Grace Millane was the kind of traveler who did everything right. She was 21, careful, close to her family, and only a few weeks into the round-the-world trip she had saved for and planned for years. She had already crossed South America. New Zealand was meant to be the easy, friendly part, a country the whole world tells young backpackers is one of the safest places on earth. She landed in Auckland in late November 2018 and started counting down to her birthday.

She never reached it. On the night of December 1, the eve of her 22nd birthday, Grace went on a Tinder date with a local man named Jesse Kempson and went back to his hotel room. She did not come out alive. What happened to her, and the courtroom fight that followed, turned a private tragedy into a national reckoning in New Zealand and a warning that still shapes how solo travelers think about meeting strangers abroad. This is the full story.

Who Was Grace Millane?

Grace Emmie Rose Millane was born on November 2, 1996, and grew up in Wickford, Essex, in the east of England. She was the youngest of three children and the only daughter, and by every account she was the heart of a tight, loving family. Friends described her as gentle, funny, and quietly adventurous, the sort of person who was kind to everyone and slow to think the worst of anyone.

She had recently graduated from the University of Lincoln with a degree in advertising and marketing. Rather than rushing straight into a career, she did what a lot of British graduates dream about: she booked an open-ended backpacking trip around the world. She set off in the autumn of 2018, traveled through South America, and arrived in New Zealand as the next leg of a gap-year adventure. She was in regular contact with her parents back home, sharing photos and updates, which is part of what made the sudden silence so alarming.

What Happened on Her Last Night?

Grace Millane was strangled to death on the night of December 1 to 2, 2018, in a hotel room in central Auckland by a man she had met on Tinder. That is the fact the jury ultimately accepted, and it is the fact everything else in this case rotates around.

Grace had matched with Jesse Kempson, then 26, on the dating app. They met up on the evening of December 1 and went on what looked, from the outside, like an ordinary first date. They visited several bars around Auckland’s city center. CCTV footage later played in court showed the two of them together, relaxed, walking through the city. At around 9:40 p.m. they went up to Kempson’s room at the CityLife hotel, a serviced apartment building in the central business district.

Grace never left that room alive. Sometime that night, Kempson strangled her. It was the eve of her 22nd birthday, the birthday her family back in Essex was already getting ready to celebrate with her from afar. When her messages stopped and she missed the calls her parents expected, that silence was the first sign that something had gone badly wrong.

The Search and the Discovery

When Grace stopped responding, her family raised the alarm, and Auckland police launched a missing-persons investigation that quickly gripped the entire country. New Zealand is a place where this kind of thing is supposed to be vanishingly rare, and the image of a young British woman vanishing on a solo trip struck a deep, national nerve. Her father, David Millane, flew to Auckland and made an emotional public appeal for information.

Investigators traced Grace’s last movements through the city’s CCTV network and social media, and the trail led straight to Kempson and his hotel room. What they eventually pieced together was chilling in its coldness. After killing Grace, Kempson did not call for help. He took photographs of her body, watched pornography, and searched the internet, including for things like how to dispose of a body and for pornography involving the term used for such fantasies. The next day he went on another date, then bought a large suitcase.

He stuffed Grace’s body into that suitcase, drove west out of the city, and buried her in a shallow grave in the Waitakere Ranges, the forested hills on Auckland’s western edge. Police found her body there on December 9, 2018, one week after she was killed. Kempson had already been arrested and charged with her murder.

Who Killed Grace Millane?

Jesse Kempson killed Grace Millane. He was 26 at the time, a New Zealand man living in Auckland, and he was the Tinder date who took her back to his hotel room on her last night alive. A jury found him guilty of her murder, and he is serving a life sentence for it.

For a long time, though, most people could not legally know his name. Kempson was granted name suppression, a common feature of the New Zealand justice system meant to protect a defendant’s right to a fair trial, especially when other charges are pending. So during the murder trial and for a while afterward, he was known publicly only as “the man who murdered Grace Millane.” That suppression was eventually lifted after his appeals ran out, and he was formally named as Jesse Shane Kempson. As RNZ reported when his identity was finally made public, he was named as Jesse Kempson after the Supreme Court declined his appeal, ending one of the country’s worst-kept secrets.

The Trial and the Rough Sex Defense

At trial, Kempson did not deny that Grace died in his room. Instead he argued that her death was a tragic accident during consensual “rough sex,” a claim widely known as the rough-sex defense or the BDSM defense. The jury rejected it, and after a three-week trial in November 2019 found him guilty of murder by a unanimous verdict.

Kempson’s defense team argued that Grace had consented to being choked during sex and that he had not meant to kill her. The prosecution dismantled this. Strangling someone to death requires sustained pressure for a period of minutes, not an accidental moment, and medical evidence pointed to prolonged force. Just as damning was Kempson’s behavior afterward. A person who had just watched a partner die by accident does not photograph the body, watch pornography, go on another date, buy a suitcase, and bury the victim in a forest. Those actions told the jury everything about intent.

The verdict landed hard. In February 2020, Kempson was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years, meaning he must serve at least that long before he can even apply for release. RNZ covered the sentencing in detail, reporting that Grace Millane’s murderer was sentenced to life with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years. The case also became a rallying point for critics of the rough-sex defense, who argued that it lets killers blame their victims for their own deaths.

The Other Victims and the Appeals

Grace was not the only woman Jesse Kempson harmed. In separate trials, held quietly under their own suppression orders while the murder case played out, Kempson was convicted of raping one former partner and sexually assaulting another. Those were not distant allegations. They were serious, proven crimes against two other women, and they revealed a pattern of violence toward the women in his life that stretched beyond the night Grace died.

Kempson fought his convictions at every level, and he lost at every level. His appeal against the murder conviction was dismissed by the Court of Appeal in December 2020. The Supreme Court then refused to hear a further appeal in 2021, exhausting his options on the murder charge. He kept going after the other convictions too, and in 2023 the courts shut those appeals down as well. RNZ reported that Grace Millane’s killer lost his appeal against the convictions and sentences for the sexual attacks on two other women, with the court finding no error of law and no reason to reduce the 11-year sentence he received for rape.

Public Perception and Media

The Grace Millane case did something unusual: it turned a whole country’s grief outward, toward her family. New Zealanders were horrified that this had happened to a visitor on their soil, and the response was collective and public. Thousands of people attended candlelit vigils in cities across the country. Then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke directly to Grace’s family, saying that New Zealanders felt “hurt and shame” that she had been killed there, and she apologized to them on behalf of the nation.

The case also became a flashpoint in a much larger debate about the rough-sex defense. Grace’s death, alongside other cases, fueled campaigns like the UK-based “We Can’t Consent to This,” which documented how often the “she wanted it rough” argument was used to explain away the killings of women. Critics argued that the defense effectively puts a dead woman on trial, forcing a courtroom to litigate her supposed sexual preferences when she cannot speak for herself. In the years since, that pressure has pushed lawmakers in several countries to limit how the consent argument can be used in cases of death or serious injury. Grace’s name is now part of that conversation.

Where Is Jesse Kempson Now?

Jesse Kempson is in prison in New Zealand, serving a life sentence for Grace Millane’s murder along with his sentences for the crimes against two other women. He has not been released and will not be for many years.

Because of his minimum non-parole period of 17 years, Kempson will not be eligible to even apply for parole until 2037, at which point he will be around 45 years old. Eligibility is not the same as release. A parole board would have to decide he is safe to let out, and given the nature of his crimes and the pattern of violence behind them, there is no guarantee that first hearing, or any hearing after it, will set him free. For now he remains one of New Zealand’s most notorious prisoners, his name permanently attached to a case the country has not forgotten.

Is There a Grace Millane Documentary?

Yes. The main documentary about the case is “The Lie: The Murder of Grace Millane,” a feature-length film directed by British filmmaker Helena Coan and released in 2024. It examines the murder, the investigation, and the trial, and it was made with input reflecting the perspective of Grace’s family and the wider impact of the case.

The film runs about 92 minutes and premiered in New Zealand cinemas in April 2024 before reaching wider audiences. Despite frequent online searches asking whether it is on Netflix, the documentary is not a Netflix title. It has instead been available through services such as Amazon Prime Video, BritBox, and Apple TV, depending on your region. Beyond that single film, the case has been covered extensively by news documentaries, television reports, and true-crime podcasts, but “The Lie” is the definitive documentary treatment of Grace’s story.

What Is the Latest in 2026?

As of 2026, the case is legally settled and Jesse Kempson remains behind bars. Every avenue of appeal he pursued, on both the murder and the sexual offending, has been rejected by New Zealand’s courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court. There is no live appeal and no realistic path to overturning his conviction. His first parole eligibility date, in 2037, is still more than a decade away.

What continues to move is the conversation the case started. Grace’s family has channeled their loss into advocacy and remembrance, and her name still surfaces whenever there is a debate about the rough-sex defense, dating-app safety, or the risks that solo travelers, especially young women, can face when they meet strangers in unfamiliar places. Nearly eight years on, Grace Millane is remembered not as a cautionary statistic but as a bright, careful young woman who was failed by one dangerous man, and whose story changed how a lot of people think about safety on the road.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to Grace Millane? Grace Millane, a 21-year-old British backpacker, was strangled to death in a central Auckland hotel room on the night of December 1 to 2, 2018, by a man she met on Tinder. Her body was hidden in a suitcase and buried in the Waitakere Ranges, where police found her on December 9, 2018.

Who killed Grace Millane? Jesse Kempson, a New Zealand man who was 26 at the time, killed her. He was convicted of murder by a unanimous jury in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison in 2020.

What was the rough sex defense in the Grace Millane case? Kempson argued that Grace died accidentally during consensual “rough sex.” The jury rejected this defense, convicting him of murder because the evidence showed sustained strangulation and because his calm, calculated actions after her death pointed clearly to intent.

Where is Jesse Kempson now? He is serving a life sentence in a New Zealand prison and will not be eligible to apply for parole until 2037, when he will be about 45 years old.

Is there a Grace Millane documentary? Yes. “The Lie: The Murder of Grace Millane,” directed by Helena Coan and released in 2024, is the main documentary about the case. It has streamed on services including Amazon Prime Video, BritBox, and Apple TV, though it is not on Netflix.

More True Crime From Slaycation

Grace Millane’s story is the reason so many solo travelers now think twice about meeting a match in a city where no one knows their name. If you want more deeply reported true-crime cases that unpack how ordinary trips turned into tragedies, keep it locked to Slaycation. Subscribe to the Slaycation podcast for the full case files, listener discussions, and new episodes on the cases that still keep the internet up at night.

References

• RNZ, “Grace Millane murderer sentenced to life in prison with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years”
• RNZ, “Grace Millane’s killer named as Jesse Kempson after Supreme Court appeal denied”
• RNZ, “Grace Millane’s killer loses appeal against convictions and sentences for sexual attacks on two other women”