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’s mother, Kathleen Kirby (left), says her daughter was a strong swimmer.
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.
Jake Chambers pays his respects to his old school fiend Audrey Griffin, whose body was found in Erina Creek.Credit: Kate Geraghty
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.
There is a bus stop across the road from the Hotel Gosford, but the service wraps up at midnight.Credit: Kate Geraghty
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.
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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.
The NSW Police diving unit searched the creek near the place where Audrey Griffin’s body was found for clues about what happened on the night she died.Credit: Kate Geraghty
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.
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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.
With Amber Schultz
If you or anyone you know needs help, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 (and see lifeline.org.au), 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732), the National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service on 1800 211 028 or Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800.
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