Previously I looked at the aftermath of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan in Georgia, Alabama in 1916.  Eighteen years ago in February this year, Australia found itself overwhelmed by the pack-rape and slaying of Sydney woman, Anita Cobby.

Enduring interest in the Cobby case was confirmed with 2003's Anita and Beyond art exhibition, while Julia Sheppard's Someone Else's Daughter has been reprinted several times since it was first published in 1991. The book is important, not the least because it discusses the lives of all involved, including the seemingly inevitable path to destruction of ringleader, John Travers.

Like Phagan, Anita has been subject in death to the kind of mythologising that sets her apart from ordinary woman. Anita's posthumous sanctification seems to have been partly driven by the need to assert a hierarchy of female victimhood. This aims to teach women that horrific offences rarely happen to the 'decent'. When they do they will be punished with the utmost severity, as evidenced by the indefinite sentences meted out to the five perpetrators: Travers, Michael Murdoch and Les, Michael and Gary Murphy ("the Murphy brothers").

It is probably unanswerable, and definitely uncomfortable, to wonder how Anita would have been treated had she survived.  When the author of Shot tells us a policeman (sic) invested her with guilt for the attack against her, and American author Alice Sebold names her book Lucky because authorities told her she was "in comparison" to a woman who was butchered at the same location where she was raped, we are perhaps given some idea.

Of course, the outrage at Anita's fate is also explained by the savagery inflicted upon her. It is a mournful fact that Anita's ravaged body was found by a farmer on his property.  That Anita was a former beauty queen, a nurse, an "angel", should not have been needed for there to be strong feelings about her death; surely her humanity was enough.

With petitions demanding the re-introduction of the death penalty, abuse directed at the families of the guilty, and a media frenzy, we lost the opportunity at the time to learn more about the intrinsic violence of sexual assault. This has been rectified somewhat: one of Anita and Beyond's installations was influenced by, "(the numerous news reports where) male judges say maybe (rape victims) deserved it and...other outlandish statements.

"I find that quite sick", added the artist," ...just because they're not dead".

The play turned movie, The Boys, was apparently not based on the incident, but has come to be spoken about as if it is indelibly linked with it.  As the title informs us, the film is about males connected in some way. "Where have the boys gone?" it is asked, and we do not really want to know the answer. The Boys are actually three men: Brett, who has spent a year in prison for aggravated assault, Glenn, employed, engaged, who despite buying a car with money raised from selling Brett's drugs leads a 'normal' life, and Steve, whose anger at pregnant "girlfriend" Noela is ferocious.

With Brett's homecoming Glenn and Steve immediately fall back under his spell, just 18 hours later he burns the clothes that contain evidence of what they have done.  Brett is manipulative, arrogant, possesses a bully's sense of entitlement and a need to confirm his masculinity, which we are led to believe was 'compromised' while he was in jail, with mind games and domination. "If you don't hang together, you hang separate", he lectures them, and thus establishes it is with him they belong and not the women in their lives.

The outsiders, Jacqui, Glenn's fiancee, who stands up to Brett and correctly argues that he should never have been set free, and Noela, offer some hope the day of Brett's homecoming will end differently, thus affirming what Butteress sees as "...a version of the 'god's police' formula, the civilising influence of a girlfriend on a brute male". Sandra's friend, the pejoratively nicknamed "Abo", also tries to help but gets beaten for his trouble. Unlike the rest of the men in Sandra's life, including her sons, he stays, and tends to her after "the boys" have committed their crime.

If The Boys offers any insight into the mentality that lay behind Anita Cobby's murder, we are left doubting much could have stopped it, or at least any violent behaviour from its protagonists, because the chance was lost long ago. Sheppard informs us that Travers was in trouble from a young age, while Brett is devoid of empathy.  We can only hope another of the exhibits in Anita and Beyond got it wrong when it suggested that Anita died in vain because other women have been murdered in the 18 years since she has been gone.

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