Shot dead, the playboy baron’s girl caught in drugs war
A PLAYBOY baron’s daughter who allegedly supplied drugs to celebrities has been shot dead in the Philippines amid a savage war on drugs.
Aurora Moynihan was born into a life of privilege as the daughter of the infamous 3rd Baron Moynihan, whose half-brother is Lord Moynihan, the former sports minister and chairman of the British Olympic Association.
Educated at a private school in Malvern, Worcestershire, before attending a top Swiss finishing school and studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, Aurora was
‘She dabbled in a lot of drugs’
considered by her family to be ‘brilliant’. But the former French literature student fell into the same trap as her notorious playboy father after dabbling in drugs as a young woman.
Last Sunday, Miss Moynihan, 45, who was on a police drugs watch-list, was found by the side of a Manila road with multiple gunshot wounds. Next to her body was a chilling message scrawled on a piece of cardboard: ‘Pusher to the celebrities. You’re next.’ She was found with four sachets of shabu, or methamphetamine, and ‘drug paraphernalia’, according to police. CCTV shows the moments before she was killed by a passenger in the middle of the night as she got out her Toyota SUV on a street corner in the capital. Witnesses said she was shot five times before the car sped away.
Her death has stunned her family, including elder sister Antonita, a national celebrity in the Philippines as an actress under the name Maritoni Fernandez.
In a recent interview, Antonita said: ‘My younger sister Aurora is exactly like our father; she gets bored really easily. She is the amazing one. She’s the one that got everything from Daddy; she speaks so many languages well, she drinks like a fish, she holds court the way Daddy did, she’s as brilliant, she has wonderful ideas. But she also dabbled in a lot of drugs.’
Following her sister’s murder, she said: ‘We as a family have one priority ... and that is to protect her children from further pain and suffering.’
After the sisters’ father Tony Moynihan died aged 55 in 1991, he was described in obituaries as a ‘bongo drummer, confidence trickster, brothel keeper, drug smuggler and police informer’.
Moynihan succeeded his father in the peerage in 1965, and took the Liberal whip in the House of Lords, where he was principally concerned in arguing that Gibraltar be given to Spain. By 1970, he faced 57 charges – among them fraudulent trading and the purchase of a Rolls-Royce car with a worthless cheque. To avoid disaster, he fled to Spain.
His extradition was sought but he disappeared, resurfacing the following year in the Philippines. Married five times, he was forbidden from leaving the country in 1986 due to inquiries into links with drugs and prostitution.
Moynihan’s half-brother Colin is a former MP for Lewisham East and Olympic gold medalwinning coxswain. The two were never close, but in 1985 they fell out when Tony said he was selling the Victoria Cross won in 1855 by their great-grandfather, Andrew Moynihan.
Miss Moynihan’s death comes amid a crackdown on drug gangs in the Philippines. More than 3,000 people have been killed since June.