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News.com.au
04-05-2025
- News.com.au
Ex-wife of Adrian Torrens, who killed Audrey Griffin, shares chilling detail on night of the murder
The ex-wife of the man accused of killing teenager Audrey Griffin has revealed he was 'aggressive' towards her on the night of the murder. Adrian Torrens' ex-wife Michelle said 'something was very off' with Torrens on Easter Monday evening, when 19-year-old Audrey Griffin was horrifically murdered after walking home from a night out with friends on the NSW Central Coast. 'Something was very off that night … he was so aggressive,' Michelle told 60 Minutes reporter Dimity Clancey. When asked if she believed that Torrens was on her way to kill her the night of Ms Griffin's murder, Michelle said: 'I think so.' She said she had 'no idea' about Torrens' true nature when she married him. Ms Griffin left the Hotel Gosford in the early hours of Sunday March 23, telling her friends she was going to get an Uber or a cab back to her dad's house. However, the next morning when Ms Griffin's mum checked her daughter's location on her phone, she knew something was wrong. Ms Griffin's best friend tragically found her body partially submerged in Erina Creek the next morning while attempting to locate her. Police inititally declared that Ms Griffin's death was not suspicious, as an autopsy led them to quickly to rule the teen's death an accidental drowning. However Ms Griffin's mother, Kathleen Kirby, told A Current Affair this did not make sense to her. 'My gut was telling me one thing, and it was not to give up. I couldn't just go with she drowned. Not one person has walked up to me and said she drowned… No one believed it,' she said. 'She was a swimmer, she's an ocean swimmer, she was strong.' Nearly a month later, police revealed a man had been charged with her murder. That man, Adrian Torrens, was found unresponsive in a cell at Silverwater Correctional Complex in Western Sydney at about 4.50pm on Thursday April 24 after taking his own life. He was unable to be revived by Corrective Services staff and paramedics. Torrens also faced 11 unrelated domestic violence charges, including using a mobile phone in a harassing or menacing manner and 10 counts of breaching an apprehended violence order. Michelle spoke about Torrens' violent history, saying: 'He would just flip … I could never see it coming.' Michelle also shared she felt let down by the legal system, after they failed to lock Torrens away despite numerous domestic violence offences. The Sydney Morning Herald reported Torrens was spared jail two months earlier and was on bail at the time of Ms Griffin's death. 'They should have put him in jail after breaching his second AVO,' Michelle said. The interview will air on Channel 9 on Sunday at 8:00pm.
Perth Now
04-05-2025
- Perth Now
‘Very off': Chilling claim on girl's murder
The ex-wife of the man accused of killing teenager Audrey Griffin has revealed he was 'aggressive' towards her on the night of the murder. Adrian Torrens' ex-wife Michelle said 'something was very off' with Torrens on Easter Monday evening, when 19-year-old Audrey Griffin was horrifically murdered after walking home from a night out with friends on the NSW Central Coast. Adrian Torrens' ex-wife Michelle shared that he was "so aggressive" towards her the night of Ms Griffin's murder. 60 Minutes Credit: Supplied 'Something was very off that night … he was so aggressive,' Michelle told 60 Minutes reporter Dimity Clancey. When asked if she believed that Torrens was on her way to kill her the night of Ms Griffin's murder, Michelle said: 'I think so.' She said she had 'no idea' about Torrens' true nature when she married him. Ms Griffin left the Hotel Gosford in the early hours of Sunday March 23, telling her friends she was going to get an Uber or a cab back to her dad's house. However, the next morning when Ms Griffin's mum checked her daughter's location on her phone, she knew something was wrong. Ms Griffin's best friend tragically found her body partially submerged in Erina Creek the next morning while attempting to locate her. Police inititally declared that Ms Griffin's death was not suspicious, as an autopsy led them to quickly to rule the teen's death an accidental drowning. Audrey Griffin was making her way home from the Hotel Gosford in the early hours of Sunday March 23, when she was fatally attacked by Adrian Torrens. Gofundme Credit: News Corp Australia However Ms Griffin's mother, Kathleen Kirby, told A Current Affair this did not make sense to her. 'My gut was telling me one thing, and it was not to give up. I couldn't just go with she drowned. Not one person has walked up to me and said she drowned… No one believed it,' she said. 'She was a swimmer, she's an ocean swimmer, she was strong.' Nearly a month later, police revealed a man had been charged with her murder. That man, Adrian Torrens, was found unresponsive in a cell at Silverwater Correctional Complex in Western Sydney at about 4.50pm on Thursday April 24 after taking his own life. He was unable to be revived by Corrective Services staff and paramedics. Adrian Torrens, 53, was charged with the murder of Central Coast teenager Audrey Griffin. Facebook. Credit: News Corp Australia Torrens also faced 11 unrelated domestic violence charges, including using a mobile phone in a harassing or menacing manner and 10 counts of breaching an apprehended violence order. Michelle spoke about Torrens' violent history, saying: 'He would just flip … I could never see it coming.' Michelle also shared she felt let down by the legal system, after they failed to lock Torrens away despite numerous domestic violence offences. Crowds gathered to remember Audrey Griffin at a memorial on Terrigal Beach. NewsWire / Damian Shaw Credit: News Corp Australia The Sydney Morning Herald reported Torrens was spared jail two months earlier and was on bail at the time of Ms Griffin's death. 'They should have put him in jail after breaching his second AVO,' Michelle said. The interview will air on Channel 9 on Sunday at 8:00pm.
Sydney Morning Herald
02-05-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
Adrian Torrens had been threatening to kill his ex: Hours later, he would instead kill a complete stranger
Warning: Graphic content The Elanora Hotel had been closed for almost three hours when 19-year-old Audrey Griffin walked past in the wee hours of Sunday, March 23. After struggling to get an Uber when Hotel Gosford shut at 2am, her only option was to walk towards home through the empty streets, past shuttered shops and gloomy parks. The Elanora's cameras spotted Griffin at 2.45am, along a road that would take her past the murky Erina Creek towards Terrigal. Several minutes later, the same camera captured her killer, Adrian Noel Torrens, striding purposefully along Victoria Road in a white hat and a red singlet. He was hundreds of metres behind her. She may not have even realised he was there. She certainly didn't know how dangerous he was. Already that day, Torrens had threatened to kill a woman. It wasn't Griffin. In the sleepless frenzy of a four or five-day bender, he'd been bombarding his former partner with death threats, despite an apprehended violence order. Domestic abusers like Torrens pose an acute danger to women they know, but they are not usually a threat to strangers. Yet Torrens killed Griffin in the early hours of that morning. Days after his arrest, he killed himself in custody. Her family may never know why he did it, or if there was any reason at all. The murder of women by strangers is rare and frightening; it leaves deep scars on the community psyche. Anita Cobby, killed while walking home in 1986. Jill Meagher, killed while walking home in 2012. Eurydice Dixon, killed while walking home in 2018. Aya Maasarwe, killed while walking home in 2019. At first, Griffin's death was not put in that category. When her friends found her bag, then her phone, and finally her body in the creek on Monday afternoon, police thought she had drowned. Her mother, Kathleen Kirby, did not. 'She's an ocean swimmer,' she told the Nine Network. 'She's strong … I couldn't just go with, 'she drowned'.' Griffin wasn't just an ocean swimmer. She was a water polo star, an Ironwoman competitor, and a rugby league player who'd 'hit with a sting, check [her opponents] were okay, then skip to … the scrums,' said the Terrigal Wamberal Sharks in tribute. She skydived, she rode horses, she skied. She had, as her mother said, the world at her feet. '[She was] probably the happiest person I ever knew,' said schoolmate Jake Chambers, who graduated from Central Coast Sports College with Griffin in 2023 and stopped to pay tribute to her at a makeshift memorial by the creek this week, where friends had left sweets, photos, flowers and letters. 'I never saw her without a smile on her face.' Griffin's visit to the Central Coast that weekend had the air of a farewell tour; two weeks later, she would begin training to become an officer in the navy. She had just visited her grandfather in hospital, and taken her grandmother out for lunch. She was staying with a friend and that night she headed out to Hotel Gosford for drinks with her Coastie friends. Hotel Gosford is a renovated pub in the heart of Gosford's CBD, with dark timber, exposed brick, and two giant Aperol umbrellas in the middle bar. Griffin's friend went home early that night, but she stayed until pub close at 2am, and intended to sleep at her father's house in Terrigal instead. There's a bus stop opposite the hotel, but services finish at midnight. There's only a few dozen taxi licences on the Central Coast, and beating the other patrons to an Uber at closing time can be fraught. At close on most Friday and Saturday nights, patrons mill, stranded, on the footpath, and often have little option but to walk home, even if it takes an hour or more, says Chalmers. 'It helps you sober up. Usually, you keep your friends updated.' This lack of late-night transport has been a problem on the Central Coast for decades. About 25 years ago, council began a night owl bus service because of the high number of young men dying in crashes involving alcohol. It was scrapped due to lack of funding in 2006. Piper Yanz, a former classmate of Griffin and the organiser of a rally protesting against violence against women in Gosford last weekend, doesn't walk home, but waiting doesn't feel safe, either. 'So many times I have been sitting on the side of the road in Terrigal alone, waiting for my Uber, and I've been harassed,' she says. 'I've had men approach me. I've had men yell at me.' Damien Cusick, manager of the Elanora, says it's been this way on the coast since he began working in pubs, 35 years ago. It has been raised 'continually' at liquor accord meetings, he says, but nothing has changed. After failing to find an Uber, Griffin headed south-east. Her mother believes she was still hoping to find transport. 'She'd taken the long way home along the water, obviously to try and hail down a cab, or she would have taken a shortcut through the heart of Gosford,' she says. Her friends followed her on Snapchat's live tracker feature, and she sent them two videos while walking home. Cusick says the camera captured her walking past his hotel in Gosford's east, which closes at midnight, at about 2.45am. Torrens was several hundred metres behind her. By 3am, Griffin's friends had lost touch with her. They reported her missing. Thirty-six hours later, friends found her bag and phone by the creek. Then, they found her body. 'It's not right for a young girl to have to find her best friend in the water,' Kathleen said. Loading Police decided it was likely she had drowned; there were no injuries or obvious defensive wounds. They referred the death to the coroner and, as part of the coronial investigation, collected CCTV footage. Three weeks later, they were sorting through vision from the Elanora Hotel and noticed a man walking past, several minutes after Griffin. They wanted to know if he'd seen anything. On April 17, they released his picture in a bid to track him down. It was the breakthrough in the murder case they didn't know they had. Friends of Torrens saw it, including one who had been told by Torrens that he'd killed someone, and 'left her body in the mangroves', the Daily Telegraph reported. The friend contacted the police. In a call to the friend after the image was published, Torrens admitted to the murder. 'Why did I do it?' he reportedly said. 'I don't know … I just f--king clicked … I was awake for four or five f--king days, and I just did it.' The following Monday, Torrens was charged. Investigators believe Griffin tried to fight Torrens off, scratching him and collecting some of his DNA under her fingernails. They think he struck the left side of her face and knocked her unconscious, causing her to drown. He may have held her underwater. She had scratches on her upper arms and a mark on the left side of her face. Torrens, 53, was a deeply troubled man. His criminal history dates back to 1994, when he was jailed for robbery. He already had substance abuse issues, as he was paroled to a rehabilitation facility. His record shows he has been sent to others since. He's driven while disqualified, been fined for offensive behaviour, stalked someone and maliciously damaged property. The official record of his domestic violence offending began 10 years ago, with the first ADVO. In 2019, he faced a slew of DV charges, including stalking and assault. In January, he was placed on an 18-month community corrections order for more domestic violence offending despite having breached a similar order in 2020. This history horrified Griffin's family. The noncustodial sentence in January was 'just wrong', said her mother. 'He's gone and murdered someone when he should be behind bars.' Not much is known about Torrens' personal story. He'd worked as a traffic controller, and moved between northern NSW and Queensland. His most recent address is listed as Milsons Point. His former partner, Michelle – who he originally met at school, and began a relationship with a few years ago – lives on the Central Coast. They split last September. She took out an ADVO, which he breached. On the night Griffin died, Torrens had called Michelle 12 times, she told the Daily Mail. 'He started calling from 7pm and the last phone call was at 12.10am on the night he killed her. He kept threatening to kill my son and I … my children are completely traumatised.' Women are far more likely to be killed by their current or former partner than by someone they don't know; the violence is driven by control and punishment. Stranger homicides represent just one in five murders in NSW, and the majority involve men who are killed by men. If statistics were any guide, Michelle was in much greater danger that night than Griffin. The murder of a stranger tends to be opportunistic; perhaps driven by a sexual motive, or by substance abuse. Torrens' description of four of five days without sleep suggests he may have been using the stimulant drug, ice. 'The escalation from [domestic violence] to murdering a stranger is significant and highly unusual,' says Xanthe Mallett, associate professor of criminology at the Queensland Centre for Domestic Family Violence Research. Beyond the phone call with his friend, Griffin's family may never know why Torrens killed her. He can no longer tell them. At 4.50pm on April 24, just three days after his arrest, Torrens was found unresponsive in his cell at Silverwater Correctional Complex. Prison guards tried to resuscitate him until he was pronounced dead by paramedics 40 minutes later. Torrens had spent his first few days on remand alone in a so-called safe cell, which has no hanging points and allows frequent monitoring of the inmate. He was cleared of being at high risk of self-harm, so he was moved to a double cell. He used a sharp object to cut himself; several outlets reported he used a safety razor borrowed from his cellmate. One of Griffin's family friends, Ali Paparestis, said his suicide denied the family closure. 'It's going to leave the family with a few questions they haven't had answers to yet,' he told the ABC. The most recent statistics, from 2023, show a third of the 33 deaths in custody were from self-harm. Prisoners can be desperate; one used bed linen to hang himself from the window bars, another put a plastic bag over his head and tied a sock around his neck, and another 'swallowed about a gram and a half of ice'. Corrective Services regularly comes under attack from the Inspector of Custodial Services on opportunities for self-harm; in 2024, it criticised the remand centre that housed Torrens for having hanging points in many of its cells. Loading There are many complexities to Torrens' story, many of which the justice system is struggling to grapple with; domestic violence, addiction, self-harm. But many who live on the Central Coast say one simple, affordable thing could have protected the much-loved 19-year-old; safe, accessible late-night transport. 'One way we could have avoided this is if Audrey had some capacity to get home, in a way that women in the city do,' says NSW Greens justice spokeswoman Sue Higginson. 'Why was this woman left with no option [other than to] work it out?' Laurel Johnson, who works on the Safe Streets for Women and Girls project at the University of Queensland, says governments have everything they needed to operate overnight transport – surplus buses, technology that can link people to rides, knowledge of when and where the transport is most needed, such as when pubs close their doors. Too often, responsibility is tossed between state authorities and transport. 'This is a known vulnerability,' Johnson says. 'No one can say 'we didn't know this was a likely outcome'. All the ingredients are there. It's leadership that's needed.' In response to questions, the Central Coast Council said it had been advocating for better public transport. 'Council encourages local hospitality venues to provide free courtesy buses or similar transport for patrons after venue closing hours,' it said. Transport for NSW said it was looking at ways to improve transport on the Central Coast.
The Age
02-05-2025
- The Age
Adrian Torrens had been threatening to kill his ex: Hours later, he would instead kill a complete stranger
Warning: Graphic content The Elanora Hotel had been closed for almost three hours when 19-year-old Audrey Griffin walked past in the wee hours of Sunday, March 23. After struggling to get an Uber when Hotel Gosford shut at 2am, her only option was to walk towards home through the empty streets, past shuttered shops and gloomy parks. The Elanora's cameras spotted Griffin at 2.45am, along a road that would take her past the murky Erina Creek towards Terrigal. Several minutes later, the same camera captured her killer, Adrian Noel Torrens, striding purposefully along Victoria Road in a white hat and a red singlet. He was hundreds of metres behind her. She may not have even realised he was there. She certainly didn't know how dangerous he was. Already that day, Torrens had threatened to kill a woman. It wasn't Griffin. In the sleepless frenzy of a four or five-day bender, he'd been bombarding his former partner with death threats, despite an apprehended violence order. Domestic abusers like Torrens pose an acute danger to women they know, but they are not usually a threat to strangers. Yet Torrens killed Griffin in the early hours of that morning. Days after his arrest, he killed himself in custody. Her family may never know why he did it, or if there was any reason at all. The murder of women by strangers is rare and frightening; it leaves deep scars on the community psyche. Anita Cobby, killed while walking home in 1986. Jill Meagher, killed while walking home in 2012. Eurydice Dixon, killed while walking home in 2018. Aya Maasarwe, killed while walking home in 2019. At first, Griffin's death was not put in that category. When her friends found her bag, then her phone, and finally her body in the creek on Monday afternoon, police thought she had drowned. Her mother, Kathleen Kirby, did not. 'She's an ocean swimmer,' she told the Nine Network. 'She's strong … I couldn't just go with, 'she drowned'.' Griffin wasn't just an ocean swimmer. She was a water polo star, an Ironwoman competitor, and a rugby league player who'd 'hit with a sting, check [her opponents] were okay, then skip to … the scrums,' said the Terrigal Wamberal Sharks in tribute. She skydived, she rode horses, she skied. She had, as her mother said, the world at her feet. '[She was] probably the happiest person I ever knew,' said schoolmate Jake Chambers, who graduated from Central Coast Sports College with Griffin in 2023 and stopped to pay tribute to her at a makeshift memorial by the creek this week, where friends had left sweets, photos, flowers and letters. 'I never saw her without a smile on her face.' Griffin's visit to the Central Coast that weekend had the air of a farewell tour; two weeks later, she would begin training to become an officer in the navy. She had just visited her grandfather in hospital, and taken her grandmother out for lunch. She was staying with a friend and that night she headed out to Hotel Gosford for drinks with her Coastie friends. Hotel Gosford is a renovated pub in the heart of Gosford's CBD, with dark timber, exposed brick, and two giant Aperol umbrellas in the middle bar. Griffin's friend went home early that night, but she stayed until pub close at 2am, and intended to sleep at her father's house in Terrigal instead. There's a bus stop opposite the hotel, but services finish at midnight. There's only a few dozen taxi licences on the Central Coast, and beating the other patrons to an Uber at closing time can be fraught. At close on most Friday and Saturday nights, patrons mill, stranded, on the footpath, and often have little option but to walk home, even if it takes an hour or more, says Chalmers. 'It helps you sober up. Usually, you keep your friends updated.' This lack of late-night transport has been a problem on the Central Coast for decades. About 25 years ago, council began a night owl bus service because of the high number of young men dying in crashes involving alcohol. It was scrapped due to lack of funding in 2006. Piper Yanz, a former classmate of Griffin and the organiser of a rally protesting against violence against women in Gosford last weekend, doesn't walk home, but waiting doesn't feel safe, either. 'So many times I have been sitting on the side of the road in Terrigal alone, waiting for my Uber, and I've been harassed,' she says. 'I've had men approach me. I've had men yell at me.' Damien Cusick, manager of the Elanora, says it's been this way on the coast since he began working in pubs, 35 years ago. It has been raised 'continually' at liquor accord meetings, he says, but nothing has changed. After failing to find an Uber, Griffin headed south-east. Her mother believes she was still hoping to find transport. 'She'd taken the long way home along the water, obviously to try and hail down a cab, or she would have taken a shortcut through the heart of Gosford,' she says. Her friends followed her on Snapchat's live tracker feature, and she sent them two videos while walking home. Cusick says the camera captured her walking past his hotel in Gosford's east, which closes at midnight, at about 2.45am. Torrens was several hundred metres behind her. By 3am, Griffin's friends had lost touch with her. They reported her missing. Thirty-six hours later, friends found her bag and phone by the creek. Then, they found her body. 'It's not right for a young girl to have to find her best friend in the water,' Kathleen said. Loading Police decided it was likely she had drowned; there were no injuries or obvious defensive wounds. They referred the death to the coroner and, as part of the coronial investigation, collected CCTV footage. Three weeks later, they were sorting through vision from the Elanora Hotel and noticed a man walking past, several minutes after Griffin. They wanted to know if he'd seen anything. On April 17, they released his picture in a bid to track him down. It was the breakthrough in the murder case they didn't know they had. Friends of Torrens saw it, including one who had been told by Torrens that he'd killed someone, and 'left her body in the mangroves', the Daily Telegraph reported. The friend contacted the police. In a call to the friend after the image was published, Torrens admitted to the murder. 'Why did I do it?' he reportedly said. 'I don't know … I just f--king clicked … I was awake for four or five f--king days, and I just did it.' The following Monday, Torrens was charged. Investigators believe Griffin tried to fight Torrens off, scratching him and collecting some of his DNA under her fingernails. They think he struck the left side of her face and knocked her unconscious, causing her to drown. He may have held her underwater. She had scratches on her upper arms and a mark on the left side of her face. Torrens, 53, was a deeply troubled man. His criminal history dates back to 1994, when he was jailed for robbery. He already had substance abuse issues, as he was paroled to a rehabilitation facility. His record shows he has been sent to others since. He's driven while disqualified, been fined for offensive behaviour, stalked someone and maliciously damaged property. The official record of his domestic violence offending began 10 years ago, with the first ADVO. In 2019, he faced a slew of DV charges, including stalking and assault. In January, he was placed on an 18-month community corrections order for more domestic violence offending despite having breached a similar order in 2020. This history horrified Griffin's family. The noncustodial sentence in January was 'just wrong', said her mother. 'He's gone and murdered someone when he should be behind bars.' Not much is known about Torrens' personal story. He'd worked as a traffic controller, and moved between northern NSW and Queensland. His most recent address is listed as Milsons Point. His former partner, Michelle – who he originally met at school, and began a relationship with a few years ago – lives on the Central Coast. They split last September. She took out an ADVO, which he breached. On the night Griffin died, Torrens had called Michelle 12 times, she told the Daily Mail. 'He started calling from 7pm and the last phone call was at 12.10am on the night he killed her. He kept threatening to kill my son and I … my children are completely traumatised.' Women are far more likely to be killed by their current or former partner than by someone they don't know; the violence is driven by control and punishment. Stranger homicides represent just one in five murders in NSW, and the majority involve men who are killed by men. If statistics were any guide, Michelle was in much greater danger that night than Griffin. The murder of a stranger tends to be opportunistic; perhaps driven by a sexual motive, or by substance abuse. Torrens' description of four of five days without sleep suggests he may have been using the stimulant drug, ice. 'The escalation from [domestic violence] to murdering a stranger is significant and highly unusual,' says Xanthe Mallett, associate professor of criminology at the Queensland Centre for Domestic Family Violence Research. Beyond the phone call with his friend, Griffin's family may never know why Torrens killed her. He can no longer tell them. At 4.50pm on April 24, just three days after his arrest, Torrens was found unresponsive in his cell at Silverwater Correctional Complex. Prison guards tried to resuscitate him until he was pronounced dead by paramedics 40 minutes later. Torrens had spent his first few days on remand alone in a so-called safe cell, which has no hanging points and allows frequent monitoring of the inmate. He was cleared of being at high risk of self-harm, so he was moved to a double cell. He used a sharp object to cut himself; several outlets reported he used a safety razor borrowed from his cellmate. One of Griffin's family friends, Ali Paparestis, said his suicide denied the family closure. 'It's going to leave the family with a few questions they haven't had answers to yet,' he told the ABC. The most recent statistics, from 2023, show a third of the 33 deaths in custody were from self-harm. Prisoners can be desperate; one used bed linen to hang himself from the window bars, another put a plastic bag over his head and tied a sock around his neck, and another 'swallowed about a gram and a half of ice'. Corrective Services regularly comes under attack from the Inspector of Custodial Services on opportunities for self-harm; in 2024, it criticised the remand centre that housed Torrens for having hanging points in many of its cells. Loading There are many complexities to Torrens' story, many of which the justice system is struggling to grapple with; domestic violence, addiction, self-harm. But many who live on the Central Coast say one simple, affordable thing could have protected the much-loved 19-year-old; safe, accessible late-night transport. 'One way we could have avoided this is if Audrey had some capacity to get home, in a way that women in the city do,' says NSW Greens justice spokeswoman Sue Higginson. 'Why was this woman left with no option [other than to] work it out?' Laurel Johnson, who works on the Safe Streets for Women and Girls project at the University of Queensland, says governments have everything they needed to operate overnight transport – surplus buses, technology that can link people to rides, knowledge of when and where the transport is most needed, such as when pubs close their doors. Too often, responsibility is tossed between state authorities and transport. 'This is a known vulnerability,' Johnson says. 'No one can say 'we didn't know this was a likely outcome'. All the ingredients are there. It's leadership that's needed.' In response to questions, the Central Coast Council said it had been advocating for better public transport. 'Council encourages local hospitality venues to provide free courtesy buses or similar transport for patrons after venue closing hours,' it said. Transport for NSW said it was looking at ways to improve transport on the Central Coast.
Daily Mail
28-04-2025
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE The monster who killed Audrey Griffin was my husband. These are the horrific texts he bombarded me with moments before he killed her
The estranged wife of killer Adrian Torrens has revealed how he sent a barrage of texts threatening to kill her and her son on the night he murdered teenager Audrey Griffin. Ironwoman athlete Audrey, 19, was found dead in Erina Creek on the NSW Central Coast in March. Police initially said her death was not suspicious. But last week they arrested Torrens, 53, over her murder after he was identified in newly-released CCTV footage. Torrens then took his own life on Thursday while in custody in Sydney 's Silverwater jail. He was already serving a community corrections order for breaching an apprehended violence order against his estranged wife when he killed Audrey. Now Torrens wife, Michelle, who does not wish to share her surname, has broken her silence about her life with him. She spoke exclusively to Daily Mail Australia from her modest home on the NSW Central Coast where she previously lived with Torrens and her two children. Michelle revealed she separated with Torrens last September, just two years after the couple had reignited their relationship, decades after first meeting at school - and she had since tried to block him out of her life. But in the hours leading up to Audrey's murder and after, he bombarded her with a string of chilling threats. 'He rang me 12 times and because he was blocked, I was receiving them as text messages,' she told Daily Mail Australia. 'He started calling from 7pm and the last phone call was at 12.10am on the night he killed her. 'He kept threatening to kill my son and I… my children are completely traumatised,' she added. The revelation comes after the traffic controller committed suicide while in jail three days after his arrest for Ms Griffin's murder. NSW Chief Magistrate Judge Michael Allen had previously spared Torrens jail time when he pleaded guilty to the domestic violence offence and instead imposed an 18-month community correction order. Torrens was arrested on Easter Monday and charged with murder, almost one month after tMs Griffin's body was discovered in the creek bed near The Entrance Road at Erina. Police had initially treated her death as not suspicious and labelled a drowning after her partially submerged body was discovered on the afternoon of March 24. But that changed when Torrens confessed to the killing in a phone call to an associate, which triggered a tip off to police and sparked the homicide investigation. Police last week appealed to the public for new information as they released a CCTV screenshot of Torrens walking near Hotel Gosford. It was taken around the time Audrey had left her friends and begun walking home towards Terrigal about 2am, after being unable to catch an Uber ride to her father's home. Audrey was preparing to begin a 10 week officer training course in April with the Royal Australian Navy. She had visited the Central Coast - where she grew up - to see her grandparents and invite her friends to a farewell party in Sydney the next weekend. Detectives believe Torrens followed Griffin, whom he didn't know, from the pub before assaulting her and the teen drowned as a result. Police said Torrens' DNA was found under Griffin's fingernails and that a witness heard a high-pitched scream in the area around 3am. He was later arrested and charged with Griffin's murder after he was identified from the CCTV footage. Distraught Michelle says both she and Audrey had both been let down by the legal system. She also revealed she and her family had been living in fear for several months. 'My heart goes out to Audrey's family,' she said. 'I do feel let down by the police and the judge, on the first night of the AVO, the very first AVO, the police took four hours to come here to do a welfare check. 'When he breached his AVO [that was taken out] to protect me, they took five months to find him. 'I lived in fear he would carry out one of his threats.' Audrey was a much-loved member of the Terrigal Sharks rugby league and local lifesaving clubs. After completing her HSC in 2023, Ms Griffin juggled training and a part-time job at Crown Plaza Terrigal along with study commitments at University of Technology Sydney. Just weeks before her death, she had competed in the New Zealand half-ironman. Audrey was also a former member of the Gosford Water Polo ladies team. 'Audrey touched everyone, not just in her community but all over the country. She was the light in many of our lives,' a family statement on a GoFundMe read. 'There is no doubt she brought endless laughter and joy to everyone. 'She was the kindest soul to walk this earth and will always be in our hearts.' Ms Griffin was also a dedicated member of the Terrigal Wamberal Sharks rugby league club, having played junior and senior football. 'With a larger-than-life personality, and happy-go-lucky nature, Audrey would hit with sting then check that they were OK, and then skip to each of the scrums,' the club said in a social media tribute to her. 'Audrey will be sorely missed by the Sharks family, may she rest in peace.' Ms Griffin's family said the 19-year-old 'brought endless laughter and joy to everyone'. Pictured is Audrey visiting Japan On Thursday evening, more than 1,000 people gathered on a NSW beach to honour Audrey just hours after her killer was found dead in his jail cell. Her mother, Kathleen Kirby, shared a heartbreaking post hours before the crowd, dressed in white, flocked to Terrigal Beach on the Central Coast at dusk. 'Let's focus today on unity, remembrance, and the love we all share for Audrey,' Ms Kirby said. 'It's about standing together, remembering her light, and showing — through our presence — that we want change, awareness, and a safer future for everyone.'
