A man accused of murdering his 21-year-old Tinder date in New Zealand told police he swiped for another date while the young woman lay dead next to him.
According to reports:
The 27-year-old man, who can’t be named for legal reasons, was on a date with British backpacker Grace Millane (above) in Auckland on December 1, 2018, the night before her 22nd birthday. Eight days later, her dead body was found intact in woods outside the city.
The suspect, who is currently facing trial at the Auckland High Court, has denied murdering the woman, insisting she died accidentally after he choked her consensually during sex in his hotel room. He told police:
“She started talking to me about ’50 Shades of Grey.’ She told me there’s a few things she likes doing and that she’d done with her ex-partner and we started having sex.”
According to Sky News, a forensic pathologist said the cause of Millane’s death was “pressure to the neck,” adding in court testimony last week that it would have been sustained for four or five minutes, with force, to cause the amount of deep internal bruising she was found with.
Overall, the suspect’s story doesn’t seem to add up. He initially told police he left Millane after their date at 8 p.m. then got drunk with his friends and blacked out until 10 a.m. the next day. However, surveillance footage from the day they met showed the two entering his hotel at 9:40 p.m..
Footage from the following day showed the suspect buying a suitcase at 8 a.m., taking it back to his hotel, renting a car, and leaving with two suitcases at 9 p.m. that night. According to prosecutors, one of those suitcases contained Millane’s body.
On Thursday, the court was shown another police interview where the suspect gave a different story: he told police that after he and the traveler had “violent sex,” he fell asleep on the floor of his shower and went back to bed, thinking Millane had left the room. He claimed he did not see her lying on the floor.
By 8 a.m. the next morning, the man admitted he was already setting up another Tinder date for that afternoon. After eventually finding his last date not breathing with “blood coming from her nose” that morning, the man said he “panicked,” according to the BBC. It’s unclear whether he started arranging for the date or saw Millane first.
He told police he then started calling an ambulance, “but I didn’t hit the button because I was scared how bad it looked.” He then said he tried to put her body in the suitcase, leaving it “half in half out of the suitcase” in his hotel room while he went to buy bleach — then a second time while he went on his Tinder date. He recalled:
“I spewed up a few times because I couldn’t put Grace in the bag because all I could think about was what we shared the night before… I put her in the bag and was I was saying ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’”
He then admitted to taking her body to a wooded area outside the city and burying her. Afterward, he reportedly attempted suicide by overdosing. He told police:
“I sat there and I took 20, 30 paracetamol tablets because I didn’t want to be around if Grace wasn’t there, and I didn’t feel like I deserved to be around, because of what happened.”
The suspect eventually admitted to and apologized for previously misleading police, telling his lawyer:
“I want her family to know that it wasn’t intentional but I also want her family to have closure.”
It’s been suggested by prosecutors that the man knew his date was dead the night before. They say he Googled “Waitakere Ranges,” the area where she was buried, and “hottest fire” that night, Sky News reported.
While looking through his phone history, prosecutors say he also looked up and watched hardcore pornography while she was dead in the room.
The woman he took out the next day, on December 2, told the court earlier this week that the man had calmly discussed why he empathized with a man who was jailed for manslaughter after accidentally killing a woman during rough sex. She recalled in court him saying:
“It’s crazy how guys can make one wrong move and go to jail for the rest of their life.”
Another Tinder date told the court the man was “a sociopath,” and said she fought for her life while he tried to suffocate her during oral sex.
The suspect’s lawyer accused the woman of making up the story “to portray him in the worst possible light.” The trial is set to continue for another few weeks.
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