40 years after the beauty queen’s murder, retired cop Deb Wallace recalls how the case was solved
It was after dark and as Deb Wallace stood in the silence of the suburban street in Blacktown, Western Sydney, the reality of what she was doing sent goosebumps down her spine.
It had been a busy day with little time to think but now, reality was hitting. She was standing exactly where Anita Cobby, the 26-year-old nurse who’d been brutally murdered, had stood just a week before.
“I thought, ‘What must she have felt?’ Her life was perfectly normal, all was going well for her,” Deb tells Woman’s Day.
“Then a car pulled up and there was a point where she must have realised they weren’t asking for directions. Then the terror she must have felt as she was dragged into the car. In those seconds her life changed.”
As a young police officer, noticed by a senior detective to be the same age and build as Anita, Deb was involved in a reconstruction of her final evening.
CATCHING THE KILLERS
It was February 1986, and she’d spent the day shopping with Anita’s girlfriends for an outfit to match the one Anita wore, and then travelled Anita’s route from Sydney’s Central Station to Blacktown.
“The media were on the train with us. It was a strategy to keep the story in the media and at the forefront of people’s minds,” Deb, now in her 60s, reveals.
“But it was also so we could check all the timings were right. The media left us at Blacktown Station and I walked to where someone had heard her [Anita] scream.”
It’s there that the reality of the situation hit home for Deb.
“Entering the police force I knew there would be some challenging cases and moments – I had my eyes wide open – but I asked myself if I could handle them, and the answer was yes,” Deb says.
It was that strength that got her through that hard day and, as it turned out, the police re-enactment played a key role in the investigation.
CAREER DEFINING
Within 22 days of Anita’s disappearance, five men who were completely unknown to her, were in custody: John Travers, Michael Murdoch, and brothers Les, Michael and Gary Murphy.
All were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment for her abduction, savage sexual assault and murder in a trial that shocked the nation.
“I remember the detectives coming back to the station after the verdict and they were all so humble. There was a quiet nod to each other,” Deb says.
“There’s still a young woman who has been murdered and that underpins all the other emotions.”
For Deb, Anita’s case shaped the course of her career in many ways.
For a start the lead Detective Sergeant Graham Rosetta took her under his wing, bringing her in on other high profile cases.
She also credits her experience with Anita’s family, in particular her parents Garry and Grace Lynch, as showing her the true meaning of resilience.
“What they faced and endured. Grace was in court every day representing her daughter,” Deb says. “They had such strength and calm and then to turn such a negative into a positive, well, whenever I had a bad day it made me remember I didn’t have anything to whinge about.”
LIVING LEGACY
After Anita’s murder the Lynches campaigned strenuously for the rights of victims of crime, later forming the Homicide Victims’ Support Group that has helped countless families since.
“It makes you really realise the impact homicides have. The families die at the same time as their loved ones in many ways,” Deb says. “I talk about that with young offenders, about all the consequences of crime and I can see it resonates. Garry and Grace’s legacy still lives on in that.”
Deb became close friends with the Lynches, who have both now passed away, and she has since played a part in setting up Grace’s Place, a trauma recovery centre for children affected by homicide.
It was named in honour of Grace Lynch and is yet another way the horrendous crime committed 40 years ago has had positive repercussions.
“Garry and Grace never spoke about the offenders. They wouldn’t fill their lives with despair and they don’t occupy any of my thoughts [either],” Deb says.
Even when Murdoch made a bid for freedom in August 2025, saying police set him up, Deb didn’t think twice about it.
“I was confident our justice system is robust enough that he wasn’t going anywhere,” she says. “I’m not sure what goes through [a convicted criminal’s] mind but in this case the evidence was overwhelming.”
Murdoch remains in prison serving his life sentence alongside the rest of the gang.
Michael Murphy died in prison in February 2019.
For Deb, who rose to the rank of Detective Superintendent and retired from the NSW police after 36 years, a lot has changed since Anita’s murder, but she still looks back on the solving of that case with pride.
“The tech approaches have changed and there’s more tech and forensic assistance, but there’s no substitute for old-fashioned police work,” she says, crediting that for bringing Anita’s killers to justice. “You need the investigators with passion and foresight.”
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