An excerpt from Missing Persons - a collection of true crime writing by Steve Braunias.
The most despised man in New Zealand – a status Jesse Kempson earned not merely by choking Grace Millane to death on the floor next to his bed on the eve of her 22nd birthday, but more so because of what he did to her afterwards, despicably and, worse, efficiently – only ever appeared in media images as a pixilated blur during his trial, and to tell you the truth, he didn't look that much different in person. I gazed at his face quite a lot during his three-week trial in Courtroom 11 at the High Court at Auckland in the early summer of 2019, and for the longest time he failed to make much of an impression at all. His features were vague, smudgy. He had a flat face with a weak chin, small nose and thin mouth. His worst side was either side; he presented a bad profile, his thick neck and squashed features giving his head the appearance of a solid block of wood – i.e. a blockhead. Frankly, he looked like a charmless moron.
But by the third week Kempson's face started coming into view. He was quite a good-looking guy. He scrubbed up nicely in the blue suit he wore every day, and the alternating white open-necked shirt or black open-necked shirt. He carried himself well. He smiled, once, and held it for few minutes, on the final day of his trial, when Justice Simon Moore lightened the mood with a self-deprecating joke. The jury and public gallery had been cleared; that one glimpse of his good humour was in private. The smile animated his face, softened it, gave it shape and focus – the most despised and most despicable man in New Zealand actually had a sweet, even rather tender face.
It would have been the face that Grace Millane saw and liked very much when she met Kempson on their Tinder date in downtown Auckland on a Saturday night. Physically, he was to her specifications; she liked men dark and solidly built, "the rugby type" as one of her friends put it. She was 21 and he was 26. She wore a black T-shirt dress and a pair of white Converse trainers. He wore a pale jacket and dark trousers. She was from Essex, backpacking her way around the world for a year. He was of no fixed abode and no fixed identity: during the trial and for a long time afterwards, he had name suppression. He appeared in the daily court list stapled on boards at the High Court under the initial of K. But even to print his initial at that time was to sail too close to the wind. He could only be known as the accused, or as X. Not Mr X, just plain X. And not X to flatter him as someone mysterious, but X in the sense of a wrong answer. X, crossed out by the jury when they took just five hours, including a break to eat white-bread sandwiches wheeled in for lunch, to find him guilty; X, aka Jesse Kempson, a deeply and profoundly wrong human being.
