MURDER IN PARADISE

AUTHORITIES LAUNCH A FRESH PROBE INTO THE UNSOLVED DEATH OF THE MELBOURNE STUDENT IN MOZAMBIQUE

- Michael Crooks

A spiring marine biologist Elly Warren was on a volunteer mission in Tofo, Mozambique in late 2016 when she was found dead outside a public toilet block. The 20-year-old from Melbourne was discovered face down in rocky dirt, with her underpants around her knees, her shirt ripped and sand in her mouth and airway. Despite those text-book markers of a violent crime scene, local police called it a drug overdose. “You’ve got a ripped top, you’ve got sand in her lungs,” her father Paul Warren tells WHO. “You can’t say Elly’s death isn’t suspicious.”

After seven excruciating years, police have finally agreed with Elly’s suffering dad. In July, Mozambique police ruled that Elly’s death was a homicide. The news came ahead of a three-day Australian inquest into the case beginning on August 22, in which pathologists and witnesses, including a friend who was with Elly in her final hours, gave evidence.

“I know for sure that … she was killed and that nothing that she did contributed to that,” her friend Jade O’Shea told the Melbourne inquest, which was attended by Paul, Elly’s sister Kristy, and Elly’s mum and stepdad Nicole and David Cafarella.