During the trial for Grace Millane’s murder it was revealed that the Auckland man who strangled her during their Tinder date also went on another date hours after murdering her, while Grace's body still lay in his hotel room. Now, the woman he went on a date with has given an interview about the experience.
Talking to the BBC, the woman – who has chosen to remain anonymous – says she hopes she can help warn others about dating safety but longs for a world ‘where women don’t have to think about their safety all the time’.
The woman explained that she and Millane's murderer - who cannot be named for legal reasons - chatted for two weeks before meeting up having initially made contact on Tinder. ‘The conversation was quite light, quite fun,’ she explains. ‘He was an Australian so we talked about Aussie things. He seemed like a nice, normal guy and when we agreed to meet I was happy to do that.’
Soon, however, he got ‘really persistent’, texting her multiple times a day and questioning what was wrong if she didn’t reply. ‘He kept trying to bring the date forward and would forget I had told him I was busy,’ she said. ‘It was unusual for someone to be that persistent. I have had guys before who are maybe a bit persistent but from nervous excitement - a different kind of excited. It was just unusual that he could not possibly wait until Sunday. It felt very narcissistic.’
When they met, the day after Millane’s murder, they went to a very popular bar. He looked different to his pictures (‘obviously he had put on some weight') with the woman describing him as having ‘big, distinctive eyes’ and ‘very, very clean’.
‘I asked him a lot of questions and he sort of talked,’ the woman continued. ‘He tried to ask me a few questions but they weren't very in-depth questions. I thought he was nervous. I guess because he had said one thing in messages about where he worked and a different thing on the date, I started to feel a bit uneasy.’
She says she thinks the murder was on his mind because the conversation kept turning to police, court cases and prosecutions. ‘We talked about him being friends with lots of policemen,’ she said. ‘He said they were having a tough time because of bodies going missing in the Waitakere Ranges (the place Millane's body would eventually be found). Police dogs can only smell four feet deep so if they are buried deeper than that, they can't find them. I thought it was a bit strange but an interesting fact.’
Then, he told her a ‘really bizarre story’.
He told me about a guy he knew who had consensual rough sex with his girlfriend but ended up accidentally killing her.
‘He said: "It's crazy how a guy can make one mistake and go to jail for the rest of his life”’ the woman stated. ‘He told me about a guy he knew in Australia who had consensual rough sex involving strangulation with his girlfriend but ended up accidentally killing her. It was an accident, things went wrong and he was really upset by that because he loved her, but the guy got done for manslaughter and was sent down for a long time. What we know now is this could have been him testing out his story on me.'
She was uncomfortable and the conversation moved on to more mundane subjects but his date ‘didn’t try to make a swift exit’ at that time, explaining that she is ‘quite used to dealing with all sorts of people.’
However, her uneasy gut feeling grew as they were saying goodbye and he said ‘my car is this way’. ‘My car was down that same road but by that stage, I was feeling uneasy and my instincts had just kicked in telling me to walk a different way,’ she said. ‘He was also a lot bigger than me so if something went wrong I knew I wouldn't be able to defend myself. In hindsight it was a good decision. It was my intuition sense, my brain was saying "this was strange, that was strange"’.
Now, she says, she is more reserved on first dates, divulging less information and asking herself ‘how well do I really know them?’. And it’s since encouraged her to warn more women of following this tactic, telling the BBC, ‘I know in modern dating it is quite common to give people your Instagram handle but you are giving people access to a lot of personal information.'
Of course, women shouldn’t have to constantly think of their safety or worry about their date killing them. This she says, is a world she wishes for.
To help Grazia's campaign to ban the rough sex defence, sign the petition here.
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The Man Accused Of Killing Grace Millane Has Been Found Guilty