source : the age
This article contains a picture of an Indigenous person who has died
On the night that Adrian Torrens murdered 19-year-old navy recruit Audrey Griffin on the banks of Erina Creek, he had been hunting down his wife, Michelle.
The couple had separated a year earlier, there were court orders in place to protect Michelle, but all night he had been leaving her threatening messages.
Michelle Torrens said Adrian Torrens had repeatedly threatened her life on the night he murdered teenager Audrey Griffin.Credit: 60 Minutes
He would love to rip her head off, he told her. He was going to come and kill her.
“The fear was in me,” she told 60 Minutes on Sunday night.
Audrey Griffin.
“Something was very off that night. He was so aggressive, very hostile.”
She double-locked the doors and brought the dogs inside.
“I got this sick feeling in … my stomach.”
For more than a year, Michelle had lived in fear of Torrens, half-expecting him to appear at any moment.
She had taken out an apprehended violence order when they split up. Weeks later, he breached it with a barrage of 34 phone calls and 24 voicemails.
One message read: “I am on my way down. You’re a f—ing mole. I’m going to end your fucking reign.”
Another: “Your time is over Michelle. I told you.”
Adrian Noel Torrens was charged with Audrey Griffin’s murder. He was later found dead in his cell.
It took police five weeks to track him down.
“I was ringing every day, you know, asking if they’d found him yet to issue the AVO. After a while I just got sick of being nervous and sick every time I rang, so I stopped eventually.”
Torrens was convicted in January of breaching the AVO and was sentenced to a community corrections order in lieu of a prison sentence, which is why he had his liberty on March 22, when Audrey was walking home from the Gosford Hotel, where she had farewelled friends before starting a navy career.
She did not know she was being followed.
The next morning, her mother, Kathleen Kirby, suspected that something had gone wrong when she checked the location of Audrey’s phone.
“Obviously it would alarm me because I knew exactly where that location was,” she told 60 Minutes. “It was at Erina Creek.”
The village swung into action. One friend called police; another went to the creek on foot and found Audrey’s bag. Her father, Trevor Griffin, and Kathleen arrived at the site just as the police were pulling up. They walked about 20 metres and then Trevor spotted a body in the water.
Kathleen Kirby and Trevor Griffin said they had to push police to conduct further investigations into the death of Audrey Griffin after it was ruled misadventure.Credit: 60 Minutes
“I knew it was Audrey straight away,” he said. “I could tell.”
But police ruled her death misadventure on the advice of pathology, which found no evidence of strangulation, sexual assault or trauma, and Kathleen and Trevor said it was left to them to push for further investigations to be conducted.
Kathleen said she had begged police to show her all the CCTV that captured her daughter on the night, and it was as they were trawling through the footage that they noticed someone following Audrey from Gosford.
When they released the image, Michelle identified him as her husband and told police that he had menaced her earlier on the night that Audrey was murdered.
Kathleen Kirby, left, with her daughter Audrey Griffin.
“On the night of Audrey’s death, he called me 12 times and left voice messages and all of them threatening to kill me,” she said.
He was wearing the same red singlet and white shorts in the footage that one of Kathleen’s friends had told police she saw a man wearing at the site of the murder five days after it took place. He was poking around with a white stick at the section of the creek where Audrey’s body was found.
The clues were starting to form a picture.
Trevor: “He’s followed [Audrey] from Gosford where he is going to his ex-partner’s house. He’s turned up in Gosford to create havoc and then just spotted maybe Audrey walking home and chose his different target.”
A memorial on the bank of the Erina Creek marks the spot where Audrey Griffin’s body was found.Credit: Kate Geraghty
Detectives tapped Torrens’ phone and caught him confessing to the murder. Three days after his arrest he took his own life, and with it the chance for Audrey’s parents to find out why he killed her.
“He’s an animal, this man,” Trevor told 60 Minutes. “It was always going to happen.”
Police Commissioner Karen Webb said police had conducted further investigations post-pathology because they instinctively knew that it was more complicated than misadventure. Local detectives consulted the homicide squad.
“The mum obviously wanted us to do as much as we can,” she said. “I completely understand that.”
A frustrated Webb said Audrey would not be dead if Torrens had been locked up after his AVO breach.
“A community corrections order for someone who has a violent history is no answer. A get out of jail free card is not the answer for people like Torrens.”
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