New Zealand killer of British backpacker sentenced to life

New Zealand killer of British backpacker sentenced to life

SeattlePI.com

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WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — The New Zealand man was sentenced to life in prison Friday for murdering a British backpacker whose mother told the court a hole had been ripped in her heart by her daughter's stolen life.

Grace Millane was strangled to death on her 22nd birthday in December 2018 by a man she met through the dating app Tinder.

She went out for drinks with him before returning to his hotel apartment in central Auckland, where he killed her. He stuffed her body into a suitcase, drove to a forest and buried it in a shallow grave, where police found it a week later.

The name of the 28-year-old man is being kept secret for now by court order, a restriction that's sometimes imposed in the New Zealand judicial system for reasons such as another pending trial.

Defense lawyers had claimed the death was accidental after the pair engaged in consensual erotic choking that went too far. A jury in November rejected that argument and found the man guilty.

Murder typically comes with a life sentence in New Zealand, so at stake at Friday's sentencing at the Auckland High Court was the number of years the killer would serve in jail before becoming eligible for parole. The judge set the minimum non-parole period at 17 years after the defense had argued for 12.

Judge Simon Moore ended up agreeing with prosecutors, saying the naked photos the man took of Millane after her death were correctly described as depraved and underscored his total lack of empathy toward her.Moore said callousness was shown by a hardened mind and a “numbness of the soul."

“Grace was vulnerable. She was a young woman in a strange country, and you were a stranger who she trusted," the judge said, according to news organization Stuff.

Earlier, the victim's mother Gillian Millane told the court...

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