murphy's brothers and their names were gary and mick so now police are looking into this gang of five men three of which were brothers all of which police were familiar with each one of these five men had some sort of criminal record or police contact i suppose and actually one of them john travers had actually been known to police in relation to anita cobby's case in the first couple of days of this investigation i don't even know if anita's body had even been found yet but police received an anonymous tip giving them john travers name just saying look into this guy and you'll see why as we get into him and his life and his past he was a very dodgy guy he'd done some awful stuff before in the past and this person that gave the tit they had nothing directly linking john travers to anita cobby but they just felt like this was definitely something that travis was capable of doing so anyway going back to this newer tip from the police informant they said that they'd actually seen john travers leslie murphy and michael murdoch all riding around in this stolen car one day so that was why their three names were given first so police tracked all three of those men down and arrested them all in relation to this stolen car they brought them all back to the police station and police were quite smart about this because they didn't want these three men to know that they were suspect in the anita cobby case police wanted them to just think that this was just about the car that's it that's all but they did try to slip in in each of these guys questionings just a subtle reference to anita or her murder or anything like that they just kind of wanted to see how these men would react if they could catch them off guard and then if they did seem a little bit dodgy then they could go in with the anita cobby questions so when this was mentioned michael murdock and leslie murphy gave absolutely nothing a word they didn't even flinch at the mention of anita's name so police didn't really get anything from them but john travers on the other hand when he was arrested and taken in for this questioning police actually found him in his car so when they arrested him they also had a quick search of his car and in there they found a knife but this wasn't just any knife this knife had blood stains on it and so the way the police kind of slipped in the anita cobby case into his questioning was surrounding this knife i don't know exactly what was said i couldn't find that anywhere but the way that john travers responded made police believe that he was guilty straight away the knife was brought up in questioning and travis snapped at police and said i didn't slit that [ __ ] throat presumably referring to anita cobby but at this point officers hadn't even said her name this was very clearly john travers guilty conscience that was just making him snap and defend himself when police actually hadn't even really mentioned anita at this point and so because of this police decided to let michael murdoch and leslie murphy go but because of the way that travers had reacted they were going to keep him in police custody for a while and question him further now more about anita cobby than the stolen car but before we get into that i just want to kind of give you some background on all of these men letting you know the kind of people that they are we'll start with 20 year old john travers who police actually believe to be the ringleader of the group although he is one of the youngest if not the youngest travers had a very very rough upbringing he came from poverty his father abused him actually very brutally abused him it's also alleged that there was some kind of sexual abuse in the household although that was never confirmed but regardless his home life was very very traumatic and that is confirmed you know he suffered a lot mentally from the things that he went through as a child and travis actually ended up turning to drugs and alcohol at a very very early age i think it was like 12 13 when he started taking drugs to deal with the pain in his household by the age of 14 he was dependent on these substances he was an alcoholic he was dependent on drugs and he was actually kicked out of school due to this so now every day of his life was spent not really doing anything he didn't have school to go to her he didn't have a job so he would just hang about on the streets drink do drugs and then end up robbing people or robbing stars in order to pay for these addictions that he had at this point travers actually became such a hassle for his mother to care for obviously he was getting in trouble literally every single day that eventually she ended up sending him to like a juvenile detention home i don't think it was like a detention center because i don't know if parents can just send their child off to something like that but she just couldn't cope with his behavior his crimes anything like that anymore so he went away for a while and even eventually when he came home nothing had really fixed you know he came out of this home and he went straight back to a life of crime and drugs and alcohol and around this time his mother got really really ill she was hospitalized she couldn't care for any of her kids and travis was actually one of a few siblings and so while his mother was ill each of them were sent to different foster families and this was where john trevor's life went from bad to horrifically worse now not only was he robbing people mugging people robbing stars he became sexually violent as well he actually even committed bestiality a few times he told this story about how he once stole a sheep from a field his plan was to just take it home kill it barbecue it eat it but before he did that he decided to sodomize it and slit it through at the same time because he got some kind of gratification from that and then there are reports that say that he ejaculated into the wound that he inflicted on this sheep which is one of the foulest things i've ever heard in one of these cases at the time of this case as well as police were looking into him he was actually a suspect for the rape of a man not too far away from where anita had been kidnapped from and this other rip that travers was a suspect in had a lot of similarities to anita's case this guy was put in the back of a car and ripped at knife point which anita cobby was put in the back of a car we know that she was at knife point through a lot of the attack and then eventually the knife was used on her so immediately as soon as police looked into travers and they saw that he was being suspected of this other rape as well they were so suspicious of this guy not to mention the way that he'd reacted in his questioning when the knife was brought up the fact that he'd called anita a [ __ ] when he didn't even know her like it shows that he has some kind of personal feelings and thoughts towards her if he had no idea who anita was if he'd never met her before if he'd just heard a name in the news because of this then why would he call her a [ __ ] like what reason would he have to use that kind of language to describe her unless he had met her and that was how he saw her during their interaction or whatever anyway the next member of the group was 18 year old michael murdoch i said that travis was the youngest i think i was wrong this guy is the youngest michael murdock and he was john travers childhood best friend he was like his sidekick he did everything that travis did he thought he was so cool and his upbringing was almost an absolute mirror of john travers just apart from the childhood abuse and stuff as soon as they met in their teenage years michael murdoch followed a very similar path so they started doing drugs and drinking together travis got kicked out of school so michael murdoch got kicked out of school travis started robbing stars murdock starts robbing stars one of them goes to juvenile detention the other one goes to juvenile detention you know exact same life he was his little sidekick and the third initial name that was given to the police it was murdoch travers and then this guy leslie murphy he was the youngest of the murphy brothers he was 22 so he was the oldest of the initial three that was given but the youngest of the murphy brothers we'll talk about the other two in a second again criminal history for things like robberies thefts a lot of these men did a lot of petty crimes it was quite surprising to see that the other four maybe not john travers because he was a piece of work but the other four the murphy brothers and michael murdoch all of them had only ever committed rather small things like robberies thefts leslie murphy was known to have a really bad temper on him he was quite an angry little man but i don't think he had any kind of violent past other than maybe the occasional street fight or something like that he was never violent towards any past partners that i'm aware of as for the other two murphy brothers the oldest one mick murphy was 32 years old at the time of anita cobby's disappearance kidnapping murder there was nothing remarkable about mick murphy that i could find he wasn't a nasty piece of work i think he had the occasional theft or robbery charge on his record but he wasn't getting in trouble every week like the other guys were and then the final murphy brother the middle one was gary murphy he was 28 years old and he actually had a hearing impairment that had affected his whole life affected his schooling he had to leave school early so he didn't have that good of an education he was just kind of dragged around by his other brothers his whole life and because he left school early and didn't get this education he just like travis went into a life of crying he started stealing cars and robbing cars so that he could sell them on but i think that was the only kind of charges that he had on his record as well just like mick murphy there were no major kind of violence charges so that is the group of men that we're talking about all of these men were unemployed they all had nothing going for them in life to be quite honest they were all just petty criminals that couch-surfed on different friends surfers i think a few of them didn't actually have their own homes they just did drugs all day drank all day they had no real life goals or aspirations or life plans at all and looking at this group there is one man that very clearly stands out and that is 20 year old john travers he had the violent past bestiality in his past as well suspected of sexual assault sexual violence rape so he was the one that police were the most interested in of course they were keeping an eye on all of these guys but john travers especially after what he said at the police station about the knife they kept him in police custody to talk about anita further and while he was there in the police station he actually asked the police if he could get some cigarettes if he could call a friend and ask them to go and pick him some up and drop them off at the police station and he actually even gave a number to the police because he knew that he wasn't going to be able to ring it so that they could call his friend and ask his friend to bring him some cigarettes and police actually did so they call this number and a woman answers and this woman actually turned out to be john travers auntie she agreed to get him some cigarettes and when she arrived at the police station police actually pulled her to the side for a second took her in a different room because they wanted to talk to her before they let her go into john trevor's they were asking her kind of questions about travis about their relationship you know what kind of person he is and that was when she said actually i'm so glad you've arrested him because i was gonna call up and give his name any day now she said that she had this really bad feeling for the last two weeks she hadn't been able to sleep for two weeks because she just knew that travis her nephew was responsible for this she said she didn't have any proof it was just a feeling in her stomach because she knew the kind of things that travis had done before kind of things he was capable of and it was then that police asked her if she actually wanted to be part of their investigation they asked if she would be willing to go and speak to john travers now in this police station with a microphone on to see if she could get any kind of confession out of him and she agreed so police put this microphone on her and they sent her over to the room and she goes in there and she's trying to talk very casually with travis you know she didn't want him to think that she was on to him or that she was working with police so she asked him if he knew anita and he said yes and she said have you had sex with her and he said yes she continued to pry until eventually she found out during this conversation that the sex was not sex it was rape it wasn't consensual and john travers told her while she was bugged that all of the men were very very drunk they'd all raped her all of them all five of them and then he said as he started to sober up he realized kind of what they'd done and how bad this was and how much trouble they were gonna get into if anita managed to tell the police and that was when he knew that they could not let her leave alive and he confessed in this conversation that it was him that was the one that slit anita's throat he also asked his auntie in this wiretapped conversation if she could go back to his house and find the knife that he'd done it with because it was his favorite knife and he wanted her to hide it so that he could keep it after all of this and he also wanted her to find the clothes that he was wearing on the day that he killed her because he still hadn't washed them and they had blood all over them also in this wiretaps conversation john travers came up with an escape plan to get him out of the holding cell and on the run and he was asking his auntie to be a part of this she had a very big role in this very spontaneous escape plan so right next to the police station where he was in a holding cell there was a train station and there was like a bridge behind it i believe and he told his auntie he was like right what you're gonna do is you're gonna go up to the train station and you're gonna derail one of the trains the train is then gonna go off the tracks hit the back of the police station and with all this commotion and now this new big hole in the wall i'm gonna escape and i'm gonna go on the run but as he was saying all of this i think even he himself realized just how far-fetched this was and how impossible it was as well so then he came up with a new escape plan he told his auntie to go and speak to michael murdoch and leslie murphy and set up another plan where those two men were going to come to the police station between 3 a.m and 3 30 a.m which is when the least amount of police were on shift it was on like skeleton staff he said the men should arrive with guns drawn run into the station and demand that they let travers free and then they would all run away together so trevor's auntie is listening to all this and she's she's got to agree you know just for the sake of this she's like yeah okay i'll talk to your friends and i'll tell them the plan of course she didn't because now she was working with the police and she comes out of that room and she goes back to the offices to go hand them the tips and when she does they said that she just collapsed she just burst into tears she was in a state of shock of everything that she just heard from her nephew you know she'd suspected that he had a part in this but hearing him say it all out loud it just it just hit her and she realized what kind of man her nephew was police now had this confession from john travers and they listened to it all back and even at certain points in this conversation with his auntie as he's telling her everything that those men did to anita cobby he's even like laughing in places and she's saying don't laugh it's not funny this is not funny she even said at one point like this isn't you though all of these things are saying this isn't you have you ever done anything like this before and he just laughed just a side note from when he'd asked his auntie to go to his house get the knife get the jeans that had blood staining on them of course she didn't she didn't go and ruin that evidence police went and collected those items and they were seized so now police know that all five of these men had a part in anita cobby's kidnapping and murder or at least that's what john travers said you know even though it was a confession in a way it could still be wrong could still be a lie police didn't know if it was all 100 truth police didn't know if he was just trying to implicate other people to make himself sound less bad so what they needed in this case was a second confession from at least one of the other five men saying the exact same thing that john travis had said so then that way if police were to present this in court john travers couldn't say oh i was lying because they would have confirmation from the other guy that it was true so the other person that they tried to get another confession from was michael murdock he was the youngest of the group police felt potentially the most vulnerable or the most trusting of authority and obviously john trevor's auntie was older than him so again his auntie got her little microphone on and she goes down to michael murdoch's house and she starts talking to him about anita she's saying look travis told me everything i know everything you know what happened and at first he doesn't give anything away he's not saying anything he's like i don't know what you mean i don't know what you mean about anita cobby but then towards the end of the conversation he does say a couple of things that confirm john travers story you know both of these things match up so now police had almost two confessions and this was all the evidence police needed at this time to go and arrest all five of these men they went down to all of their houses arrested them all most of them went without a fuss apart from gary murphy gary murphy was found in a house along with i think it was mick murphy and mick you know surrendered let police arrest him but gary stood up and tried to run out of the back door and run through the garden and just like try to run off into the night i don't know obviously he didn't make it very far because the house was surrounded police knew that these men were very dangerous so they weren't just gonna go there with just one officer to try and arrest them the house was surrounded gary murphy managed to make it all the way to the end of the garden before he was tackled handcuffed and arrested and when he was he actually peed himself so that's really cool from gary murphy this 28 year old man was so scared of police that he peed himself and now there's photographic evidence as well there's photos of that everywhere all five men were charged with a range of things relating to this incident kidnapping rape of course the murder of anita cobby so now the case was to go to trial and i just want to add in here as well actually john travers auntie that helped out with police and everything that managed to get these confessions she has actually and her whole family have had to go into the witness protection program obviously john travers had a lot of scary dangerous connections and they weren't very happy that his own auntie had helped to get him put in prison she got death threats she got people like sending her her location at times and she just wasn't safe so her and her whole family have new identities they live somewhere else now so anyway the trial it was here in this court that police and the prosecution laid out the full time line of events everything that happened to anita cobby on the night that she was kidnapped and murdered and up until this moment people hadn't known the full timeline it wasn't until police had got these confessions from the men and spoken to them more and more and more that they could actually piece this together so like i said anita cobby safely arrived at the blacktown train station that night around 10 p.m she tried to use all the pear phones to contact her father to come and pick her up but all of them were out of order out of use due to this vandalization issue she went over to the taxi rank there were no taxis and so she decided to make the 20-minute short walk home as opposed to trying to get a lift about 10 minutes into this walk anita is walking down this one particular road when a car drives past her and pulls in just ahead she continues walking she probably didn't think much of it because i don't know the people that live on that street need to park somewhere don't they so maybe she just thought it was someone that lived on that street she continued walking towards the car anyway but as she got closer two men leapt out of the vehicle and we now know that these two men were john travers and michael murdock they grabbed hold of anita who began screaming the loudest scream she could possibly make to try and alert everyone in that area that something was going on outside so she's screaming while these two men grabbed her and pushed her into the back of their car once she was in there at least one of the men sat on top of anita who was now laying on the back seat so that one no one could see her and two so that she couldn't get away and this car then made a u-turn and drove back in the direction that they came in now from this point on the story is a little bit jumbled because we don't know exactly which men did what to anita in what order but at this moment in time there's five men in the car with anita some parts of the story are a little bit more specific than others like i can tell you exact things that the men did but then the rest of it's just kind of to them it all just blurred into one they were very drunk and they were doing this for hours they were torturing this poor woman for hours you know they couldn't remember the very specific details because they'd done so much so anyway as they're now driving around with anita in the back of the car some of the men demanded that anita took all of her clothes off anita's crying and she's begging these men not to do this to just leave her alone to just let her go but they insisted and so anita says please i'm married and she even said that she was on her period at the time she was like you don't want to do this but these men did not care they were ordering her to strip and she did they beat her in regular intervals i think they were just driving aimlessly around with her in the boot of the car i don't think they really had a plan when they kidnapped her they were just driving and doing all of this spontaneously so they would beat her at regular intervals and this was when anita's nose and both of her cheekbones were broken she was then forced to perform oral sex on each of the five men in turn and they would literally just swap who was driving the car so that they could do this in the back seat as all of this was happening so this must have taken place over about an hour and a half and by this point they were running low on gas and they knew they were going to have to go to a gas station fill up so they stopped off at this gas station with anita still naked in the back seat terrified the way that no one noticed that this was going on i suppose it was quite late at night and it was dark but still she was just there in the backseat these men stole her purse they took money out of anita's purse and used her money to pay for the gas and then from there from this gas station that was when they drove to the field where anita's body was later found the whole way there anita was continually beaten and ripped by different members of the group she was threatened with a knife like i said a lot of this was at knife point she must have been so scared and when they eventually reached the farm they told anita to to go over the fence and into this field and she couldn't she couldn't move she was so brutally beaten that she physically just could not walk anymore so the men dragged her from the car over to this field through a barbed wire fence literally pushed her through a barbed wire fence a lot of the injuries a lot of the wounds on her autopsy report are believed to have been from this barbed wire and in this field they just continued the attack the same way that they'd been doing it in the car but now they were just in one place they were there for quite some time just repeatedly assaulting anita cobby in all these different ways just all five of them as well the men said that at one point during this attack in the field they actually heard a car driving up the lane right next to them they said that when this happened they all just ducked to the floor laid on the ground covered anita's mouth not that she could really say anything at this point she could barely scream anymore and they just laid there as this person got out of the car shone their flashlight in the fields and then eventually got back in their car and drove away and they never saw any of this we now know later on in this investigation that that's exactly what these people in that car were looking for they were the people that had witnessed the kidnapping now trying to find that car and had they just walked into that field i mean it was probably very dangerous for them to do so they probably would have been attacked by the men as well had they walked into that field but they would have seen this they would have seen anita but the men weren't caught so they went straight back to torturing anita and it continued again for at least another hour and around this time this was when john travers was starting to sober up and he was realizing what they'd done to this woman he wasn't feeling remarkable don't get it twisted he was not feeling bad about what he'd done he was sobering up and feeling worried that he would get caught for what he'd done he thought that if anita cobby somehow managed to survive this she clung to life she recovered in the hospital he knew that she'd seen and heard way too much she'd seen every single one of their faces she'd heard them all calling each other by name so she would be able to give police names and identify the faces and he just knew that they had to silence her so it was then that john travers started convincing the other four men that they should murder anita cobby and it really didn't take long to get them all on board they all agreed that that was what should happen but they all said that they didn't want to be the one to do it they all said that it should be john travers since it was his idea and they all encouraged him to go and do it i think one of them even said go do your thing so john travers walked over to anita cobby and slit her through so deeply that she was almost decapitated and then the men ran and got back in the car and drove away leaving her there to die it's believed that it took a total of two minutes from when anita's throat was slit to when she eventually passed away so two minutes of her laying in that field listening to her attackers running away and then just being left there in the silence in the dark as she died the men all then drove to some field somewhere and they burnt their clothes well all of them burnt their clothes apart from john travers for some reason he didn't want to like he told the men he did not want to burn his clothes i think he wanted to keep them like a trophy they had anita's blood on them and that also explains why he didn't wash them for two weeks after this i think michael murdoch then ended up with the stolen car i don't know where he left it because i don't think police actually ever found it so that was the full timeline of events of that night and as soon as the jury heard this and they heard all the facts and all the evidence to support it there was no way that these men were not guilty and the jury found all five of them guilty of all charges now the public were absolutely desperate for all five of these men to get capital punishment for all five of them to be sentenced to death however at this point in new south wales i think the death penalty was abolished i could be wrong on that one but it was very unlikely that these men were going to get capital punishment and that is what the public were campaigning for angry mobs would show up outside the courthouse every single day they would bring signs that said you know we want them dead at one point they even made a dummy of one of the men and they hung it up with some rope from a building but you know the law is the law and i don't think at that point there was the possibility for the death penalty so instead each of the men were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole the community in sydney and all over australia for that matter actually this was a huge huge case in the whole country everyone was incredibly angry at everything that happened as i'm sure you can imagine but anita cobby's own family decided that they were not gonna hold that same anger that everyone else did they felt like anger in this situation was not gonna achieve anything it wasn't gonna bring anita back it wasn't gonna you know punish her killers even harder all that anger was gonna do was just punish them and make them live in these negative emotions anita's mother grace didn't like calling it forgiveness a lot of people seem to call it forgiveness in this case she didn't forgive anita's killers for what they did but she chose not to hold anger towards them she wasn't going to ruin her own life with these thoughts and emotions when she could be taking what had happened to anita this horrific tragedy and kind of spinning it and turning it into a positive thing her family just decided that when they remember anita they didn't want the next thought in their brain to be how much they hate her killers they just wanted to remember anita they wanted to remember the good times they wanted to honor her memory and not think of her as a murder victim if anything they wanted anita's legacy and her life and her story her tragedy to educate other people and to help other women to make good and safe decisions when they're in a situation like anita anita couldn't have done anything that night the pay funds were out of service there were no taxis at the taxi rank there were pretty much no other options for her but for a lot of other girls they might think to walk home as their first option just because it's cheaper it's easier you know i only live around the corner but anita's family want to campaign and say if there's pay phones there use them to call yourself a taxi or call yourself a lift don't put yourself in situations like the situation that anita was in that night all of her family have struggled coming to terms with what happened to anita especially john cobby like i said he struggled so much with alcohol drug addictions and he says that he very very often goes to the local church where there's a little plaque on the wall in memory of anita and he says that he'll go down there and he'll just sit and talk to her for hours he'll update her on his life ask her for guidance ask her questions you know about relationships or career or his kids because he has kids now and he feels like anita communicates with him answers these questions that he has in the form of his dreams he says he even has this recurring dream about anita where he has to save her you know it can be a different situation each time but every dream he has he has to save anita and he thinks that that's just his brain's way of coping because he felt so guilty that he wasn't there to save anita on the night that he died but his brain is just giving him chance after chance after chance to finally save her i mentioned earlier that jon fell into a lot of addictions following anita's passing and luckily he did manage to get himself out of all of that but things still weren't smooth sailing for him he spent a lot of time in and out of psychiatric hospitals trying to deal with this he was left with very very very severe mental health issues it took him years and years and years to even start dating again because he just felt so guilty doing anything with another woman you know he couldn't go to the same places that he and anita used to go to the same countries that they visited but eventually he went on to find a woman that eventually became his wife and like i said he had kids with her but not before changing his name so john cobby suffered so greatly with this that even his own name cobby reminded him of anita he couldn't live being john cobby anymore because as soon as anyone heard his name they knew who he was they would ask questions about anita he literally couldn't even hear his own name without thinking of her so eventually he ended up changing it to john francis and he felt a lot better after this for a while because no one knew who he was no one was constantly asking him about anita every time they met him but before long when his children were kind of growing up into adults maybe late teenagers he realized that that whole time for the past nearly two decades he'd just been running from his sorrow and his pain and his past that changing his name wasn't the answer and so with the help of his son they both went and they changed both of their names back to kobe it was their attempt at reclaiming that part of their lives well not his son because his son had been francis all his life he'd never known otherwise but he did it with his dad to support him and to help him move on from this part in his life that he was very clearly trying to just cover up instead of deal with the actual pain so now just some quick updates on the killers in 1996 john travers actually tried to escape prison he and another inmate started faking that they were really really ill i don't know what they were trying to say that they were ill with but eventually the prison decided to take both of them to hospital and once the two of them were in this transport vehicle in this van on the way to hospital they produced hacksaws that they'd stolen from the workshop in the prison and they started sawing their way through the back door of the van i think their plan was literally just to like saw a hole in the back of the van jump out and then go on the run but of course this didn't work cause it's not a cartoon the people in the front of the van heard this saw them trying to saw their way out they pulled the van over they went back there and they handcuffed them rearrested them both they were charged with whatever charge that is you know trying to escape a prison sentence i suppose and this only ended up adding time onto their sentence which they were already serving life in prison so in fact john travers was that hated in prison that he actually had to be protected from the other inmates because they were constantly trying to fight him even trying to kill him they were trying to kill john travis for what he'd done to anita cobby like i said this was one of australia's biggest true crime cases ever everyone knows who anita cobby is so every single inmate that would get put into that prison they recognized the name john travers and they had big issues with him it was also the same for mick murphy as well he also had to be in protection for a lot of his prison life and this was mainly actually because of one particular incident that happened in the prison now this is very very graphic so i'll put a time stamp on screen if you want to skip past this sexual violence trigger warning other inmates had managed to get a hold of mick murphy pin him down one of them pulled his pants down and inserted a tube up his anus they then put barbed wire up this tube and pulled the tube back out leaving just the barbed wire in there following this mcmurphy couldn't sit down for weeks even at his next court hearing he had to stand through the whole thing because he just could not sit down other than those specific incidences all five of the men got regular beatings in prison for what they'd done to anita cobby all the other inmates hated them it's quite a common thing that these men have to be transported to hospital for injuries i believe gary murphy once got eaten in a shower block and he had serious head injuries had to be sent to hospital and this is like a yearly thing for all of them in 2019 one of the five killers mick murphy actually passed away serving his prison sentence he had terminal cancer that eventually took his life when he was 66 years old and at that point he'd served 33 years in prison half of his life was in prison gary and grace lynch anita's parents have since passed away but in their lifetimes they did so much in anita's memory and in the way of helping other women and educating people based on anita's story they joined forces with another homicide victims parents from australia and together they all made the homicide victims support group in this group of course they offer a lot of support you know it's in the name support group but they also campaign for stricter laws and tougher sentences surrounding homicide but that is all i have for this case thank you so so much for watching it means the world to me thanks again to skillshare for sponsoring this video remember if you want to get 30 off of an annual premium membership then you can click the link down below but remember it's only the first 1 000 of you guys so get there quick huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed please leave a thumbs up down below because that really helps me out if you want to subscribe there'll be a link to do so right here if you want to subscribe to my second channel there'll be a link to do so right there and if you want to 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Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 542,757

Rating: 4.9650254 out of 5

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, itv, netflix, storytime, dateline, interview, news, creepypasta, horror, anita cobby, anita, cobby, anita cobby murder, australia, sydney, gary murphy, les murphy, michael murdoch, john travers, travers, travis, traves, gang, abduction, abducted, kidnapped, kidnapping, 2021, true crime daily

Id: U3oReKD7IaQ

Length: 48min 1sec (2881 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021