Elly Warren had been found dead in Mozambique in 2016. Photo / Supplied
Elly Warren had been found dead in Mozambique in 2016. Photo / Supplied
It's the moment when the shivers crept up the spine of the man investigating 20-year-old Australian Elly Warren's mystery death, her own father Paul Warren.
Trapped in Victoria at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Warren could not immediately do anything when the eerie contact from a woman he didn't know came to him via Facebook Messenger.
The woman had a strange story to tell and more chilling details would ensue as a locked-down Paul Warren began to learn about crime, corruption and cover-ups from Africa to Melbourne.
It would set him on a path of investigation regarding his daughter that he could not have predicted.
But by 2020, he was already used to twists and turns no suburban father or even a retired engineer might have anticipated.
Four years ago this month, Paul Warren and his family had received the terrible news that Elly, an adventurous, hardworking and confident young woman, had been found dead in Mozambique.
Elly Warren was passionate about marine life and Africa. Photo / Supplied via news.com.au
Her lifeless body had been found face down in the sand, with her bikini bottoms around her ankles, behind a toilet block early on November 9, 2016, in the coastal town of Tofo.
Elly Warren, who was due to return home in two months to study marine biology, had been volunteering on a marine conservation project.
Tofo, fringed by coral reefs which are world renowned for manta rays, whale sharks and migratory humpbacks, is a magnet for international divers.
Although the town in Tofo is in reality a collection of resorts dotted among tin shacks along dirt roads, Elly was enjoying a holiday in a place she had told her father she wanted eventually to make her home — Africa.
On the night before her body was found, she had been out with friends from Casa Barry Beach Lodge and dancing in the street.
Sometime after 2am, a man watched her walk from the Parangio Beach Motel towards the Tofo De Mar Hotel and a street clustered with snack bars.
Three hours later, a fisherman found Elly's body near the toilet block, the location of the town's only public freshwater taps where fishermen went daily to prime their boats.
Multiple forensic examinations revealed the fit and healthy young woman died from asphyxia, after inhaling sand into her lower airways, and had no drugs in her system.
Elly Warren with her father Paul Warren. Photo / Supplied via news.com.au
It would prove, however, the sand was a golden yellow, the kind found at the beach, and not the black sand around the toilet block.
Elly's body had been moved. The fisherman who found her had taken a clear photo which indicated a struggle.
But at the time, despite a Mozambique autopsy finding she had been murdered, Tofo police and authorities told Paul Warren there was no homicide.
They said she had simply fallen over into the sand and her death was an accident.
Despite two visits to Mozambique himself and spending time and money to investigate Elly's death, Paul was still effectively flying blind until the message from the woman out of the blue.
"She didn't want any money. She didn't contact me straight away but it preyed on her mind," Warren told news.com.au.
"It was an indirect tip-off and I could relate to her."
What the women had to tell him was that on a holiday in Tofo, her teenage children had run into an unsavoury character.
The man, Tony, had alarmed the teens enough that they told their mother about him, and she had quizzed the caretaker of the premises at which they were staying.
The caretaker warned the woman not to let her children near the man because he was dangerous.
This was the woman's initial communication with Paul: "One night our kids came home from the market and asked our caretaker, do you know a guy called Tony.
Elly Warren on a walking track in Botswana in 2016. Photo / Supplied via news.com.au
"The … caretaker got this look on his face and said, 'I can't say anything except that Tony is not a nice man. Stay away from him'.
"The following day, I asked the caretaker more about Tony. He said 'do you know about the Australian girl?'.
"And he said, 'Tony and his gang were behind that. I am pretty sure you will know this already.'
"It's more a case of getting the authorities to act on it. He's a dangerous guy and has tattoos all over – apparently the teardrop tattoo on his face too.
"I think his name is Antonio. We saw him a few times. Tony would hang out in a little pub next door to Branco's pizza place.
"He's a drug dealer I think. We were told he spikes tourist's drinks and steals from them."
Paul Warren already had indications that his daughter's death was far from accidental but had come up against brick walls of bureaucratic indifference, incompetence or worse.
Convinced his daughter was murdered, he had travelled to Tofo on a personal investigative mission last year.
But confined to lockdown this year, he would learn that far from his daughter having been found lying flat on the ground, she had in fact been in a Muslim praying position.
A local businessman had either helped move her body, or asked it be moved from the beach because an unnatural death, and possible murder, was bad for business in a town which relied heavily on tourism.
As he delved more deeply into the known and the unknown facts regarding Elly's death, Paul would learn that there was a clear image of his daughter's body.
Before that, all he had known about was a blurry photo sent to the Melbourne doctor who was conducting a third post mortem examination on Elly, after the autopsy in Mozambique and another in South Africa.
He was disturbed to find that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) had known of the existence of the clear image since about two weeks after Elly's death, but had not informed him.
Warren has shared the disturbing but vital clear photo of Elly's body in situ, and it shows her black T-shirt torn off her right shoulder to the extent the rip exposes her right side.
"The AFP and DFAT [Department of Foreign Affairs] knew the Mozambique authorities were covering it up," he said.
"When I disputed the autopsy from [a Melbourne doctor] that said the cause of Elly's death was 'undetermined' we had a meeting.
"There were … three from the AFP there. They didn't say anything about the photo."
Paul Warren's own investigation led him, incredibly, to infiltrate the gang run by the man implicated in Elly's death by the Tofo caretaker.
He found himself in the unusual situation of hiring a local woman, on the advice of a German private investigator, to make clandestine recordings of "T' and his gang.
Paul Warren in Tofo, Mozambique with a photo memorial of his daughter seeking clues as to anyone who might know something of her death. Photo / Supplied via news.com.au
The plan was for the woman to mention Elly's death after seeing the memorial of photos Paul had erected at the public toilets where his daughter's body was found.
This would allow the woman to casually bring up Elly with T, but an unknown person had ripped down the photo and that plan was thwarted.
While there was no smoking gun, T nevertheless big-noted himself about crimes he had committed, leaving Warren with recordings that could fuel a local police investigation into him.
Warren concedes his efforts may come to nothing, that the murder of Elly Rose Warren may never properly be investigated in Mozambique, nor a perpetrator charged and convicted.
He said he and his family were lobbying for a new federal agency to be set up for when an Australian was killed overseas
And now a Victorian Coroner's Court directions hearing has been set down for December 17, and he is hoping for an inquest into Elly's death.
Abrasions were found on Elly's neck, as well as bruising on her mouth and in the muscles on the left-hand side of her neck.
Warren said his daughter had not been sexually assaulted.
He said his investigation of Elly's murder has not been easy on his wife, Nicole, and his other daughter, Kristy, but "it needs to be done and people need to know".
Warren's investigations of Elly's death and the crime scene thereafter include crucial details either overlooked or discarded by local police investigators.
He is still seeking his daughter's torn black T-shirt, which is clearly visible in the fisherman's photo of her but not bagged and tagged by police, who kept neither evidence nor any crime-scene photos.
Elly Warren pictured with a giraffe on an earlier trip to Africa. Photo / Supplied via news.com.au
"As Elly's Black T-shirt is clearly ripped open, why has this vital piece of evidence not been bagged and tagged as evidence, which is vital evidence that proves a struggle took place?" he asked.
Instead, he received a Mozambique police report last month saying the cause of Elly's death "may have been merely accidental".
In a statement, Warren has expressed his disappointment – and his disgust – at the lack of action by both Africa and Australia on Elly's death.
"When my daughter died a suspicious death in a foreign country in 2016 I had no idea about the circumstances that were going to take place over the next four years," he said.
"I am very disappointed with the effort and lack of support of the Australian Government and their relevant agencies.
"Elly was a young female Australian citizen and she and her family deserved a far better commitment by all concerned.
"I am also very disappointed by the doctors who conducted the autopsies."
Warren has pages and pages of evidence, videos and his recordings of Tony which he hopes to present to the Victorian Coroner's Court.
If he cannot completely prove what happened to his daughter and see justice, he doesn't want it happening to any other Australian family.
"We're pushing the Government to set up an independent team, to look after people whose loved ones have been murdered overseas because it's really not good enough the way it is," Warren said.
