The 2:00 AM call app showed no drivers. So, after saying goodbye to her friends at the bar, Audrey Griffin decided to walk. She was 19, about to enlist in the Navy, and had come to the small town of Arina to say goodbye to her dad, her grandparents, and the friends who had thrown her a going-away party that night. Her grandfather was in the hospital.
She had visited him the day before. Now she was heading back to her dad’s place along a quiet road. About an hour later, her friends texted her. No answer.
They called. Nothing. They told themselves she had probably just gone to bed. Her mother, checking a phone locator app the next morning from Sydney, saw the battery icon hovering near the river that ran through town.
Not at her dad’s house. She called him. He said Audrey had never come home. She might have crashed at a friend’s place, he suggested.
She hadn’t. By the time friends reached the riverbank, they found her purse and a hair clip. Police arrived. Then they saw something floating in the water.
It was Audrey. The initial conclusion was drowning. A tragic accident. The dark, the quiet road, a slip and a fall into the river.
The theory made sense to investigators. But it made no sense to her family. Her mother insisted Audrey hadn’t been drinking that night. She had been swimming, even in rough ocean water, her whole life.
How could she drown in a shallow river? Then there were the scratches. The torn jacket. Police treated it as an accident anyway.
For weeks, her death barely made even the local news. Her parents waited for updates that never came. So they started searching themselves. Three days after her body was found, a friend of her mother’s spotted her phone half-buried in the mud near a tree.
Just lying there in plain sight. That discovery made her parents furious. How had police missed it? Her mother started going door to door along the road where Audrey had walked that night.
Not one business had been contacted by police. No one had been interviewed. Weeks passed. Her family pushed.
Finally, detectives opened a full investigation. On April 17th, nearly a month after her death, they released surveillance footage of a man seen walking along Audrey’s route that night. Not a suspect, they said. Just someone they wanted to speak with.
Then, on April 21st, they made an arrest. The man was 53-year-old Adrien Torrren. He was charged with Audrey’s murder. By reviewing CCTV footage, detectives had found him walking several hundred yards behind her.
Then appearing on another camera, still trailing her. A local resident who lived near the river told them he had heard a sharp, high-pitched scream around 3:00 AM that night. He had thought it was a fox. After hearing about Audrey’s death, he realized the timing lined up.
Another witness, a man walking his dog in the middle of the night, said he had passed a man who gave him a bad feeling. Nervous. Twitchy. Strange.
His description matched the man from the footage. A new forensic analysis found scratches on Audrey’s arms and abrasions on her face that could have come from a blow. Then the most important discovery. Samples from under her fingernails contained skin tissue.
DNA testing showed it belonged to a man. When they ran it through the criminal database, it matched Adrien Torrren. The evidence suggested she had fought him. That he had held her underwater until she lost consciousness.
But the case was far from over. When news of his arrest spread, the entire country began to learn about the man who had killed her. His ex-wife, Michelle, said she wasn’t surprised at all. She had been living in fear for months.
He had repeatedly threatened her life. They had married in 2020. At first, he had seemed kind, caring, positive. Then his behavior shifted.
He would fly into fits of rage, threatening her out of nowhere. By early 2024, he punched a hole in the wall just inches from her face. That was the final straw. She left him and got a full no-contact restraining order.
Within weeks, he had broken it. He called her 34 times and left 24 voicemails filled with threats, insults, and promises to kill her. He said he was on his way to her house multiple times. Police went to arrest him.
They couldn’t find him for five whole months. During that time, the threats kept coming. When they finally caught him in January 2025, Michelle learned he had a long criminal history he had never told her about. Drunk driving.
Drug offenses. Assault. In 2019, he had assaulted a girlfriend and been sentenced to 20 months in prison. He served four.
And then, for violating the restraining order, the judge gave him a slap on the wrist. No jail time. Just loose supervision that put no real restrictions on his freedom. Three months later, he murdered Audrey.
Public outrage was immediate and massive. How had the system let this man walk free? Why had police taken nearly a month to even treat her death as a possible homicide? Audrey’s mother revealed more.
A friend of hers had seen Torrren at the exact spot where Audrey died, just five days after the murder. He was wearing the same clothes from the surveillance footage. She also said police only started investigating after she demanded to see all the CCTV footage from her daughter’s route. And even when they arrested him, they handled it poorly.
They told her parents that Torrren was likely the killer. When Audrey’s mom asked if he had done something to her daughter, the detectives said: “We haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet because he’s asleep. ”
Torrren refused to confess. But before taking him in, police had tapped his phone.
During a call with a friend, he admitted to the murder. He said something inside him had just snapped. He had no idea why he did it. The prosecution had what they needed.
Then, just three days after his arrest, Torrren was found unconscious in his jail cell. He was rushed to the hospital but didn’t make it. According to early reports, he ended his own life. For Audrey’s parents, it was a second tragedy.
They had wanted justice. They had also wanted answers. Now, those answers died with him. Maybe there never was a reason.
Torrren was known to abuse alcohol and drugs. He might have been completely out of his mind that night. Michelle said he had started calling her again that same evening, threatening to kill her. The case was effectively closed.
Audrey was the 23rd woman killed in Australia in 2025. Her story sparked widespread outrage. People were furious at a system that repeatedly allowed a dangerous man to walk free, and at police who took nearly a month to even begin a proper investigation. A resolution named in her memory was introduced in Parliament, calling for stronger measures to prevent similar crimes.
The prime minister launched an investigation into the police department that handled her case and the jail where Torrren died. Memorial events were held across the country. Thousands came together to honor her life. At the river where her body was found, people gathered and waited for the sunset.
It was her favorite time of day.
