Jesse Shane Kempson was born in Wellington, New Zealand. He grew up there particularly in Wainuiomata and Porirua.

As a junior softball representative, Kempson spent several years living in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Here are 13 more things about him:

1. In 1994, his parents separated.
2. In 2016, he moved from Sydney to Auckland. In the same year, he met a woman on Tinder. She became his girlfriend and they moved in together shortly after. He was accused of abusing her. She told police he tried to kill her on January 19, 2017 by holding her in a choke hold after chasing her around the house with a knife. In April 2017, she left him. She did not file charges against him but she was granted a protection order against him.
3. In April 2018, he met a young British woman via Tinder. He was accused of sexually assaulting her in a motel room in Epsom, Auckland.
4. He was 5 years older than Grace Millane of Wickford, Essex, England, United Kingdom. He met her on Tinder while she was backpacking in Auckland. On December 1, 2018, they physically met for the first time. That day, he strangled her to death in his apartment on the third floor of CityLife hotel in Auckland. While her lifeless body was still in the room, he took intimate photographs of her, accessed internet via his phone, searched for pornography, ways to dispose of a corpse and Waitākere Ranges in West Auckland, New Zealand went on a Tinder date with another woman. He was captured on closed-circuit television wheeling a suitcase containing Millane’s body out of the hotel. He later dumped her body in a shallow grave in the Waitākere Ranges.
5. On December 7, 2018, he was arrested for the murder of Millane. Represented by Ian Brookie and Ron Mansfield, he denied murdering Millane and claimed she accidentally died after they had rough sex at his apartment. Through three court proceedings, he was allowed to keep his name secret. His defense counsel argued that revealing his name to the public would deprive him a fair trial.
6. In January 2019, he appeared before Justice Simon Moore at the High Court in Auckland and pleaded not guilty of killing Millane.
7. On November 22, 2019, he was found guilty of murdering Millane following a High Court trial.
8. On February 21, 2020, Moore sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years. The judge also ruled his interim suppression would continue with his reasons.
9. In November 2020, Justice Geoffrey Venning convicted him of rape in relation to the woman he assaulted in Epsom in April 2018.
10. On October 23, 2020, he faced a judge-alone trial at the High Court at Auckland before Justice Timothy Brewer in relation to the attack he allegedly committed against his former girlfriend on January 19, 2017. The judge found him guilty of two charges of sexual violation, three charges of assault, two charges of assault with a knife and one charge of threatening to kill, Stuff reported. He was sentenced to seven years and six months in prison.
11. On December 18, 2020, he successfully made an attempt to continue keeping his name a secret by appealing to New Zealand’s Supreme Court. On the same day, his appeal against his conviction and sentence was dismissed by Justice Stephen Kos, Justice Patricia Courtney and Justice Mark Cooper.
12. On December 22, 2020, New Zealand’s Supreme Court ruled that he could be named.
13. He was 29 years old when New Zealand’s Supreme Court dismissed his application for leave to appeal its verdict on June 29, 2021, exhausting his legal avenues to overturn his conviction.