The Unsolved Death of Elly Warren in Mozambique

**Meshel Laurie** (0:04)
10 years ago, 20-year-old Elly Warren was found dead in a coastal village in Mozambique under circumstances that remain deeply contested. In the years since, her father, Paul Warren, has spent his life savings and traveled across continents in a relentless search for the truth, uncovering alleged failures by authorities along the way. He's written a book about it called Hunting Elly's Killer, and he joins us to share the story of his ongoing fight for justice.
This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.
Who was Elly Warren? Tell us about your girl, your adventurous girl. I have 16-year-old twins and I often think to myself, imagine them going overseas without me. Like how, what a weird feeling. What a great feeling, but what a scary feeling. And she was particularly adventurous, your Elly, wasn't she?

**Paul Warren** (1:12)
Oh, she certainly was. She was unbelievable. As a baby, she was hard to deal with even then, you know, at the start, but things happened at school. She stuck up for herself.
She was really confident about anything and everything. So, as life progressed, her first real trip to Africa was with her mother, Tanzania and all those parts of Africa, and she loved it. That's where she fell in love with Africa. Then she went on trips after that to Central America. She was diving in the Belize hole. She loved diving and scuba diving with the marine biology that she was doing. What she would do is do three jobs, save up as much as possible to go on her next adventure.
She's doing all this while she's at school, some of it. She's only 16, 17

**Meshel Laurie** (2:04)
That's what you want for your kids, isn't it? For them to find their passion. I feel like once they've got their passion, you know how to support them, you know how to help them leap into adulthood.

**Paul Warren** (2:14)
Well, going back a little bit, Nicole was actually a vet nurse, her mother. She used to bring all the animals home, you see, the sick animals and Elly would give them a syringe of milk and look after them. So that's where the love of animals eventually came from, from that.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:28)
She seemed to make friends easily too. I've seen people talk about her from Mozambique, people that she was volunteering with, really popular girl.

**Paul Warren** (2:36)
Oh yeah, she was out there, she loved it and she wouldn't stop talking like Jade O'Shea, one of the ladies that worked at Casey Barry as a bartender, said that she would get back from the dives and nobody else get a word in it. Because Elly was talking about her dives, you know.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:52)
What's Casey Barry? Is it like a backpackers there?

**Paul Warren** (2:55)
No, that's actually quite a nice place. It's in between in a way because it is still huts.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:03)
Yeah. Because I didn't know a lot about Mozambique either, but I was watching your 60 Minutes from years and years ago and they were talking, is it Tufo?

**Paul Warren** (3:10)
Tufo, yeah.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:11)
Tufo is the name of the town.

**Paul Warren** (3:12)
It's a small fishing village.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:13)
Yeah.

**Paul Warren** (3:14)
It's near Inzimbabum, which is a bigger town and it's got an airport. It's a 20-minute drive from Inzimbabum. That's where the Zinniq main police, criminal police were based at.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:25)
Very beautiful place. Seemed very friendly and welcoming to the young tourists.

**Paul Warren** (3:30)
Look, the locals are lovely really. I got along really well with the locals. But you see, the thing is anybody from overseas, they think you're rich and they're all in on trying to get as much as they can out of you really.
But they were nice. They were all very good.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:45)
I've been to lots of places like that, where you are conscious that people are very friendly and I'm very friendly, but there is this elephant in the room, which is my obvious, like I'm there because I've been able to pay it.

**Paul Warren** (4:00)
You've still got to be weary, I suppose. But Elly dropped her guard a bit because she loved it.
It was her element over there. She was just, that last couple of days, she was obviously just at the wrong place at the wrong time.

**Meshel Laurie** (4:12)
Well, that's it. She was really about to come home, wasn't she? She was a couple of days off her flight home.