The disappearance of British backpacker Grace Millane in New Zealand in made headlines around the world. A week later, Jesse Kempson, a man she met on a Tinder date, was charged with her murder.
Culture and entertainment reporter gemmapeplow. On 2 December , British backpacker Grace Millane should have been celebrating her 22nd birthday during the trip of a lifetime in New Zealand. Thousands of miles from her home in Essex , the messages and requests for video calls from friends and family kept pinging through to her phone. But they were never answered. Her disappearance made headlines around the world. Grace had been murdered by Jesse Kempson , a year-old man she met through Tinder.
He strangled her in a hotel room in Auckland, calmly left in the morning to purchase a suitcase, and later buried her body in an area of bushland in the Waitakere Ranges. When CCTV contradicted his story - that they enjoyed a short date before going their separate ways - he admitted she had died while with him, but claimed a case of consensual "rough sex" gone badly wrong. Kempson's defence meant Grace's parents David and Gillian, grieving and in a strange country, listened in court to what felt like blame and shaming of their daughter; details of her sex life raked over, never able to tell her own story.
Following the trial, it emerged Kempson had a record of violence against women and had raped another British tourist eight months before he murdered Grace.
Almost five years on, a new documentary, The Murder Of Grace Millane, takes a look back at the night of her death and Kempson's subsequent trial, focusing on his use of the defence and the reaction from some on social media that Grace was in some way at fault for going back to a hotel room with a man she had met that day. She says Kempson's defence, arguing that Grace had asked to be choked during sex, was one of the main reasons she wanted to tell the young woman's story.
