A former convict has shared a chilling glimpse into the mind of one of Australia’s most notorious murderers.

Sydney man Greg Fisher was sentenced to seven years and 10 months in jail for corporate fraud and drug-related charges, including using and dealing cocaine and crystal meth.

When he got incarcerated in 2005 at the Lithgow Correctional Centre, he was allocated a cell with an inmate whose crimes had been described as “one of the most savage and brutal … the state has ever known”.

Only later did Fisher find out that the man on the top bunk of his cell was John Travers, one of the five men who abducted, raped and killed Sydney nurse Anita Cobby in 1986.

“I hadn’t put two and two together,” he told news.com.au. “I think I was numb anyway from the first six months I was in jail.”

But even without knowing Travers’s true identity, Fisher said he could tell that his cellmate “simply wasn’t normal”.

“The thing that struck me immediately was his eyes,” said Fisher. “He had eyes like I’d never seen before. Before I spoke to him, it was like I could see through them to the back of his head.

“There was no reflection. There was no emotion. There was no soul, and I’m not a spiritual-type person at all. It was absolutely like a physical thing that I could see to the back of his head. He simply wasn’t normal.”

He finally found out who Travers was from another inmate. 

“I immediately worried and called my lawyer and the governor,” he said. “The governor came to see me and said: ‘Look, he’s a model prisoner, and it’s up to you. I can move you if you want’.”

However, Fisher decided against moving out due to fears that it might put him “on show”, making him a target to be beaten by other inmates.

“It was confronting to say the least because John’s never to be released, so that’s his home,” he said. “I was given the ground rules by him straight away. I had to take the top bunk and everything had to be kept meticulously tidy. I accepted the rules, therefore we got on well.”

Fisher said they began getting to know each other afterwards. He said Travers showed no feelings of guilt over raping, torturing and leaving 26-year-old Cobby to die at a rural farm in Prospect, NSW.

“He kept saying he wanted to get a group of law students and a professor to take him on as a project to get him released,” said Fisher.

When asked whether he would like to apologise to Cobby’s family, Travers said his prison sentence was enough of a punishment already. 

“He said it was all about his future now, and there was absolutely no indication of remorse,” said Fisher.

“He was the victim now, in his eyes, because he’d been there too long.”

In a 2015 interview with Life Matters, Fisher said spending time behind bars with Travers made him feel conflicted. 

“John was pretty decent to me, and almost protective. But he also sickened me. So it was very mixed emotions for me.”

Fisher was released from prison in 2012 and has since worked for charities such as Our Big Kitchen and Thread Together.

In 1986, Travers and four other men captured Cobby near Blacktown railway station and took her to Prospect, where they beat, raped and slit her throat.

The five men were later arrested and charged with a range of offences in what was dubbed “the trial of the century”. The crimes prompted public outrage and some calls for the death penalty to be reinstated. 

In 1987, the men were sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.