When I started dating way back in 2010, Tinder didn’t exist yet. Back then I used to meet new guys on a South African instant messaging app called Mxit (Mix It), and by the time I’d left university and started working, I’d switched over to a dating website called OkCupid.
I joined Tinder in November 2014 after I’d heard it being discussed on a local radio show. They were discussing the app in particular, and that morning they had a ‘specialist’ in to comment on the do’s and don’ts of online dating, how to set up your profile, and which red flags to avoid when browsing the list of available singles.
Now I can’t remember what they’d said to look out for, but I remember the list of things I looked for when I was browsing through the available profiles of single men in my area:
- There had to be more than one clear picture of the guy.
- Photos with friends are fine, but they can’t all be of him and his buddies – because then you don’t know who you’re chatting with.
- One or two photos of him wearing sunglasses are fine, but they shouldn’t all be of him wearing sunglasses, because it suggests that he’s insecure in his appearance.
- His profile should at least include a short description of himself - bonus points if it’s funny – because someone who can’t even go through the effort of adding a short description to his profile is not going to be a good conversationalist.
- NO GYM OR BATHROOM SELFIES, because I don’t need to date someone who’s THAT much into his own body (also, you just KNOW that the first photo he’ll send you once you start chatting is going to be a photo of his favourite body part)
Now, back then I was a six or seven at best, but I’m blonde and have blue eyes and I’m a decent conversationalist, so I did really well on Tinder. I also followed the golden rule of online dating once I’d hit it off with a guy and agreed to go on a date with him - ALWAYS meet in a public place, because it gives you an easy out if the guy isn’t who he’d said he is. It also allows you to easily slip away if the guy you’re on a date with starts regaling you with sad stories about his cheating ex, explains that he lost his job after falling down a ravine and injuring his back, and then offers to regularly pamper you by rubbing your feet and giving you a neck massage after a long day at work if only you’ll give him a chance.
No, thank you.
Most of my dates were uneventful. Only three of my dates went really badly. Others were some of the most fun dates I’ve ever been on, and I ended up marrying the 23rd guy I went on a Tinder date with.
But there are also hundreds of Tinder horror stories out there, and today’s case is one of them.
”English Backpacker Goes Missing”
I wish that there was more that I could have told you about Grace. But as with so many of these cases, hers was a life that was cut short way too early, and there is only so much information about her available online.
Grace Emmie Rose Millane was born on the 2nd of December 1996. She was the youngest of three children and grew up in Wickford, Essex, in the UK. She loved hockey and was a talented artist, and after finishing high school, she pursued a degree in Advertising and Marketing at the University of Lincoln.
She also regularly posted photos of herself, her family, her friends, and her artwork to her social media accounts, and they painted her as a beautiful, talented young woman who loved her family, hanging out with friends, going on trips, partying, and loving on her pet dogs; a black labrador called Maddie, and a Newfoundland pup called Benson. She came from a large family, and they were all very close.
According to her father, David Millane –
“Grace [was] a lovely, outgoing, fun-loving, family-oriented daughter.”
Grace spent her summers working to build up her CV and gain some work experience, but during her final year at university, she informed her parents that she was planning on taking a gap year once she’d earned her degree so that she could go and see the world.
So, on the 26th of October 2018, David and Gillian Millane dropped an excited Grace off at the Heathrow airport. Grace spent the first six weeks in Peru, then flew to New Zealand on the 20th of November. She spent the next two weeks visiting the islands and seeing the sights, going on hikes, and hanging out with her new friends before she travelled to Auckland. During her holiday she spammed her family with photos of the things she was doing and regularly posted photos and story updates on her various social media accounts.
On the 1st of December 2018, she told a friend of hers that she was going on a date that night with a guy she’d met on Tinder. The next day was her 22nd birthday, and the two of them were planning on getting ‘smashed’ to celebrate it. She told her friend that her date was Australian and that he worked as a manager on an oil rig.
He was on leave and was staying in a hotel in Auckland Central, and had plans to travel to the UK in 2019, so there was a chance that she would see him again after she left New Zealand. That evening she sent her family a photo of a Christmas tree that was covered in golden fairy lights and told them that she was at SkyCity, an entertainment centre and casino in Auckland Central. During the evening, she also sent a message to her friend that read –
“I click with him so well. I’ll let you know what happens tomorrow.”
Around 7 pm the next evening, her family and friends back in the UK started sending her messages to wish her a happy birthday. Auckland is 13 hours ahead of the UK, so her family had expected to wake up to numerous photos and messages from Grace, but she’d been quiet all day, and they thought that she was just out celebrating. When she still hadn’t gotten back to them by the 3rd of December, her parents tried calling her, and when that failed, they called the backpackers she’d been staying at.
The staff at the Base Backpackers then informed the Millane family that Grace wasn’t in and that the other residents had last seen her around 5 pm on the 1st of December. According to her father, David –
“Grace has never been out of contact for this amount of time. She’s usually in daily contact with either her mother or myself, her two brothers, or members of the family on social media.”
Understandably, the Millane family were out of their minds with worry, so on the 4th of December they contacted the British Embassy and the police in New Zealand and reported Grace as missing. They also posted appeals for help on their various social media accounts and Facebook groups in New Zealand, asking the people of New Zealand to help them look for Grace. On the 6th of December Grace’s father, David, flew to New Zealand to look for his daughter, and in a televised appeal to the New Zealand public, he said that –
“We are all extremely upset and it’s very difficult at this time to fully describe the range of emotions we are going through. While we are very grateful for the media coverage both here and back home, we are finding this situation quite upsetting, and would sincerely hope that the media continue to respect our privacy.”
“I would like to take this opportunity to appeal to anybody who has seen, spoken to, or come into contact with Grace over the last few days, to come forward with any detail, no matter how small, and to contact the investigation team.”
Within minutes calls started coming in, saying that Grace had been spotted walking down a street, or was out hiking with other people. People also posted messages on her Twitter page, telling her that her family was looking for her, and to please get in contact with them. The Millane family and the police followed up on every single lead, but none of them panned out, and DI Beard told the media that –
“The longer this goes on the more concerning it is. At this stage we’re still hopeful that we’ll find Grace.”
The Date
Usually, we report that the police didn’t take the family’s concerns about their missing daughter seriously, but this case had the potential to become an ‘international incident’, so the Auckland police started investigating Grace’s disappearance immediately. According to Detective Inspector Scott Beard -
“We get missing person’s complaints every day. It’s just that when you look at this particular case – an overseas tourist here by herself – and on her birthday, she hadn’t contacted anybody, and nobody has been able to contact her. She’d gone off the radar.”
DI Beard and his team spoke to the Millane family and to the staff at the Base Backpackers and tried to find out what Grace had been up to in the days leading to her disappearance. They browsed through Grace’s social media accounts and got copies of CCTV footage from all over central Auckland. Teams of officers then spent hours going through the footage and following Grace’s route through the city, enabling them to set up a timeline of events for the night of the 1st of December 2018.
They knew that Grace had left Base Backpackers at around 17:37, and then made her way to SkyCity on foot. At around 17:44, she was standing near a Christmas tree display outside SkyCity’s entrance and could be seen checking her phone. After a minute, a dark-haired man dressed in dark jeans, a dark t-shirt and a light blue unbuttoned shirt walked up to Grace and greeted her with a hug.
The pair then headed inside the SkyCity centre and headed towards a burger bar, where they spent the next hour and a half drinking cocktails and downing tequila shots. They left SkyCity at 19:14, and that was the last time that Grace showed up on the available CCTV footage.
The police now knew that they had to track her date down, so once again, they scoured her social media accounts and came across a comment that was made on a profile picture she’d added to her Facebook profile just two days before she’d disappeared. The comment read – “Beautiful very radiant” – with an upside-down smiley face next to it. The commentator was a dark-haired Australian named Jesse Shane, and the comment had been made at 21:27 on the night that Grace had gone missing.
So, thinking that he might have been the man that Grace had been on a date with that night, a Detective Constable Levinzon sent Jesse Shane a message on Facebook on the 5th of December. She explained that they were looking for Grace, and asked Jesse to come and see them at the police station.
On the morning of the 6th of December, Jesse called DC Levinzon and confirmed that he had been on a date with Grace that night. He was then interviewed at a local hotel by two more detective constables and told them that he’d last seen Grace at around 8:30 pm on the night of the 1st of December. They took down his details and once the interview was over, they started looking into his story.
But the first red flags popped up almost immediately – Jesse had told them that he lived in Mount Eden, a suburb in Auckland, but the address didn’t exist. And when they went to speak to his employer, they found out that he’d been fired on the 30th of November. According to his old employer, he’d been working as a telemarketer but had been making several fraudulent calls to inflate his call rate – including dozens of calls to his own cell phone number.
His old employer also informed the police that Jesse had been renting an apartment at the CityLife hotel in Auckland Central, so a team of detectives went to speak to the staff there, who confirmed that yes, Jesse Kempson was renting an apartment there. They also provided the detectives with CCTV footage from the hotel, and when the two detectives left the lobby, they spotted a smartly dressed Jesse walking away from the hotel and chased him down.
According to Detective Jordan, she had determined that the falsified information he’d provided them with was enough of a reason to bring Jesse in for questioning. Around 15:30 that afternoon, a Detective Settle conducted Jesse’s first formal interview while the rest of the team went through the CCTV footage that they’d received from CityLife hotel and tried to reconcile it with his version of what had happened that night.
Jesse told Detective Settle that he was 26 years old, and his full name was Jesse Shane Kempson. He’d seen Grace’s profile on Tinder, and the two of them had matched on the 30th of November. He’d messaged her on the morning of the 1st of December and asked her if she had any plans for the next day, and she told him that it was her birthday, but that she didn’t have any set plans. He then asked her if she would mind meeting up for drinks that evening, and after some back and forth, Grace agreed.
He suggested that they meet up at SkyCity since there was a casino and multiple bars and restaurants that they could go to, and told Detective Settle that it was a safe meeting point because it was a public area and there was a lot of security around. But that’s not exactly how he phrased it. Instead, he explained that he’d decided to meet Grace in a public place because there was a chance that the person he was meeting that night had been catfishing him, and Jesse then had to spend three minutes explaining to a sceptical-looking Detective Settle what catfishing is, and why a well-built man like Jesse needed help defending himself against someone who wasn’t quite as attractive as they’d made themselves out to be.
Anyway, Jesse explained that the date went well. They each had around three cocktails and some tequila shots, and then they left SkyCity. Grace told him that she was heading back to the backpackers, so they hugged and Jesse kissed her on her cheek. The two made plans to meet up the next day, then split up. Jesse went to a sports bar across the road, and had just assumed that Grace was planning on going to a bar that was located next to the backpackers.
Jesse spent the rest of the night at the sports bar and drank around 10 ‘handles’ of beer – by which point he was completely sloshed. (FYI, ‘handles’ are New Zealand’s version of a ‘pint’ – but where a pint is usually 570ml, a handle is just 440ml.)
A hungover Jesse woke up in his hotel room at around 10 the next morning, and when he checked his phone, he saw that Grace had blocked him on Tinder. He just assumed that she hadn’t enjoyed the date as much as he had, so he shrugged it off and went on with his life.
Detective Settle then informed Jesse that they were very worried about Grace and that as a part of the investigation into her whereabouts, they’d appreciate it if Jesse would provide them with a DNA sample. Jesse agreed, but when Detective Settle left the interview room to talk to his team, Jesse called him back and asked –
“Am I being arrested for something I didn’t do?”
Another police officer assured him that no, he hadn’t been arrested, and informed him that they were still treating Grace’s disappearance as a missing person’s case. Jesse audibly sighs in relief and then explains that it had been quite a shock to hear that she was missing and that he found the entire situation to be quite stressful.
For the next 25 minutes, Jesse calmly sits in the interrogation room and waits for Detective Settle to return. But behind the scenes, another detective had handed Detective Settle a stack of photos, and basically told him “This guy is lying”. They had clear CCTV footage of the street corner where Jesse said he’d last seen Grace, and Jesse and Grace could be seen leaving the area together at around 20:28 that night.
What’s more, according to the CCTV footage from the CityLife hotel, Jesse hadn’t been alone when he’d gone back to the hotel that night. At around 21:40 on the evening of the 1st of December, both Jesse and Grace can be seen entering the hotel lobby together. Jesse had his arm around Grace’s shoulders, a grinning Grace was holding onto his hand, and it was clear that at this point, both of them were quite drunk.
The last time Grace is seen alive is when she and Jesse leave the elevator at around 21:41, and make their way towards Jesse’s room, which was located on the third floor. The next time either one of them shows up on camera again is at 08:01 the next morning when Jesse enters the elevator on his own.
When Detective Settle returned to the interrogation room, he asked Jesse if he had a tattoo. When Jesse confirmed that he had one on his right forearm, Detective Settle asked to see it and then presented Jesse with a CCTV screenshot of himself walking into the elevator from the CityLife Hotel lobby. In the screenshot, Jesse is wearing blue jeans, a black t-shirt, and black and white sneakers, and his tattoo is clearly visible.
Jesse is pushing a light grey suitcase into the elevator, and the timestamp reads 08:14 am on the 2nd of December 2018. Which, if you’ll remember, was when Jesse claimed to still be asleep up in his hotel room.
When Detective Settle confronted Jesse with this discrepancy in his testimony, Jesse said that no, he was pretty sure that he’d still been asleep at 8:14 that morning. Detective Settle then calmly pointed out the fact that the camera didn’t lie and asked Jesse where he’d been that morning.
For a few seconds, Jesse stares down at the photo, then says –
“I might have got the times wrong, but if you’re assuming that I was using that suitcase for something, I’ve still got that suitcase in my room, and you guys can have it.”
When Detective Settle asked Jesse where he got the suitcase, Jesse explained that he’d bought it that morning from The Warehouse, which is a department store that sells everything from groceries to furniture and trampolines. According to Google, the store in question opens at 8 am, which means that Jesse went and bought that suitcase shortly after the store opened its doors, despite claiming that he’d been severely hungover that morning.
Jesse continued to explain that he’d bought the suitcase because he had to move his things out of the hotel that day, at which point Detective Settle pointed out that Jesse had just contradicted himself, and that the majority of his testimony was built on lies.
In the Sky Original documentary “The Lie – The Murder of Grace Millane”, Detective Inspector Scott Beard explains that –
“While he was being interviewed, and particularly once he’d been proved to lie, we got a search warrant for his room at the CityLife hotel. We found out that he’d been living at the hotel, and had been for several months.”
Following his interview, Jesse was informed that he wouldn’t be allowed to return to the hotel, and the forensic team descended on Jesse’s hotel room the next day. At first glance, it seemed to be relatively clean, but as soon as the lights were turned off and the curtains were drawn, the carpet lit up with the help of some luminol and blue lights.
Two large circular stains were embedded in the carpet next to the bed. There were also a handful of bloody footprints at the foot of the bed and leading into the bathroom, blood spatter against a wall, a spot of bodily fluids on the foot of the bed, and a few spots of dried blood on the mini-fridge. The stains tested positive for female human DNA, but the chemicals that had been used to clean the blood had damaged the DNA to such an extent that it couldn’t be matched to Grace. However, the presence of blood in Jesse’s room gave the Auckland police the evidence they needed to confiscate his cell phone and to issue a warrant for his arrest.
On the 8th of December, Detective Settle tracked Jesse down at a backpackers that he was staying at, and informed him that he needed to come down to the police station for another interview. Once there, he informed Jesse that they now not only had the blood evidence but also CCTV footage from several other places that suggested that he’d not only murdered Grace Millane but had then gone through the effort of trying to cover up his crimes.
By this point, a smart man would have lawyered up, but instead, Jesse agreed to come clean to the police.
He told Detective Settle that on the evening of the 1st of December, he and Grace spent an hour and a half drinking cocktails at a burger bar in SkyCity. They left at around 19:14 and then made their way to a nearby Mexican restaurant. From there they headed to a nearby bar called The Bluestone Room.
“We had a fair bit to drink there. Most of the time we were sitting there we were just kissing. I think we were both into each other.”
In the CCTV footage, Grace is grinning all the way, and when Jesse gets up to fetch them some more drinks, Grace drunkenly messages her friend to let her know how her date is going and then greets Jesse with a smile and a kiss when he returns with their drinks.
The two left The Bluestone Room at 21:45 and walked to Jesse’s hotel. On the way there, Jesse first puts his arm around Grace’s middle, then her shoulders, and Grace hugs him back. They enter the lobby of the CityLife hotel and then head up to Jesse’s room.
According to Jesse –
“The next thing I remember after that is being in the room with Grace. We were kissing, we were talking. She asked me to turn the tv off, and started talking to me about Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Jesse then claims that Grace suggested they should try out some BDSM, but that he was hesitant since bondage isn’t really his thing. Still, he agreed, and they started taking explicit photos of each other and having sex. He claims that Grace asked him to choke her and that she had insisted on it. Things heated up, and they ended up on the floor with him on top, restraining her and holding onto her throat like she’d asked. After they’d finished having sex, he went to take a shower.
He then claims that he fell asleep in the shower, which is… possible, I guess. After a long and tiring day I’ve fallen asleep in the bath, but after a wild night with friends, I’ve found more than one of them passed out butt-naked on the bathroom floor with their pants around their ankles…so, you know, it’s possible. But in my experience, if they’re already that far gone, they’re usually unable to get it up and will remain useless for the next few hours at least.
Anyway, Jesse claims that he woke up at some point during the night and then went to bed. Grace wasn’t in the bed, so he assumed that she’d left at some point during the night. He woke up the next morning and was surprised to see that Grace was still lying on the floor next to the bed. He saw that there was blood coming from her nose, and that is when he realised that something was wrong. Jesse claims that he screamed and tried to wake Grace up, but she was already dead.
“I was in shock. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t believe what had happened, I was just terrified and scared.”
So instead of calling the emergency services or the police, he went out to buy a suitcase and some cleaning supplies. He then forcibly stuffed Grace’s body into the suitcase and cleaned the room, but the entire exercise was quite gory, and he claims that he vomited several times.
“It just didn’t seem right…All I could think about was what we’d shared the night before.”
Jesse then told the police that he had taken the suitcase and buried Grace in a shallow grave in the Waitākere (Way-tah-key-ree) Mountain Range outside of Auckland. However, he continued to insist that he hadn’t murdered Grace. Her death had been a simple accident. Then an unimpressed Detective Settle informed him that he was being arrested for the murder of Grace Millane, and Jesse Kempson was taken into police custody.
During a press conference, Detective Inspector Scott Beard told the media that –
“Sadly, the evidence we have gathered to this point of the inquiry has established that this is a homicide. Grace’s family have been advised of this development, and they are devastated.”
Grace’s body was recovered on the 9th of December, and once the autopsies were concluded, she was sent back to the UK where her family held a funeral for her.
Over the next few weeks, the people of New Zealand mourned Grace alongside the Millane family. They held vigils for her, built shrines in her name, and started talking about the fact that ‘women were statistically more likely to be victims of violent crimes than men’. Jacinda Ardern, the then prime minister of New Zealand, also chimed in when she made a public apology to the Millane family, saying that –
“…on behalf of New Zealand, I want to apologise. Your daughter should have been safe here, and she wasn’t.”
Lies, All Lies
In her article titled “Who is Grace Millane’s murderer?”, journalist Anna Leask started off by writing that –
“He had cancer. He was a hot-shot manager earning $150,000 a year. He had a law degree. His cousin was an All Black. His parents were dead. He was adopted by rich people. His mates were mostly cops. He had gang connections.”
“Lies. All lies.”
Jesse Shane Kempson was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1992. His parents got divorced when he was 9, and he lost all contact with his mother. He was raised by his father and grandfather, and when his father remarried, he was joined by several step-siblings. Jesse’s father’s side is Māori (More-ee), but his mother isn’t, and it’s been suggested that he never felt like a part of the whānau (fah-now) (or family) and never felt comfortable identifying as Māori, which led to him rejecting a lot of his family’s culture and traditions.
According to his grandfather, the teenage Jesse was –
“a nice kid, but he sort of fell out with everybody.”
Jesse had a habit of stirring drama wherever he went, was a pathological liar, and freely stole from his family and friends. By the time he was 21, he was estranged from most of his family, and his father set an ultimatum – Jesse had to get his shit together and make some effort to be a part of the family, or he had to leave. So, Jesse broke things off with his remaining family members and left for Australia where he worked as a manual labourer and a bartender for a few years.
He returned to New Zealand in 2016, and in a post on Facebook, apologised to his friends and family for his past behaviour.
“I’ve done a lot of reflection over time and have narrowed down the cause of it all…My clear arrogance and selfishness has truly affected the relationship I have with people in my personal life.”
“I’ve recently been diagnosed with severe anxiety and currently take medication to keep this under control.”
“Putting all that aside, I just want anyone who I’ve hurt/let down to know I’m truly sorry from the bottom of my heart.”
According to his grandfather, he also came slinking back during this time, and borrowed a large amount of money from his grandfather – money he never paid back.
Jesse continued working whatever jobs he could find and got into trouble for driving under the influence and being drunk and disorderly, but he also continued to lie about who he was and where he came from. According to an old roommate of his, Jesse had told her and their two other female roommates that he was Australian and his father owned a string of restaurants. He claimed that he was in New Zealand to help oversee a few of them.
He then spun a story about some renovations they were doing, but his roommate knew the owners of the restaurant, and she realised that he was lying. When she and a few friends went out for drinks a few days later, Jesse was working at the bar but disappeared soon after they’d arrived.
They knew that he was always going out on dates, but he spent most of his days at home. Whenever one of them was alone with him during the day, he’d start flirting with them and forcing them into tight corners, which made them uncomfortable.
“We finally built up the courage [to ask him to leave], because it was a bit scary, just us three girls asking him to leave when we felt a little bit uncomfortable with him.”
“But he said that his mother had died and that he was going back to Sydney. So he left that night on the pretence that he was going to Sydney, and then when we came home from work the next day he’d cleared out all of his stuff.”
“The way that it happened, the way he left so abruptly, we actually got the locks changed the next day.”
According to his old landlord, Jesse moved into an apartment in the CityLife hotel in October 2018. Jesse told his new landlord that his father was on the board of directors for Woolworths, and he worked as a manager there. Jesse claimed to earn more than $150,000 a year and told his landlord that he had a company car. The apartment didn’t exactly fit his high-rolling persona, but Jesse claimed that he had been looking for a ‘modest’ apartment to live in because he wanted to spend the majority of his income on socializing and funding his high-flying lifestyle.
Jesse was your typical ‘metro-man’ – he was always smartly dressed, and put a lot of effort into his appearance. He told the police that his hobbies included going to the gym and swimming, and he was definitely well-built and attractive. But he didn’t seem to work and he could be seen wandering around the building during office hours. According to his landlord -
“He appeared to have been a pick-up artist. It seems like that was his full-time job, like it was all he did.”
Initially, Jesse’s rent was paid for by WINZ, which was New Zealand’s old Ministry of Work and Income – basically, it was part of an unemployment benefit. But they only paid his rent for October, and Jesse was responsible for footing the bill for November. When his rent went unpaid, Jesse claimed that there was a delay in the HR department at Woolworths and that his bill should be settled soon.
Of course, Jesse was working as a telemarketer at the time, but he was fired on the 30th of November, and he never did pay his rent.
He also went on dozens of Tinder dates in the months leading up to Grace’s disappearance. He claimed that he was a ‘hopeless romantic’ who loved his dog and spending time in the outdoors. One of his dates described him as attractive and “very charming and very chatty”, but it didn’t take them long to realise that they couldn’t trust a word that was coming out of his mouth, and a few of them explained that there were so many red flags in their conversations that they decided never to meet up with him.
One of his dates told journalist Anna Leask that –
“Most of his conversation was about him, his mother dying of cancer and talking about his celebrity friends. A red flag appeared in my mind when I rang a former radio host who told me she didn’t know who he was.”
Another one of the women he’d met on Tinder told Leask that –
“He was telling me about his life and that his mum had passed away, he was telling me about his sisters, he seemed quite harmless.”
“He rang me three times a day, it was over a couple of months. There were a lot of red flags so I never met him for a date. I guess I was just trying to be nice messaging him but it got to a point when it was getting too much. I felt he was controlling.”
Jesse met a woman known only as “Miss K” on Tinder in September 2016. The two of them became a couple soon afterwards, and Jesse moved into Miss K’s apartment in Mount Eden in November 2016.
While they were together, Jesse spent his days lounging around the apartment when he was in between jobs, and he regularly borrowed money from Miss K. He had a drinking problem and was often physically and emotionally abusive towards her, and according to Miss K, Jesse had a thing for rough sex.
“He slapped me, he head-butted me, he’d hold my throat until I couldn’t breathe while he was having sex with me. Whenever he was angry with me, he’d go to the kitchen and get a butcher knife and hold it to my throat.”
In January 2017, Miss K came home and found Jesse lying naked on the couch with weights attached to his ankles. She claims that he told her he’d been sent by the CIA to kill her, and that he’d then grabbed a knife and chased her around the apartment.
“He got me on the ground, and I was in a foetal position. He was on top of me with the knife, holding it by my throat. Then he got me behind the couch in a chokehold, and he whispered in my ear ‘time to go to sleep.’”
At some point during the night, he forced her to perform oral sex on him, and Miss K explained that she cried and gagged the entire time. Afterwards, Miss K wrote a letter outlining what had happened to her that night but didn’t report any of it to the police, but she finally broke things off with Jesse in April 2017 after she learned that he’d been seeing other women behind her back.
She then went to the police station to get a protection order against him. She detailed the emotional and physical abuse she’d suffered during their relationship and explained how he’d manipulate her into giving in to his demands by refusing to give her affection, and how he’d turn violent whenever he didn’t get his way.
“He needed power and control at all times. And when he didn’t have it he would resort back to those violent behaviours.”
Another Tinder date of his also went horribly wrong. “Miss O” was also a British backpacker, and she met Jesse in April 2018 while she was visiting her mother who lived in Auckland. They had a few drinks at different bars in Auckland, and Miss O explains that Jesse became increasingly more affectionate as the night wore on. At one point, he leaned over and kissed her, and Miss O kissed him back.
They were heading to another bar when Jesse noticed that she was messaging a friend to let her know how the date was going. According to Miss O, Jesse scolded her for being on her phone, so she put it away, after which he calmed down. They had a few more drinks, and then Jesse drove her to the motel where he was staying at.
They went to his room, and after a while Jesse started kissing her. It turned heated, and when Jesse started touching her intimately, Miss O stopped him and told him that she wasn’t the kind of girl to sleep with a guy on the first date. Miss O explains that Jesse got angry at this, and told her that she had to put out because –
“…he had treated her like a princess and paid for dinner and drinks.”
The two argued, and Miss O told Jesse that she wanted to go back home. However, that’s when she realised that she’d forgotten her handbag at the last bar they’d been at. Jesse allowed her to call her mother and her friend from his phone but they didn’t answer, and he refused to drive her back to the bar so that she could pick up her bag.
Miss O didn’t have any other way of getting to the bar, so she reluctantly agreed to spend the night in Jesse’s room. During the night, Jesse got into bed with her and started touching her again, and despite Miss O’s insistence that she didn’t want to have sex with him… well, you can imagine what happened next.
The next morning, Jesse took Miss O to the bar to collect her bag and then dropped her off at her mother’s house. She didn’t tell anyone what had happened that night and returned to the UK. Then the news of Grace’s murder reached her, and when his name and photos were published in the local media, Miss O realised that they had both been victimised by the same man.
The Crown vs “K”
Jesse Kempson appeared in the Auckland District Court on the 10th of December 2018, and he was officially charged with the murder of Grace Millane. During his hearing, his defence team submitted a request for his name to be kept a secret so that public opinion wouldn’t impede his right to a fair trial – you know, the whole ‘innocent until proven guilty thing’. Initially, this request was denied, but Jesse’s legal team lodged an appeal, and it was decided that a suppression order would be in effect until Jesse’s murder trial was finalised.
HOWEVER, this order only applied to New Zealand’s media houses, which meant that journalists in the rest of the world could name and shame Jesse to their heart’s content. Which they did.
Jesse’s murder trial began on the 4th of November 2019. According to DI Beard –
“We knew we had the right person. What we had to be able to prove, was the intent to kill [Grace].”
Jesse arrived in court wearing a smart navy suit and a black shirt and pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder. He’d also chosen not to testify on his own behalf, and for the duration of the trial, he quietly sat in the accused box in between two police officers.
Crown Prosecutor Robin McCoubrey started his opening statement by explaining that Jesse Kempson had murdered Grace Millane. He then gave a brief summary of their relationship and explained that on the night of the 1st of December 2018, the two of them had met up for a date.
“Grace Millane went back with the defendant to his apartment. She died there. A couple of days later the defendant buries her body on Scenic Drive out in the Waitākerees. None of this is in dispute. What is in dispute is how she died.”
The Crown argued that between 10 pm on the 1st of December and 1:27 am on the 2nd of December 2018, Jesse Kempson had strangled Grace to death. This was either intentional or a result of actions that any reasonable person would have understood could cause her death.
Jesse’s defence lawyer, Ian Brookie, told the court that Jesse hadn’t murdered Grace. Her death was an accident and had occurred while the two of them were having consensual sex – an argument that is infamously known as the “Rough Sex Defense”. He would go on to argue that Grace had a history of practising BDSM and that she had initiated the sexual act that had resulted in her accidental death.
To prove their case, the Crown called several detectives to the stand who all explained their role in the investigation. Detective Constable Levinzon explained how she’d come across the comment that Jesse had left on Grace’s profile picture on Facebook, and had then asked him to contact the Auckland police. Detective Constables Han and Heimuli described their initial meeting with Jesse and told the court how he’d provided them with a fake address.
Detectives Jordan and Hames explained how they’d managed to find out that Jesse was living at the CityLife hotel, and how he’d been walking towards the hotel when they left the lobby. He’d looked straight at them, then turned left and walked away from the hotel, prompting them to chase him down.
Then Detective Settle was called to the stand, and his first formal interview with Jesse was played to the court. After that, the Crown played the various clips of CCTV footage that they’d collected during the course of their investigation, and the court became a silent witness to Grace and Jesse’s short relationship.
In the first clip, Jesse can be seen standing outside The Bluestone Room just minutes before he meets up with Grace. He finishes drinking a beer and then puts the empty bottle down on the table next to at least three other empty beer bottles. In the second clip, Jesse meets up with Grace, and we follow them as they make their way to the burger bar, then the Mexican restaurant, and The Bluestone Room, and the viewer can see how the two chat and flirt with each other and grow increasingly more comfortable with each other as the night goes on.
While they’re at The Bluestone Room, Grace leaves the table to head to the bathroom, and while she’s gone, Jesse can be seen rifling through her purse looking for cash. He places the bag back on her chair, and a few minutes later, the two of them head towards the CityLife Hotel. Jesse places his arm around her shoulders while Grace smiles up at him and puts her arm around his waist, hugging him. They then enter the elevator in the lobby, and that is the last time we see Grace.
At 8:01 the next morning, a calm-looking Jesse enters the elevator on the 3rd floor. He turns to look at the camera, then turns his back on it as he makes his way down to the lobby. From there, Jesse heads to The Warehouse, where he purchases a large grey wheeled suitcase with cash. He renters the hotel at 8:14 and takes the suitcase up to his room on the third floor.
Fifteen minutes later, Jesse is heading out again, and he makes his way to Countdown Metro where he purchases a number of cleaning materials using the self-checkout lane. Once again, he pays in cash. He returns to the hotel and heads back to his room on the third floor.
At 10:25, he’d changed out of his black jeans into light grey sweatpants, and he takes a taxi to a car rental company. Keys in hand, he heads back to the hotel at 11 am and goes back up to his room. At 14:53, Jesse is dressed in blue jeans, a new black shirt, and black dress shoes, and heads out on another Tinder date. It’s safe to assume that, by this time, Grace’s body had been stuffed into the suitcase, and is still in his apartment.
When we next see Jesse, he’s finishing up his date, and he’s wearing the same outfit he’d worn the previous night. He makes his way back to the hotel and parks his rental car out on the street before he heads up to his room, changes his clothes, and heads out again to park the rental car in a parking garage. At 20:11, he goes back to a different Countdown Metro, rents a carpet cleaning machine and some cleaning liquids, and returns to the hotel at 20:28.
At 20:56, Jesse takes the carpet cleaner back to his rental car, and when he returns to his room, he’s pushing a luggage trolley. At 21:30 he’s heading out again with the trolley, and the trolley has the large grey wheeled suitcase, a smaller black suitcase, and a gym bag on it. Jesse heads down to the lobby and then pushes the luggage trolley to his rental car. When he returns to the hotel, the luggage trolley is empty.
At 6:50 am on the 3rd of December, Jesse buys a shovel at a hardware store. He’s wearing a black sweatshirt grey sweatpants, and his black and white sneakers. He returns to the hotel at 9:30, but now his pants are rolled up, his sweatshirt is missing, and he’s barefoot. He takes his gym bag from the car and heads back up to his room. 20 minutes later, he’s freshly showered and is once again wearing a black shirt, jeans, and a pair of sneakers.
He’s also carrying a black refuse bag that’s half full and heads out again. He drops a bag of clothing off at the dry cleaners, buys another grey wheeled suitcase and a smaller black suitcase at a different store than the one he’d shopped at the day before, and then drives to a self-service car wash where he cleans the rental car. When he returns to the hotel at 11:20, he takes the two suitcases up to his room.
The investigation into Grace’s disappearance starts on the 5th of December, and that afternoon, Jesse wanders around the park carrying his gym bag and is wearing a smart grey jacket and jeans. At 16:50, a camera watches on as he takes a black refuse bag out of his gym bag and dumps it into a large black trash can before heading back to the hotel. It’s thought that the bag had contained Grace’s clothing, handbag, cell phone, and other personal items. These items were never recovered.
The next time we see Jesse on camera, it’s 11 am on the 6th of December and he’s dressed in a smart 3-piece suit. Three hours later, the two detectives arrive at the hotel, we see them chasing him down, and, well, we know what happened then.
The Auckland police had confiscated Jesse’s phone after his arrest, so they were able to get in contact with “Miss M”, the woman he’d been on a Tinder date with on the 2nd of December 2018. According to her, everything went well at first. He told her that he was Australian and that he’d only been in New Zealand for a few months. He told her that he had some experience in sales and that he was working as a manager at Woolworths. But when she started asking him about what he’d been up to that day, things got weird.
“He told me that he’d been trying to find a really large sports bag because he plays softball and he teaches children to play softball. But it was really hard for him to find a bag that could fit all of his equipment in.”
“And we talked a little about his friends, and he said ‘All my friends are police officers’. And he said ‘I just met them in bars and they invited me back to their houses for barbeques’. But he said that [the police] were having a lot of trouble right now because a lot of bodies were going missing in the Waitākerees. But police dogs could only smell five feet deep, so if you bury a body more than five feet, the police dogs can’t smell it.”
“We also talked about the fact that I’d sat through a murder trial and I’d seen this guy being put away for life, and then Jesse said that it’s just crazy how guys could make one wrong move and then be put away for life.”
According to Miss M, he then told her that he had a friend who’d been having rough sex with his girlfriend, but something had gone wrong and the girlfriend died. He then told her that his friend ended up going to prison for manslaughter and that he thought it was incredibly unfair because it hadn’t been on purpose. But Jesse’s apparent sympathy for this friend of his, and his interest in bodies going missing in the Waitakere ranges freaked Miss M out a bit.
“I just thought it was really, really strange. I think I said I had to go, and he actually had to walk the same direction that my car was in, but I didn’t feel comfortable walking next to him. So I just walked down the street and went somewhere else, and he walked to his car.”
As we know, the CCTV footage suggests that after his date ended, Jesse went back to his apartment, cleaned up all the remaining evidence of his crime, and the next day he drove up to the Waitākere Mountains where he dug a shallow grave and buried the grey suitcase that contained Grace’s body. I guess he learned the hard way that it’s a lot of hard work to dig a 5ft deep hole, especially when your muscles are purely for display purposes.
Anyway, the most damning evidence against Jesse was the forensic evidence. In almost all of the court cases I’ve watched, the autopsy photos were projected onto a screen so that the entire court could see them. But during Jesse’s murder trial, each member of the jury received a flip file containing the photos of Grace’s remains. They were warned that the photos were gruesome, but that a lot of the bruising on her body was a result of being stuffed into a suitcase and that most of the damage happened post-mortem.
The forensic pathologist Dr. Simon Stables explained that he couldn’t find any evidence that Jesse and Grace had had penetrative sex that night. But he was able to determine that Grace had several bruises on her body that she’d sustained while she was still alive, mostly from hiking and going about her day. But there were several bruises on the top of her arms and shoulders, and in particular, around her neck, that suggested that her attacker had forcefully held her down and strangled her.
“…there was an amount of significant bruising. It was on the left side of the neck, and basically extended from the jaw down.”
“There has been significant pressure for a significant period of time and for sufficient force for that bruising to occur. The bruising wouldn’t occur with a sort of gentle pressure on the neck. It has to be something more forceful than that.”
According to Dr Stables, Grace would have passed out shortly after her attacker started strangling her, but it would have taken between five and ten minutes of sustained, continuous pressure on her throat to kill her – maybe even less considering the fact that she’d consumed a large quantity of alcohol that night.
But there weren’t any defensive wounds on Grace’s arms or hands, and at the time of his arrest, there weren’t any suspicious scratches on Jesse’s body. So Jesse’s defence team argued that the lack of any defensive wounds was proof that the sex had been consensual and that Grace’s death was an accident.
In Jesse’s version of events, he hadn’t realised that something was wrong, despite the fact that Grace would have stopped moving or responding to him long before he finished having sex with her. Once everything was over, he didn’t talk to Grace or offer to help her up or offer to grab a towel so that she could clean herself up. Instead, he took a shower, fell asleep, and eventually climbed into bed without worrying over much about where Grace had disappeared to.
But according to his cell phone records, Jesse was up and awake well after Grace had passed away. At around 1:29 am on the 2nd of December, Jesse was trying to figure out how he was going to get rid of Grace’s body. He searched for “Waitakere ranges”, then “hottest fire”. That was followed by a search for “Pornhub”, where he then spent some time watching hardcore porn while Grace’s body was lying on the floor next to him, bleeding onto the carpet.
And once he was done, he took seven photos of Grace’s naked body to keep for later, spent the next half an hour watching porn again, and then he went to sleep. The next morning, he woke up at around 6 am, then searched for “large bags near me” and “rigor mortis”.
Any reasonable person would argue that Jesse’s response to Grace’s death was fucked up. But Jesse’s defence team argued that Jesse had acted out of fear. According to defense lawyer Ron Mansfield –
“People do things when they’re stressed, when they’re panicked, and often a combination of both under the influence of alcohol, that they later regret. He might not have done the right thing at the time out of a concern that no one was going to believe him.”
But the Crown had tracked down some of Jesse’s other Tinder dates, and they shed some light on just how Jesse treated the women he went out with. One of them, “Miss A”, told the court that when she’d first started talking to Jesse, she’d told him that she was into rough sex and ‘choking’ in particular. The two of them met up in his room for a night of mutual pleasure, and Jesse had put pressure on her throat during sex. But she told the court that it had been ‘just right’ and that she’d consented to everything they’d done, but they never went on another date.
Another one of the women he’d talked to, Miss B, told the court that while she was chatting with Jesse on Tinder, he’d told her what some of his sexual interests were, which included dominance, a foot fetish, and strangulation. Jesse was pushing her to go out on a date with him, but his blatant sexual interest put her off, so Miss B ended things shortly after.
Then “Miss C”, described her own experience with Jesse’s idea of ‘consent’.
Miss C explained that she’d known Jesse for two months at the time, and had agreed to meet up with him in October 2016. At first, their date went well. The two of them had met up for drinks, and they spent the night chatting and laughing together after which they went up to Jesse’s apartment.
Miss C told the court that she’d agreed to perform oral sex on Jesse, but that she’d told him she wasn’t interested in doing more. But at some point, Jesse turned on her and used his body to restrain her while he continued to use her body for his own pleasure. He’d placed his full weight on her face, and she was struggling to breathe. She fought back against him, but when Jesse didn’t respond to her attacks, she decided to play dead so that he would leave her alone.
But it didn’t work, and once he was finished, Jesse asked her what was wrong. When she told him that she’d been struggling to breathe, Jesse laughed it off, and Miss C described his response to her concerns as “chilling”.
When it was Jesse’s defence team’s turn to cross-examine Miss C, his asshole of a defense lawyer, Rob Mansfield, asked Miss C –
“Do you think that you may have over-emphasized or exaggerated what took place that night and how you really felt about it?”
In response, Miss C told the court that –
“Not at all. That’s not a pleasurable thing. He would have seen me kicking and writhing. You can’t say that I was sitting there enjoying it.”
The entirety of Miss C’s cross-examination is sickening. Rob Mansfield kept on insisting that she was lying, that the sex had been consensual, and that Jesse hadn’t held her down and sexually assaulted her against her will. She’d agreed to have oral sex with him and had wanted him to force himself so deep down her throat that she couldn’t breathe.
After all, that is what they claimed Grace had done. She’d seduced Jesse. She’d suggested that they should have rough sex. She’d asked him to choke her, to hold her down and dominate her. After all, they had proof that Grace had had an interest in rough sex. One of her ex-boyfriends had testified that the two of them regularly practised BDSM and that they’d had a safe word. And her internet search history indicated that she used to visit dating sites that were set up for people who had an interest in BDSM.
It wasn’t Jesse’s fault that Grace couldn’t handle his rough treatment of her. It was her own fault for putting herself in that position. For not pushing Jesse away when it became too much. It was her fault that she’d died.
But as the prosecution rightfully pointed out – you can’t consent to being murdered, and Judge Moore would later tell the jury that –
“Consent is not a defence to murder.”
During his closing argument, Crown Prosecutor Brian Dickey told the court that –
“[The defendant] had [Grace] under his grip, suffocating her, strangling her, for a total of five to ten minutes. At some point of which she lost consciousness and would have become unconscious and limp and lifeless, and he had to carry on. And if that’s not reckless murder in this country, someone will have to explain to me what is.”
On the 22nd of November 2019, the jury was sent off to decide whether or not Jesse was guilty of either murder or murderous intent. Five hours later, they returned to the court, and the forewoman of the jury told the court that they’d concluded that Jesse was guilty of murdering Grace Millane.
On the 21st of February 2020, Judge Moore read his judgement to the court. He very briefly touched on the details of the case and told the court that he’d read and listened to the Victim Impact statements that Grace’s family had sent to him, which he described as ‘harrowing and desperately sad reading.’
When it comes to Grace’s murder, Judge Moore explained that –
“Viewed in isolation, the actual mechanics leading to Ms Millane’s death may not meet the threshold of a high level of brutality, cruelty, depravity or callousness when compared to other cases. But to stop there would be to view your offending in a vacuum and that I must not do.”
“She trusted you. Her messages to her friend reveal that she believed the lies you told her about yourself. She trusted you enough to go into your room with you alone. That certainly placed her in a position of some vulnerability. But, in my view, what then happened after she entered your room made her particularly vulnerable.”
He then briefly explains Jesse’s proven actions after he’d murdered Grace – how he’d started planning on disposing of her body, how he took pictures of her, and how he then spent his time watching porn.
“This conduct also strongly supports the statutory requirement of callousness and depravity to a high degree. It is plainly a serious aggravating factor. It was conduct closely connected in time to Ms Millane’s death. It is rightly described as depraved. These were not the actions of a man in panic. Far from it.”
“Your actions reveal a complete disregard for your victim. This conduct is inextricably connected to the manner in which the murder itself was committed. It is conduct which underscores not only the total lack of empathy you had for Ms Millane but the sense of self-entitlement, objectification and sexualisation that is reflected in other parts of the evidence.”
“For the murder of Ms Millane I sentence you to life imprisonment and order I that you serve a minimum of 17 years in prison.”
Love, Grace
According to David Millane -
“Grace was a beautiful, talented and loving daughter. Grace was our sunshine, and she would be missed forever.”
In her victim impact statement, Grace’s mother Gillian explains that the last photo she has of her entire family together was taken at Grace’s graduation ceremony. Then they lost Grace, and the circumstances surrounding her death did a number on David’s health. He passed away in November 2020, and Gillian and her sons have had to pick up the pieces of their lives and move on.
Gillian and one of Grace’s cousins have since started a charity called ‘Love Grace’, and on their about page, they explain that –
“Our Grace loved a handbag. In her name, we are collecting handbags and filling them with useful items for women in need.”
They also work closely with White Ribbon UK, a foundation that aims to prevent violence against women by teaching young boys to take responsibility for their actions and to do their part in preventing violence against women and young girls. Last year, she was part of a team that climbed Mount Everest to raise funds for White Ribbon UK, and a friend of hers, Karen McIntyre, told their local magazine that –
“Out of a tragic situation, Gillian has turned her life around and has been working closely with The White Ribbon charity, so that no other family has to endure what the Millane family has been through.”
Dismembered Appendices
In his judgement, Judge Moore explains that the minimum imprisonment term for murder in New Zealand is 10 years. The fact that Jesse got 17 is an indicator of just how seriously Judge Moore considered his crimes to be. He also explained that 17 years doesn’t mean that Jesse will be let out on parole after serving 17 years – instead, he’d appear before the parole board, and if they do decide that he doesn’t pose a danger to the rest of society, he’ll essentially be under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Two of the women we’d discussed in this episode – Jesse’s ex, Miss K, and Miss O, the British tourist he’d sexually assaulted – weren’t allowed to testify against Jesse during his murder trial, since they had both formally accused him of abuse and sexual assault, and their hearing took place in November 2022. For threatening to kill Miss K, for assaulting her with knives, and for sexually assaulting her on multiple occasions, Jesse received 7 years and 7 months in prison. For the sexual assault of Miss O, he received another 11 years in prison. Both sentences will be served concurrently.
So far, Jesse has appealed all three of his sentences, and all of them have been denied.
In the documentary “The Lie – the Murder of Grace Millane”, they explain that between 1972 and 2022, at least 60 men in the UK alone have used the “Rough Sex Defense” to explain why they’d murdered their wives or girlfriends, and in at least 45% of these cases, it resulted in a lesser sentence or the charges against these men being dropped.
Following Grace’s murder though, legislators in the UK proposed outlawing the “Rough Sex Defense”, and have added it to the Domestic Abuse Act of 2021. It means that men can no longer claim that a woman had ‘asked for it’ as a part of a legal defence, and in my opinion, it’s a change that should be applied worldwide.
Key Takeaways
- Jesse Kempson murdered Grace Millane on December 1, 2018, after a Tinder date in Auckland, New Zealand.
- Kempson used the ‘Rough Sex Defense,’ claiming Grace’s death was accidental during consensual BDSM, but forensic evidence showed sustained strangulation.
- CCTV footage and phone records revealed Kempson bought a suitcase, cleaned the crime scene, and searched for body disposal methods after Grace died.
- Kempson was a pathological liar with a history of violence against women, including choking and knife threats toward a former girlfriend.
- Grace’s murder led the UK to outlaw the ‘Rough Sex Defense’ in the Domestic Abuse Act of 2021.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Grace Millane and what was she doing in New Zealand?
Grace Emmie Rose Millane was born on December 2, 1996, in Wickford, Essex, UK. She was the youngest of three children, loved hockey, was a talented artist, and had pursued a degree in Advertising and Marketing at the University of Lincoln. She was in New Zealand as part of a gap year to travel the world after finishing university. She had already spent six weeks in Peru before arriving in New Zealand on November 20, 2018.
How did Grace Millane meet her murderer?
Grace Millane met Jesse Shane Kempson on Tinder. They matched on November 30, 2018, and he messaged her on December 1 to ask if she had plans for the next day. When she mentioned it was her birthday but she had no set plans, he suggested meeting for drinks that evening at SkyCity in Auckland Central.
What was Jesse Kempson’s version of events on the night Grace died?
Jesse Kempson claimed that he and Grace had consensual sex involving BDSM and choking at his request. He stated that after they finished, he fell asleep in the shower, woke up during the night and went to bed assuming Grace had left. He claimed he woke up the next morning to find her dead on the floor with blood coming from her nose, panicked, and then bought a suitcase to dispose of her body rather than calling emergency services.
What evidence contradicted Jesse Kempson’s initial statements to police?
Multiple pieces of evidence contradicted Jesse’s statements: he claimed to have last seen Grace at 8:30 pm and that she went back to her backpackers, but CCTV showed them entering the CityLife hotel together at 9:40 pm; he claimed to be asleep at 8:14 am on December 2, but CCTV showed him pushing a suitcase into the elevator at that time; he provided a fake address in Mount Eden that didn’t exist; and his employer confirmed he had been fired on November 30, not that he was an oil rig manager as he told Grace.
What did forensic evidence reveal about Grace Millane’s cause of death?
Forensic pathologist Dr. Simon Stables determined that Grace had significant bruising on the left side of her neck extending from the jaw down, indicating forceful strangulation with significant pressure for a significant period of time. He testified it would have taken 5-10 minutes of sustained, continuous pressure on her throat to kill her. There was no evidence of penetrative sex, and no defensive wounds on Grace’s body or scratches on Jesse.
What did Jesse Kempson do after Grace’s death according to the evidence?
After Grace died, Jesse searched on his phone for ‘Waitakere ranges’ and ‘hottest fire’ at 1:29 am, watched hardcore porn on Pornhub, took seven photos of Grace’s naked body, watched more porn, then searched for ‘large bags near me’ and ‘rigor mortis’ the next morning. He bought a suitcase and cleaning supplies, stuffed her body into the suitcase, cleaned the room, went on another Tinder date, rented a car, and eventually buried her in a shallow grave in the Waitākere Mountain Range.
What was the outcome of Jesse Kempson’s murder trial?
Jesse Kempson was found guilty of murdering Grace Millane on November 22, 2019, after the jury deliberated for five hours. On February 21, 2020, Judge Moore sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum of 17 years. The judge cited his depraved conduct after the murder—including taking photos of her body and watching porn—as demonstrating callousness, a complete disregard for his victim, and underscoring his sense of self-entitlement and objectification of women.
What other crimes was Jesse Kempson convicted of?
In November 2022, Jesse was convicted of additional crimes against two other women: for threatening to kill Miss K, assaulting her with knives, and sexually assaulting her on multiple occasions, he received 7 years and 7 months; for the sexual assault of Miss O, a British tourist, he received another 11 years. Both sentences are to be served concurrently with his life sentence. He has appealed all three sentences and all have been denied.
What is the ‘Love Grace’ charity and what does it do?
Love Grace is a charity started by Grace’s mother Gillian and one of Grace’s cousins. They collect handbags and fill them with useful items for women in need. They also work closely with White Ribbon UK, a foundation that aims to prevent violence against women by teaching young boys to take responsibility for their actions. Gillian Millane has also participated in fundraising events, including climbing Mount Everest to raise funds for White Ribbon UK.
What legal change occurred in the UK following Grace Millane’s murder?
Following Grace’s murder, UK legislators proposed outlawing the ‘Rough Sex Defense’ and added it to the Domestic Abuse Act of 2021. This means men can no longer claim that a woman had ‘asked for it’ as part of a legal defense. The article notes that between 1972 and 2022, at least 60 men in the UK had used this defense, with 45% of cases resulting in lesser sentences or dropped charges.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: The Murder of Grace Milane
- Hero image source by Daniel Case / openverse, by-sa.
