Dad Paul Warren will never give up on justice for daughter Elly

An Aussie father says he’s uncovered a prime suspect in his daughter’s murder after recruiting a sex worker to infiltrate an African gang.

Elly Warren was killed in Mozambique in November 2016. Picture: Supplied

A heartbroken Australian father says he has uncovered a prime suspect in his daughter’s murder after recruiting a sex worker to infiltrate a crime gang in the remote African village where she was killed.

Paul Warren says he resorted to taking the drastic action after being frustrated by four years of “incompetence and inaction” by police following the mysterious death of his daughter Elly during a night out with friends in the coastal tourism retreat of Tofo, in southern Mozambique, in 2016.

He credits the covert operation — which he launched in late August and continued through into September — with not only yielding the sole suspect in his daughter’s long-running murder case, but also the strongest indication of the motives behind it.

He is now calling on homicide detectives in Mozambique to follow up his vigilante sting with their own probe into the gang leader, who he believes killed Elly, in the hope it could bring the reviled drug dealer, pimp and standover man to justice.

“The only reason why no one has come forward about this guy earlier is because people there are scared of him and his gang,” Mr Warren tells The Australian.

“He’s a bad man and is well-known and feared around Tofo. The locals think he can get away with anything because he pays off the police.

“What we know for sure (after my investigation) is that he runs a prostitution ring, deals cocaine and is notorious for drugging tourists and robbing them.

“I feel that this guy and his gang should be the number one focus; they are the number one suspects — the only suspects — in a murder investigation that was bungled from the very beginning and has been dragging on for years.

“I hate that he’s still out there enjoying his life after taking Elly’s and for him to rot in a Mozambique jail would be the only justice for me. To end his life would be too easy; I want him to suffer in a prison.”

That thought alone offers Mr Warren some brief respite. The Melbourne father of three has spent the past four years — and at least $50,000 — travelling to Mozambique and fighting to uncover the truth about his daughter’s death; quietly worrying, in his darker moments, that it might all be for naught.

“Sometimes I wonder how I haven’t fallen flat on my arse already, you know what I mean?” he says. “You’re striving for this ambition to get justice and you can’t break through and you can’t switch off and it feels like you’re going to crash. But then I think of Elly and it keeps me going. I know I need to do this for her. I need to make a difference for her.”

Mr Warren’s dedication to solving his daughter’s murder has won him a string of staunch, high-profile supporters, including former leading Victorian homicide detective Charlie Bezzina and former opposition leader Bill Shorten, but his activities have not been as well-received in all quarters of the law enforcement community.

Paul Warren spent has spent four years — and at least $50,000 — travelling to Mozambique to uncover the truth about his daughter’s death. Picture: Aaron Francis

He says he received a stiff ­rebuke from the AFP in September after launching his undercover sting and was told to leave the police work to the professionals.

“I got an accusatory letter from them saying that I may be jeopardising the official investigation,” he says. “But what official investigation? After four years, the local police have done f..k all and have no suspects and the AFP haven’t done f..k all either.

“Their email was insulting, really, given all the effort and evidence I have obtained to try and solve Elly’s murder. If only the AFP had’ve cared and put some effort into investigating Elly’s murder it might have been solved by now and I wouldn’t have to be playing detective.

“Every Australian citizen needs to know that if one of their loved ones is killed overseas, they’re on their f..king own.”

In the letter, sighted by The Australian, an AFP officer tells Mr Warren “we understand that you have people, based in Mozambique, that are assisting you with trying to identify individuals who may be involved in the death of Elly”.

“Please be aware that you could potentially jeopardise the ongoing efforts that continue to be pursued by Australian authorities in relation to this matter,” the officer adds.

“We don’t want anyone placed at risk unnecessarily including yourself, members of your family or Australian government representatives travelling to Mozambique in the future.”

The email now forms part of Mr Warren’s final 71-page submission to the Coroners Court of Victoria as he waits to learn whether his request for an Australian inquest into Elly’s death will be granted, with a directions hearing listed for December 17.

The AFP says it is still engaging with Mozambique authorities regarding Elly’s death through its South Africa bureau, and had most recently discussed the matter with them on September 21.

“AFP officers have travelled to Mozambique on a number of occasions since 2016 in relation to this matter, with the support and permission of local authorities. The most recent travel was in July 2019,” a spokesman says. “Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation no further comment can be made at this time.”

Marine volunteer

An avid adventurer and conservationist, Elly was only just beginning to make her mark on the world when she travelled to Mozambique alone in October 2016, volunteering with marine research outfit Underwater Africa in its mission to help save the region’s endangered coral reefs.

For six weeks, the 20-year-old lived in the coastal village of Tofo, working alongside marine biologists on dives across reefs to document their fragile health along with that of the threatened species that call them home.

“We were all extremely proud of Elly and what she was doing,” Mr Warren says. “She was the perfect daughter. She knew what she wanted out of life and wasn’t afraid to work hard to make it happen.

“She’d already been to Kenya, and she’d been to South Africa with marine biologists there, working with sharks. She worked long hours at three jobs waitressing in Melbourne to earn enough money to go to Mozambique because she loved Africa and all it had to offer, and loved every second of her time volunteering there.”

Then, on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, just a few days before she was due to return home to Australia, the unthinkable happened.

After spending the day out diving, Elly headed to a popular, beachside watering hole called Victor’s Bar in the heart of Tofo with friends to celebrate the end of the volunteer program.

As the night wore on, she drifted off to her backpacker accommodation shortly after midnight, before returning to the bar at about 1am and telling her friends, who were now sitting on the beach, that she was heading inside to get a drink.

They never saw her again.

Instead, the next morning, as the sun rose over the seaside village about 5am, a local fisherman found her body laying face down in the dirt — her skirt hiked up, and underpants pulled down to her knees — beside a public toilet block across the street from Victor’s Bar.

Mr Warren says an investigation into what had happened by local authorities was a mess from the outset: the initial police report into the incident claimed Elly had died from a drug overdose, only for two separate toxicology reports to later reveal she had no drugs in her system.

Authorities now concede Elly was most likely murdered: her head pushed down into the sand on the town’s main beach until she suffocated, before her lifeless body was picked up and dumped outside the toilet block about 100m away.

Elly Warren on a beach in South Africa in 2015.

AFP ‘must have known’

“My greatest regret is that I didn’t go there straightaway the moment I found out Elly had been found dead, but I listened to the f..king AFP,” Mr Warren says.

“I trusted the AFP, as most Australians would, when they told me not to go and that the police in Mozambique would be conducting a proper investigation. It didn’t quite come across me until I got that overdose report that that wasn’t the case.

“They didn’t want to know about it and all the vital evidence from the crime scene was either lost or destroyed. The AFP must have known all along that not much was happening because they wouldn’t answer my emails and tried to fob me off.

“That’s when I realised, ‘I’ve got to go and do it myself. I’ve got to get over there and start doing some investigating because no one else is going to do it.’”

Pictures supplied by Paul Warren for story on Elly Warren - Pariango Backer packers where Elly was staying for her last few nights in Tofo. Her stay at Casa berry had finished.

‘He’s behind that’

In the years since Elly’s death, Mr Warren says he has made two trips to Tofo to interview locals and chase down leads. Last year, he also announced a personal $25,000 reward for information about her murder before plans for further visits were curtailed by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

Just as he began to fear his investigation would stall, Mr Warren says he received a tip-off from “a very concerned South African mother” who contacted him via Facebook messenger on March 3.

“This lady did not want any reward money for her information — which was a first — and said it had been weighing on her mind that she needed to contact me because it was the right thing to do,” he says.

“She told me that she had been staying in a lodge in Tofo with her family last December when the caretaker there warned them about a guy they had seen hanging around the market. When she pushed him for more details, he said: ‘Do you know about the Australian girl they found dead? He’s behind that. He’s a dangerous guy’.”

The woman went on to tell Mr Warren that the man, who The Australian has chosen not to name, had distinctive tattoos and hung around a little pub next door to Branko’s — a pizza place just around the corner from where Elly was last seen alive.

She told him that she had also been warned that “he spikes tourists’ drinks and steals from them”.

A memorial to Elly.

Frustrated by his experiences with the Mozambique police and AFP, Mr Warren decided to take the matter into his own hands and discussed the information he had received with a German private investigator who had offered to work on the case pro bono.

He says they then spent a couple of months planning an undercover surveillance operation together; putting it into action in August after receiving confirmation that the local authorities were still to identify any suspects or make any arrests in relation to Elly’s murder.

“I felt I had no other choice but to run this operation,” he says. “So we organised a prostitute to move to Tofo and befriend this gang leader over time to find out what we could about him and how he operates.”

He says the sting ran for about four weeks but had to be wrapped up when the sex worker began to fear for her life. By that time, he says they were already convinced the crime boss warranted serious further investigation as a key person of interest in Elly’s murder.

“After the last time (the sex worker) met with him, she called me straight away and told me she was too scared to do it any more. She had no doubt he was a killer and was absolutely terrified, so we had to get her out,” Mr Warren says. “Listening to his voice, I had no doubt about what he was capable of either.”

The ‘dirtiest ghetto’

In a number of covert recordings of the self-described crime “king” — obtained by the sex worker and reviewed by The Australian — the gang leader can be heard boasting about his criminal exploits, discussing drug deals and threatening a young woman in a fit of jealousy.

“Don’t treat me like a fool. I don’t like it. I don’t like it. I treat people nice in this town. Anyone can do what they want in this house. As long as you treat me with respect,” he says in one of the secret recordings.

“Eat what you want. Do what you want. It’s all cocaine money anyways. It’s all cocaine… (but) I don’t like disrespect. I am an ego man. Where I come from is different from where you come from. Remember this … I come from the dirtiest ghetto in Africa.

“It’s so easy to kill something … because, me, I’m a gangster. I do what I like. I come here today. Imagine me cutting your neck, and cutting your hands and your legs. How will I feel tomorrow? I won’t feel good. Because now I can’t call you, I can’t say, ‘Hey, que pasa?’, because I kill you.”

Following the investigation, Mr Warren now believes his daughter fell victim to a bungled robbery attempt by the gang leader and at least one of his crew members on Tofo’s main beach the night she died and may have been accidentally killed after she tried to resist.

He says they dumped her body by the side of the toilet block because they knew the police would try to cover-up what appeared to be the rape and murder of a foreign tourist to help protect the region’s tourism trade, which is built around Tofo’s growing reputation as one of the world’s premier diving destinations.

“We know from the type of sand found in Elly’s lungs and on her body that she was killed on the beach and her body was moved, and we also know that she wasn’t raped,” he says.

“If they just made her disappear after they killed her — and fed her body to the sharks or something — then there would have been an international search and a lot of attention on the place and they didn’t want that. They knew this was the best way to try to keep it quiet.”

He says he has since handed over the full brief of intelligence he collected on the gang leader to consular officials in the Australian embassy in Pretoria, South Africa — the nearest outpost to Mozambique — in the hope they can encourage police in Tofo to act.

‘We will never give up’

The person of interest

While optimistic his work will lead to a major breakthrough in his daughter’s case, Mr Warren remains circumspect about the chances of it resulting in any convictions, saying there are just “too many unknowns at this stage”.

Whatever happens, he says he will keep fighting for the beautiful young daughter he lost half a world away. As painful as it is to keep going at times, it would hurt even more to stop.

“I’m a strong person and I’m an industrial engineer,” he says. “So when you look at what an industrial engineer does, they analyse the facts. And I’m very good at that. I can be rational and logical when I’m looking at everything that has happened.

“But the moment I stop doing that, and I think about Elly, it’s hard to explain, but this ache comes across you. It’s like this terrible feeling of downness and your whole body feels like you’ve got no energy and you’ll never be able to get it going again.

“It comes over you when you get into a really bad state of knowing that she’s gone and that she’s never coming back again because I had a fantastic relationship with Elly and I love her.

“The people who did this think she’s just one girl out of all the deaths around the world. But she’s my girl. And we’re Elly’s family. We will never give up on her.”