Estranged wife of Audrey Griffin's killer reveals his history of violence

The 19-year-old Navy recruit had plenty of friends and plenty of life ahead of her. Until the unthinkable.

Six weeks ago she was murdered on the NSW Central Coast as she walked to a friend's home after a night out.

Audrey didn't know her attacker, she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The killer, Adrian Torrens, was a violent man who opportunistically decided to cause maximum harm.

Police initially declared it was a case of misadventure.

But from the start, the 19-year-old's parents instinctively knew their daughter's death was no accident.

They say it was their own investigating that pushed detectives to catch Torrens. 

Parents tormented by daughter's horrific last moments

For Audrey Griffin's mum and dad, Kathleen Kirby and Trevor Griffin, a dirty creek bed on the side of a busy road is where they feel close to their daughter.

That's where her body was found.

They say what Audrey went through when she was killed is tormenting them.

"That's for me right now is just knowing what she was going through. What were her last thoughts? Knowing she fought him," Kathleen said.

"Fighting for her life, imagine fighting for your life," Trevor said.

However, Audrey should never have died.

Torrens' wife Michelle said she has been "living in fear for the past year" because of him.

Michelle said her husband had threatened her so many times before, she'd lost faith in the police to respond quickly. 

So she didn't call them that night. If only she had, officers might have been able to intercept Torrens, before he killed Audrey.

"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 told 60 Minutes.

Audrey left pub to walk home - but never made it

It was Saturday night, March 22.

Audrey was having a great night out, farewelling her mates before starting a career in the Navy.

When she left the Gosford Hotel in the early hours of Sunday morning, she planned to get an Uber but instead started walking back to her friend's place. 

She had no idea Torrens was following her.

The serial offender had spent the night harassing Michelle, with threatening voicemails.

And even though an AVO was in place to protect Michelle from him, it seems Torrens was on his way to her house nearby.

Michelle says she believes he was on his way to kill her.

She said she wished she called police.

"It is awful," she said.

"You know this morning I got up and I saw the sunrise, and I thought that, that it is something that Audrey will never have the luxury of. Just the simple things in life."

Phone location led to tragic find

When Audrey's mum woke up on Sunday morning in Sydney and checked the location of Audrey's phone, as she always did, she quickly realised she had never made it to her friend's place.

She was at Erina Creek.

"I saw the location and automatically obviously it would alarm me because I knew exactly where that location was," Kathleen said.

Trevor headed there and faced a horrifying discovery.

"We walked down probably 20 metres and we could spot a body in the water," he said.

"So I spotted that. I knew it was Audrey straight away because I could tell." 

Police told them she had died from "misadventure" as a result of drowning and that she might have fallen.

Kathleen and Trevor believe it was blatantly obvious there was something sinister about Audrey's death.

"I knew from the beginning there was something wrong," Kathleen said.

"Kathleen spotted it straight away. Her nails were full of mud," Trevor said.

Three days after she died, it wasn't detectives, but one of Kathleen's friends, who found Audrey's phone at the creek.

While Kathleen was begging police to do more, Audrey's killer was on the loose.

He spent three more weeks harassing his wife, Michelle, who didn't know that while she'd survived that night, Torrens had killed Audrey instead.

Marriage soon turned violent

When Michele married Torrens in 2022, she thought she was in safe hands.

Michelle says it didn't take long, though, for Torrens to turn violent and temperamental; a man she didn't recognise.

"I could see a change and it would just flip. It would just change automatically, like I can never predict it when it was going to happen," she said.

She says their relationship became unbearable just before Easter last year and the couple split up.

"That was the night that he kicked the wall next to me and threw something at me and blocked my way," she said.

"He was in a big rage and I was trying to console him and I just couldn't console him. It was beyond anger."

Michelle went to police and an apprehended violence order was put in place to protect her.

But just a few weeks later, Torrens breached it by leaving his wife a barrage of vile voicemail messages.

"He called me 34 times, left 24 threatening voice messages."

One said: "I am on my way down. You're a f---ing mole. I'm going to end your f---ing reign."

"He probably wanted to kill me. It would make me so sick and nervous," Michelle said

That awful feeling only got more frightening for Michelle while she waited for police to catch up with Torrens.

It took them five months to track him down.

Michelle didn't realise she had even more reason to be scared of her husband.

She was yet to discover the true extent of his lengthy criminal past.

There were drug and alcohol offences and he had assaulted a partner who had an AVO out against him.

He stomped on her chest and broke her arm, while threatening to kill her with a knife.

Then in 2020, Torrens was jailed for a slew of crimes including theft, fraud, assault, intimidation, and twice breaching an AVO.

In January, he was convicted of harassing Michelle and breaching the AVO meant to protect her.

The judge sentenced Torrens to a community corrections order instead of sending him to prison, after he completed a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program.

Three months later, he killed Audrey Griffin.

Family say they begged police to check CCTV

The breakthrough came on April 17.

Audrey's mum says she'd been begging investigators to show her every piece of CCTV that captured her daughter that night.

It was when detectives were trawling through footage they'd collected weeks earlier, that they made a sickening realisation.

A man had been following Audrey.

Police released an image and asked the public to come forward with information.

The next day, Michelle did just that, revealing he'd been threatening to kill her on the same night Audrey was killed.

"I got this sick feeling of icicles in my stomach that he might be lurking around in my house or in the backyard," Michelle said.

With Torrens firmly in their sights, detectives tapped his phone.

And it didn't take long for them to get the proof they needed.

The killer rang a friend and confessed and police nabbed him on April 21.

But Torrens would only spend three days behind bars before he took his own life, and took away some crucial answers for Audrey's already defeated parents.

"If there is a hell, I hope he rots in it," Trevor said.

Police commissioner defends response

NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb now has serious questions to answer about the investigation into Audrey's death.

"Could this [have] been better? More perfect? Yes. But did we catch a killer? Yes," she told 60 Minutes.

She said there will be a review into what happened, and promised to meet Audrey's parents.

"If we've failed that family in any way, then I apologise," she said.

"None of us should be in this position. Audrey should not be a statistic."

Her parents Kathleen and Trevor are determined to make sure their heartbreaking loss won't be in vain.

"Hopefully her death has made some change in the system," Trevor said.

"It's definitely not going to stop here. And I'm hoping I get the strength to keep going," said Kathleen.

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