‘I was horrified’:Anita Jacoby’s painful discovery about her father

After years telling other people’s stories,TV current affairs producer Anita Jacoby turned her investigative skills upon her father. What she found rivalled anything she’d put to air.

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Anita Jacoby:“I’ve travelled all over the world and told hundreds of stories,only to find probably the richest story of my life within my own family.”

Anita Jacoby:“I’ve travelled all over the world and told hundreds of stories,only to find probably the richest story of my life within my own family.”Nic Walker

One day in 2001 the TV current affairs producer Anita Jacoby was researching a story on organ donation when she came across a newspaper article about “ratters”,morgue workers who stole from corpses. The story,which was from 1996,told how staff at Glebe morgue,in Sydney,routinely rifled through the pockets of recently deceased people,pilfering cash and belongings,including jewellery and items of clothing. Three “ratters” had been fired following an investigation by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption.

It was a disturbing story,but something about it struck Jacoby as odd. The amounts of cash were relatively small – $10 or $20 – inconsequential by ICAC’s standards. Sensing something amiss,Jacoby tracked down the three former staff members,who told her there was indeed a far larger story at the morgue,involving senior pathologists removing body parts without the consent of relatives,and conducting bizarre experiments on the corpses. According to the former staffers,senior pathologists had stabbed dead bodies to study blood splatter patterns and smashed skulls with hammers to replicate murder methods. There were also claims that plastic surgeons had practised on the faces of the deceased,and that in some cases spines had been removed and replaced with broomsticks.

“One of our sources told me that I needed to speak to the former morgue manager,called Frank Smalley,” says Jacoby. “I tracked Frank down and went to visit him at his house,where he had kept a 50-page document with data on all the corpses:names and causes of death and the dates of autopsy. Next to that was a list of the body parts that had been taken:eyes,brains,femurs,knees,lungs. Frank had given it all to the ICAC,and they’d done nothing.”

The subsequent story,“The Body Snatchers”,aired on Nine’sSunday in March 2001,presented by investigative journalist Helen Dalley. (A modified version also ran on60 Minutes.) In it,Professor John Hilton,director of the morgue,admitted on camera that he’d used knives on bodies,without permission,to test the effects of stabbing,and that up to 1000 bodies were being buried every year without their brains. “It’s got to be stopped,” said a parent of one of the deceased. “They’re scavenging from bodies.” The story was a bombshell,prompting two government inquiries and a change to the NSW Human Tissues Act 1983,making it a legal requirement that next of kin give consent before any of their relatives’ body parts are removed.

For Jacoby,“The Body Snatchers” had everything that makes journalism worthwhile:human interest,social justice and,most importantly,impact. “Helen and I went hell for leather to make sure[the harvesting of body parts] was stopped,and it was.”

Twenty years on,and Jacoby is no less in love with storytelling. Widely recognised as one of the most accomplished TV current affairs producers in Australia,she has,in the course of a 40-year career,worked as a senior producer for all of Australia’s commercial networks,as well as the ABC,SBS and Foxtel,and was for a time managing director of the Australian arm of British giant,ITV Studios.

She has produced and won multiple awards for marquee programs such as60 Minutes,Enough Rope andThe Gruen Transfer,and hustled interviews with Bill Clinton,Elton John and Alan Bond,among others. She has,from behind the scenes,wrangled contracts,massaged egos and mended fences,all the while trading on her talent alone in a churn-and-burn business populated by network silverbacks and boys-club politicking. “One of the things I like about Anita is that she doesn’t suffer from the ego problem,” says long-time friend and ABC TV producer Helen Grasswill. “She detests bragging and doesn’t big note.”

Jacoby with Andrew Denton,host of the TV program Enough Rope,at the AFI Awards in 2004.

Jacoby with Andrew Denton,host of the TV program Enough Rope,at the AFI Awards in 2004.Angela Wylie

Jacoby,who is in her early 60s,has blue eyes,a gold and red streaked pixie cut,and the compact frame of the habitually active. (For many years she played competition squash,and she still swims two kilometres a day.) Together with her accountant husband,John Cary,she lives in a large,modern home on the waterfront at Pittwater,on Sydney’s northern beaches,with books and artwork and a minor museum’s worth of African carvings and facemasks,collected by the couple on their travels. The morning I turn up,the view is chocolate-box pretty,with ducks on the water below and a little nursery of sailboats,their rigging clinking in the breeze. “I love living here,” she tells me. “I saw a shark this morning,just cruising around,out there. There’s all this stuff going on here that you hardly even notice most of the time.”

“I realised that I’ve travelled all over the world and told hundreds of stories,only to find probably the richest story of my life within my own family.”

Jacoby no longer works hands-on in TV,something she says she misses “all the time”. Instead,she contributes to a constellation of industry bodies,including as chair of the ABC Advisory Council,which advises the ABC board on programming,and as an associate member of the Australian Communications and Media Authority. She also does pro bono work on the board of a group called Women in Media,among others. Mentoring is a big thing for her. “Anita never imposes her view,” says TV presenter Hamish Macdonald. “But at the same time,she won’t bullshit you if she thinks an idea or decision isn’t right.”

For the past three years,however,Jacoby has been consumed by a more personal project,a book calledSecrets Beyond the Screen,to be published next week. Even in an age of genre-melding titles,Secrets is a shape-shifter,a detective thriller by way of memoir,a family history that detours into Gothic tragedy and Cold War intrigue. “I had no idea when I started that it’d turn out like that,” Jacoby tells me. “When I found all this new stuff,I realised that I’ve travelled all over the world and told hundreds of stories,only to find probably the richest story of my life within my own family.”


Anita Jacoby grew up the elder of two children in Killara,a middle-class suburb in Sydney’s north. As a teenager,she was a rebel:she wagged school,went surfing,didn’t study. Her parents sent her to Presbyterian Ladies’ College,an expensive private school,but in year 10 she was expelled for smoking. (She finished school at Abbotsleigh,another private school nearby.) “I was pushing boundaries,” she says. “I needed to find my own place in the world.”

The principal figure in Jacoby’s life was her father,Phillip. Born in Germany,Phillip had escaped to Australia on the eve of World War II before starting several successful businesses. He was tall,elegant,gentlemanly;a pipe smoker with an Errol Flynn moustache,fluent in several languages,a lover of culture,ideas and a good suit. He could be warm and tender but also manipulative,given to using his commanding presence to impress or intimidate,depending on his mood. “Phillip was quite a severe man,and he didn’t take fools gladly,” says Helen Grasswill,who knew him well. “He could be brusque,and people were sometimes scared of him in the sense of saying something he might ridicule.”

To Jacoby,however,he was perfect. Phillip would shower her with attention,to the exclusion of his wife,Josephine,and son,Karl. (Phillip had another daughter,Linda,from a previous marriage,who grew up largely in boarding school.) Come the weekend,he would spend hours with Jacoby in his book-lined study,talking about the world and current affairs. He taught her to think critically and ask questions. “There must be a reason,” he would counsel her. Her mother,Josephine,was more often Jacoby’s adversary,policing her relationships and homework. But her father was always an ally.

Jacoby as a young girl with her father,Phillip,who escaped to Australia from Germany just before World War II.

Jacoby as a young girl with her father,Phillip,who escaped to Australia from Germany just before World War II.Courtesy of Anita Jacoby

In the 1950s,Phillip ran a business importing telephone cabling;by the 1960s,he was bringing in electrical equipment from Japan,and had secured the Australian distribution licence for Sony,then the world’s largest consumer electronics manufacturer. Growing up,the Jacobys always had the latest technology:transistor radios,reel-to-reel tape decks,Japanese television sets. As Jacoby writes,“I understood the power of pictures in storytelling from a young age.”

By the age of 15,Jacoby had decided she wanted to be a journalist. After leaving school,she worked briefly for Paul Hamlyn,the publishing company,andThe Australian Women’s Weekly,under influential editor Ita Buttrose. (“Many of us were going to the same hairdresser[as Ita],” Jacoby writes in her book. “Some were even copying her lisp”.)

But getting into television was her ultimate goal. After a year at theWeekly,at the age of 21,she got a researcher’s job at a kids’ current affairs show calledSimon Townsend’s Wonder World! The conditions were appalling,with low pay and 12-hour days. Jacoby told her father,who suggested she look for work at smaller,regional TV stations. This she did,becoming a reporter at Channel 3 in Newcastle.

Jacoby with her mother Josephine and brother Karl,circa 2000.

Jacoby with her mother Josephine and brother Karl,circa 2000.Courtesy of Anita Jacoby

Jacoby was on the ascent. In 1983,she and Grasswill,whom she’d met at Hamlyn,set up their own production company. In 1985,she moved to breakfast television as a producer at Network Ten’sGood Morning Australia before switching to Nine’sToday show,with George Negus and Liz Hayes. “She was a potent character,” recalls Hayes. “Incredibly energetic,committed and hard-working. She stood out.”

Despite this,Jacoby was overlooked for promotion three times,with the job going to a man on each occasion. Again,her father urged her to look for other opportunities. She duly resigned,in 1989,but a couple of days later was lured back with an offer to be associate producer at60 Minutes,then at its height. “I loved it,” she says. “They’d give you an American Express card,you jumped on a plane and went anywhere in the world.”

According to Jacoby,her father encouraged her to pursue stories “that will make a difference”. During her six years at60 Minutes,she produced stories on Alzheimer’s,AIDS and disability. She left the program in 1995,but returned in the early 2000s to make several ground-breaking specials,including an exclusive on Rolah McCabe,a Victorian woman with terminal lung cancer who made Australian legal history when she sued Big Tobacco and won. “I can still see Rolah,” says Jacoby. “She was thin and gaunt,and decades of smoking had affected her voice.”

Jacoby with 60 Minutes colleague,reporter Jennifer Byrne (at right),in 1998.

Jacoby with 60 Minutes colleague,reporter Jennifer Byrne (at right),in 1998.Courtesy of Anita Jacoby

Sixty Minutes was relatively progressive,but Jacoby learnt how hard it was being a woman in Australian television. “It was incredibly blokey,” she tells me. “Management were all men who only employed other men because they felt challenged by smart women. There was a particular type of woman who made them feel comfortable,the woman who would dress in a flirtatious way and all the rest. But if you just wanted to be good at your job and deliver on that,it made them really uncomfortable.”

Jacoby looked to the senior women around her,including Kerri-Anne Kennerley,who had co-hostedGood Morning Australia with Gordon Elliott. In her book,Jacoby describes how Kennerley guilefully turned Elliott’s ego to her advantage:“Although he thought he was in charge,in fact,she was in charge.” Like Kennerley,Jacoby would remain comfortable in her own skin and confident in her abilities.

“Nothing ever got handed to these women,” says friend and former60 Minutes reporter Jeff McMullen. “Those breakfast programs are just puppet shows. They barely take the women in the audience seriously,let alone the women in the studio. And women like Anita and Liz[Hayes] had to fight their way up through that.” Today,he adds,“there are young women performing superbly in the Ukraine and with the floods and elsewhere and no one is second guessing them about being female. That is a huge change,and Anita’s generation made that possible.”


In Easter 1990,Jacoby took her then boyfriend,Anthony McClellan,to a cattle farm her family owned in north-western NSW. She and McClellan went for a spin around the property on a motorbike,with Jacoby riding pillion. At one point,however,Jacoby lost her balance and got her right foot trapped in the back wheel. Her leg became mangled in the spokes and had to be amputated. (She now wears a prosthesis below the knee.) For someone as active as Jacoby,the accident was a catastrophe.

A young Jacoby at her family’s farm near Boggabri in north-western NSW.

A young Jacoby at her family’s farm near Boggabri in north-western NSW.Courtesy of Anita Jacoby

Her father was devastated;she now believes the stress of it hastened his descent into dementia. He became erratic,hitting out at his wife,Josephine. He went to a home,where he was heavily sedated. He died in 1996;Jacoby still carries a photo of him in her wallet.

She didn’t talk publicly about the accident:hardly anyone outside60 Minutes knew about it. Instead,she focused on her career. She developed an interview program with broadcaster John Laws on Foxtel,and worked with comedian and presenter Andrew Denton on an ABC TV program calledEnough Rope.

Then,in 2013,she was headhunted to run ITV’s local operations. One night soon afterward,she was at a dinner party at the home of her half-sister Linda in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Jacoby announced her new job,adding that she wished her father were around to see it. A friend of Linda’s,a lawyer named John Atkin,then turned to Jacoby,looked her in the eye and asked if she’d known about “that infamous,long-running court case” involving her father in the 1950s.

Jacoby with radio host John Laws on location in London in 2000.

Jacoby with radio host John Laws on location in London in 2000.Courtesy of Anita Jacoby

Until then,Jacoby had had no reason to look into her father’s past. “I knew Dad had lived a big life and that he’d been married twice,as I had a half-sister. But no one in the family really talked about him. And he’d never talked about it. He was a refugee. He was all about moving forward.”

Her curiosity piqued,she began digging around. Atkin put Jacoby in touch with an 85-year-old lawyer named Bill Hotchkiss,who had worked on her father’s case as a young man. Hotchkiss told Jacoby that it had involved a “very sexy”,big-drinking brunette named Bonnie Snellgrove. Much to Jacoby’s surprise,her father had been married to Snellgrove five years before he’d even met her mother. Unable to find out more,and busy with her new job,Jacoby employed Shaun Hoyt,a researcher at the ABC,to find out everything she could about her father. There was a lot to find.


Jacoby’s book begins with a quote by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:“Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being,another and altogether different reality lies concealed.” Phillip Jacoby had many concealed realities,starting with his youth in pre-World War II Germany. Though he never spoke of it to Anita,Phillip’s paternal grandparents were Jewish. As far as the Nazis were concerned,that made him Jewish. He was also part of an anti-Nazi group called the Young Democratic League. At one point he was almost hurled off a bridge by Brownshirts,a paramilitary group attached to the Nazis;another time,he was thrown in jail.

With the writing on the wall,he decided to escape,opting for Australia,which was about as far away from the Nazis as possible. The Germans had him on a watch list,however,and wouldn’t let him leave. Through an influential friend,a retired police officer,he managed to have his passport reissued under his middle name,Heinrich,rather than Phillip. It worked. In 1934,he sailed for Sydney. His German girlfriend,Grace Barrow,followed shortly afterward. A few months later,they were married.

Phillip had no money – the Nazis had prevented him from taking it out. But he soon started a business with Grace,called Jacoby&Barrow,importing electrical goods. Their office was in the city,close to a business run by another German émigré called Hans Lewy and his wife,Emmy. As she writes in the book,Jacoby had always regarded her father as “steadfast and loyal”,so it was a shock to discover that in 1939,only four years after marrying Grace,he left her to be with Emmy,who in turn abandoned Hans and their toddler,Marion. Phillip and Emmy rented an apartment together. Enraged,Hans forbade Emmy any contact with Marion.

Phillip Jacoby’s passport had been reissued with his middle name,Heinrich,with the help of an influential friend. This enabled him to escape from Germany after being on the Nazis’ watch list.

Phillip Jacoby’s passport had been reissued with his middle name,Heinrich,with the help of an influential friend. This enabled him to escape from Germany after being on the Nazis’ watch list.Courtesy of Anita Jacoby

Hardly a month after moving out with Phillip,Emmy stuck her head into an oven and gassed herself. It was Phillip who found her on the floor of their apartment. The reasons for Emmy’s suicide remain unclear,but Jacoby speculates that she was stricken with guilt for leaving her husband,and pining for her daughter. Grace then divorced Phillip,the tragedy reported at length in the scandal ragTruth,which paid special attention to the fact that Phillip was a “Prussian”.

Phillip’s troubles were just beginning. Despite his anti-Nazi activity,he was classed as an “enemy alien” and interned in 1940,first in Long Bay Jail,then in a series of camps in country NSW. In his absence,Jacoby&Barrow was run by a diligent young assistant he’d employed called Phyllis Anderson. In 1941,Phillip lodged an appeal against his internment,and won. Upon his release,he began a relationship with Phyllis,whom he married in 1942. They appeared perfectly happy together:in 1946,Phyllis had a daughter,Linda.

A year-and-a-half later,however,Phyllis placed her head in the oven in their kitchen and gassed herself. She was 28. “I was horrified when I found out,” says Jacoby. “Two women had now killed themselves in the space of eight years,and in exactly the same way.” More disturbing were the notes from the coronial inquest,in which Phillip admitted that on the morning of her suicide,Phyllis had told him she was depressed and that she “felt like putting her head in the gas oven”. He told the coroner that he didn’t “take much notice of the remark” and went off to work.

“For Anita,everything she knew about her father,in fact,she didn’t know.”

It’s difficult to read this and not have serious questions about Phillip’s character. “I know,” Jacoby tells me. “When I read that Phyllis said she wanted to gas herself and my father didn’t react,I just can’t rationalise that.”

In the years to come,Phillip would slowly push Linda out of his life. He sent her to boarding school at the age of four. When she came back for the holidays,he was distant and cold. He waited until the day of her 21st birthday to tell her that her mother had committed suicide. Linda was distraught. Jacoby admits that her father’s behaviour was strange and cruel. She thinks he may have subconsciously blamed Linda for Phyllis’s death. “It’s hard,” she writes in her book,“but I have accepted there was another side to Dad.”

In 1954,Phillip married Josephine. “Dad definitely told Mum about Phyllis’s suicide. But I only heard about it from Linda while I was writing the book.”


So much of our identity is bound up in our parents. They are the clay we are made from;we look to them,from our very first breath,for clues about who we are and might yet become. It can be confronting,then,to discover that they aren’t who you thought they were. “For Anita,everything she knew about her father,in fact,she didn’t know,” says her husband,John Cary. “The process of doing the book made her emotional,but even more so she was very hurt that her father didn’t discuss this stuff with her. She would have had so many questions for him.”

Karl,Linda and Anita at Sydney’s Palm Beach in 1966.

Karl,Linda and Anita at Sydney’s Palm Beach in 1966.Courtesy of Anita Jacoby

After she started gathering material,Jacoby asked her brother Karl,and Linda,for anything they had on their father and the family. It turned out Linda had some of his old papers and mementoes,tucked away in a metal box. “I have no idea how she came to have these but Karl and I had never seen them before and she’d never mentioned them,” Jacoby tells me.

The box contained old German correspondence,some dating back hundreds of years,an antique book from the 17th century,and some letters from her father’s former school friends describing the war years in Germany. There were also some old passports and mysterious government documents,which,together with a file from the National Archives of Australia that Shaun Hoyt had uncovered,shed an unexpected light on Phillip’s postwar life.

As with so many businesses,Jacoby&Barrow had been turned upside down by the war. It had initially brought in glassware and electrical goods,but with imports disrupted,Phillip was forced to pivot,moving into telephone and commercial cabling,which he began cladding with plastic instead of the traditional cloth. Eventually. he was contracting to government departments such as the Postmaster-General.

The government clearly recognised his technical acumen. In 1947,he was recruited by the British,on the recommendation of the Australians,to conduct a covert mission – essentially,industrial espionage – in Germany. He was to locate and connect with the producers of German technologies that could be useful to the Allies,particularly enamelled wire,and especially those made with tungsten and molybdenum. He was given a camera to record his findings,and made a “civilian officer” of the British Services,with a rank equivalent to colonel.

He was only meant to go for one month but ended up being away for six,not just in Germany but in France,Sweden and Denmark. Jacoby is at a loss to explain what he was doing in these countries,but suspects he used the time to develop his own business contacts. “He was quite entrepreneurial.”

Most of the “secrets” in Jacoby’s book were hard won,uncovered after years of digging,mainly in the National Archives and the NSW State Archives and Records Authority. At other times,Jacoby more or less stumbled upon them. One of the most bizarre stories concerned a man named Horace Pile,a suspected Russian spy who was found to have been working for her father’s company in the early 1960s. Pile,a committed Communist,was thought to have been using Phillip’s company as a way to get access to the British atomic test facilities at Woomera,and the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE),north of Adelaide. (Phillip’s company supplied the WRE with electrical components.) Pile was never charged,but ASIO opened a file on Phillip,before concluding that he wasn’t a risk.

For all her searching,however,there was one riddle about her father that Jacoby couldn’t solve – that of the “infamous court case” she’d heard about in 2013. Then,in 2016,Jacoby got a call from Shaun Hoyt. “She said,‘I’ve found the file!’ ” It was 600 pages long and bound with pink ribbon,with a yellowing cover sheet. It had the date,October 16,1953,and scrawled lengthways down the page in large letters,“Jacoby vs Jacoby”.

Phillip Jacoby met Bonnie Snellgrove in late 1949 – about two years after Phyllis’s suicide – and married her in 1951. Bonnie was lively and voluptuous,and had two young children by her former husband. She was also a violent alcoholic. Almost from the first,their marriage was a disaster. Bonnie would drink too much and become abusive;she attacked Phillip on several occasions,bashing him with a shoe and coming at him with a whisky bottle. On their honeymoon in Europe,she regularly trashed their hotel room,hurling around ashtrays and glasses. She also taunted him about the deaths of his former wives,and would accuse him of being cold and controlling,and mean with money. He accused her,in turn,of spending too much.

The lively and voluptuous Bonnie Snellgrove,whom Phillip Jacoby married in 1951,was caught “in flagrante”.

The lively and voluptuous Bonnie Snellgrove,whom Phillip Jacoby married in 1951,was caught “in flagrante”.Courtesy of Simon Snellgrove

In the book,Jacoby writes that in the first year of their marriage,her father spent “twice his annual income … indulging Bonnie’s requests.” In 1952,the couple split up. Afterward,Phillip would receive phone calls from strange men asking for her. A month after leaving,Bonnie sued Phillip for “constructive desertion”,claiming he had forced her from the house by being cruel and manipulative. Phillip fought back:if he could prove she was having affairs,Bonnie would have no case. So he carried out what was then called a “divorce raid”,staking out her home with a private detective. They waited for another man to enter,before barging in,at 4am,and catching Bonnie “in flagrante”.

“The details are all in the court file,” says Jacoby. “Dad burst in and found Bonnie,her legs splayed,and this other guy down there.” The case was salacious,even burlesque,like some kind of noir penny dreadful. “I just couldn’t imagine Dad,who was so cultured and refined,being involved in it all.”

The file provided a fascinating insight into the private lives of 1950s middle-class Australia. But it also contained many confronting details. It described Phillip having sex with Bonnie,and their many fights,in which Phillip admits to hitting her. “Reading about all this so many years after Dad had died made me feel like a voyeur,like I’d crossed a line,” says Jacoby. “And the hitting stuff just seemed so out of character. I’m not condoning it,but the way Bonnie used the suicides of[Emmy and Phyllis] as a tool against him was so cruel. When I read that in the transcript,it made me so angry that she had treated him like that.”

In the end,Bonnie’s case was dismissed. She appealed,and Phillip,wanting an end to the matter,settled out of court,paying her a lump sum of £800 (about $27,000 today). Jacoby admits now that when she started writing her book,she was wearing “rose-tinted glasses”. But Jacoby v Jacoby dispelled any illusions. “That’s not to say I love him any less,” she tells me. “It just means I see him in a more complex and flawed way. It only makes him more interesting to me.”

Jacoby with her dad,Phillip,in 1994,during his struggle with Alzheimer’s:“You can’t really see it in the pic,but my eyes are shut,hiding the tears.”

Jacoby with her dad,Phillip,in 1994,during his struggle with Alzheimer’s:“You can’t really see it in the pic,but my eyes are shut,hiding the tears.”Courtesy of Anita Jacoby

Towards the end of her book,there’s a photo of Jacoby and her father,sitting at a table in her old home in Avalon. It was taken in 1994,shortly after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. His hair is neatly parted and chalky white,his shirt,freshly ironed,is buttoned to the collar. “I think it was his birthday,” Jacoby says. “We had a small family lunch. I used to spoil him with small pressies,always including marzipan,which he would get stuck into immediately. But on this day,he was almost totally emotionally absent.”

In the photo,Jacoby is trying to cheer him up. She has her arm around his neck,her hand on his shoulder. Her eyes are closed,and she is bending in to kiss his cheek. “You can’t really see it in the pic,but my eyes are shut,hiding the tears.”

There were other people at the lunch:her mother,and Anthony,Jacoby’s boyfriend at the time,Linda and her son,PJ. But you can’t see any of them. They might as well be invisible. In the photo,it’s just father and daughter,caught for a moment in time.

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Tim Elliott is a senior writer with Good Weekend.

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