Grace Millane's murderer Jesse Kempson faced two further trials for violent sexual offending against two other women. Video / Dean Purcell / Michael Craig
Two years ago this week, Jesse Shane Kempson - already internationally infamous for the murder of British backpacker Grace Millane even though his name was still suppressed - yelled out in court as a judge found him guilty of attacking a third woman.
“I can’t wait for the Court of Appeal to overturn you, mate. You’re full of s***.”
Kempson, 30, will finally get an opportunity for a more nuanced argument on Tuesday as his lawyers appear before a Court of Appeal panel in the High Court at Auckland - the same courthouse where his previous trials were held.
Several weeks after Kempson’s third trial ended with the outburst, Venning sentenced Kempson to three-and-a-half years in prison for the rape of a woman during their first date. The judge ordered that the sentence be stacked on top of a seven-years-and-six-months sentence that had been handed down by another judge a month earlier following a separate trial in which Kempson was found to have physically and sexually abused an ex-partner during their troubled relationship.
Grace Millane came to New Zealand as part of a year-long solo OE. Photo / Supplied
Both of the sentences were to run concurrently with Kempson’s life sentence, with a minimum period of imprisonment of 17 years, which was ordered in February 2020 for the strangling death of Millane in an Auckland hotel room - a case that garnered months of international headlines.
The Court of Appeal rejected Kempson’s appeal against the murder conviction and sentence in December 2020.
Tomorrow’s appeal will focus solely on his two subsequent convictions and stacked sentences.
At his third trial, Kempson’s accuser said she recognised the defendant as the man who had raped her after his name was plastered in international media coverage and on social media following his arrest for Millane’s death.
She went to police on the same day that Kempson appeared in court for the first time on the murder charge and was able to identify him in a photo lineup.
Like Millane, she was a young British woman who had met Kempson via dating app Tinder.
The two had been on a date in Auckland’s Viaduct Harbour that she described as somewhat awkward but resulting in two kisses at the bars they visited. However, she was surprised when he then drove them to an Epsom hotel where he was living, claiming that the bars would soon be closed, she testified.
“I couldn’t just stay in the car,” she said of going inside with him. “I didn’t know where I was.”
Once inside, she said, he yelled at her after she rebuffed his advances - calling her “ungrateful” after he had treated her “like a princess” by paying for her food and drinks that night.
“I have never been shouted at like that before ever, by anyone,” she told the court. “I was really scared and upset.”
The woman said she tried to leave the motel but Kempson said he was too drunk to drive, her purse was missing and her phone wasn’t working reliably.
He raped her, she said, as she tried to sleep fully clothed on the opposite side of Kempson’s motel bed.
She never saw him again after the following morning, when he took her to retrieve her bag from a bar they had been to, then dropped her off in a supermarket carpark at her request, she said.
Jesse Kempson is driven into the Auckland District Court ahead of his first appearance for murder. Photo / Simon Runting
Defence lawyer Tiffany Cooper argued during the trial that the woman had multiple times to leave that night. She suggested the woman had regrets only after she consented to sex, and after learning of the similarities between herself and Millane.
“You didn’t want to be the woman who had slept with Grace Millane’s murderer,” Cooper suggested during cross-examination. “Your motivation [for coming forward] was to assist the police to try and get Grace Millane’s murderer.”
Cooper added during her closing argument: “But of course we know that hindsight and regretted sex, reluctant sex, doesn’t make it rape.”
Justice Venning, however, said he believed Kempson’s accuser - sparking the defendant’s outburst as his conviction was announced.
‘I’m going to murder you’
In between Kempson’s murder conviction and his Tinder rape trial, Justice Timothy Brewer presided over another judge-alone trial in October 2020 in which a former partner outlined abuse that she said included slamming her on the ground so that she struggled to breathe, threatening her with a butcher knife, locking her out on a balcony in the rain and explicitly telling her one night that he intended to murder her.
He was found guilty of two charges of sexual violation, three of assault, two of assault with a weapon and one of threatening to kill.
That woman had gone to police on the day she left him in April 2017, more than a year before Millane’s death, but initially settled for a protection order instead of criminal charges after realising it would be her word against his, she said.
Police revisited the case, however, after Kempson’s arrest for murder.
Like the others, the woman said she had met Kempson on Tinder. He told her stories that she described as “bizarre” - including being adopted by a wealthy Australian after his biological mother tried to set a car on fire while he was locked in the boot - but she said she was vulnerable and liked to help “wounded birds”, according to the Herald’s coverage of her trial.
In a police interview played in court, the woman said their brief relationship would often be punctuated with fights over money.
When he got angry, she said, it was like Jekyll and Hyde and he would get a look of “pure evil” in his eyes.
“It was like a game to him,” she said of the abuse. “He loved seeing me cry. He loved seeing me upset. He loved seeing me scared. He loved it because it was power and control for him.”
She described the worst night of the relationship as having occurred in January 2017, when she said he claimed to have been sent by the CIA to kill her and chased her around the house with a knife.
Jesse Shane Kempson has been convicted of attacks on three women, including the death of Grace Millane. Photo / File
“I’m going to murder you,” she recalled him saying before later putting her in a chokehold and saying: “Shush ... It’s time to go to sleep.”
He then forced her into sexual acts by threatening to kill her or her family, she said.
Defence lawyer Belinda Sellars, KC, who represented Kempson at that trial, said her client acknowledged it had been a “difficult relationship”. But he denied having physically or sexually abused his accuser.
While delivering his finding of guilty, Justice Brewer noted a letter that the accuser had written on the night of the attack and rape.
“I signed it because I honestly thought that night I was going to die and if my body was found people would need to know that it was him that did it,” she had said.
Brewer said he found the letter convincing in its detail.
‘Unable to cry out’
At his appeal hearing, Kempson is set to be represented by Ron Mansfield, KC, who represented him at trial for the murder charge.
Millane’s body was found in a shallow grave in the West Auckland bush in December 2018.
The university graduate had gone missing days earlier, the day before what would have been her 22nd birthday.
CCTV showed her walking with Kempson, who she had met on Tinder that day.
At the murder trial, he acknowledged causing her death but he claimed it was an accident caused by consensual rough sex.
Jurors rejected the controversial defence in November 2019, and so did the Court of Appeal just over a year later.
“To be plain about matters, it really is very difficult to imagine much greater vulnerability than the situation Ms Millane found herself in on the evening of Saturday, 1 December 2018,” the Court of Appeal judgment stated.
“Intoxicated, in a strange hotel room, naked, in the arms of a comparative stranger with whom she thought she had ‘clicked’ (and could therefore trust), and with his hands about her throat. Unable to cry out, unable to breathe, lapsing into unconsciousness.”
Millane’s family, who flew to New Zealand after she went missing and later for the trial, described her as a “kind, fun-loving” person who “was enjoying the first of what would have been a lifetime of adventures before her life was so cruelly and brutally cut short by her murderer”.
