Florida Man Laughs While Pleading Guilty to Torturing, Dismembering and Decapitating Teen He Lured In On Grindr
A Florida man laughed in court while confessing to the brutal murder of a 16-year-old girl.
Steven Gress, 35, appeared in the Sixth Judicial Circuit Court to enter a guilty plea to the charge of first-degree murder in the death of Miranda Corsette.
The high school student was tortured for a week by Gress at his home in St. Petersburg and then dismembered and decapitated, with her remains tossed into a dumpster.
Gress did not enter his guilty plea as part of a deal with prosecutors, and acknowledged that the minimum mandatory sentence he is facing is life in prison without the possibility of parole in his plea form.
He is also still facing the possibility of being sentenced to death, and when the judge noted this in court, Gress laughed and said he would rather be executed than spend the rest of his life in jail.
Miranda Corsette Credit: St. Petersburg Police
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Gress lured Corsette to his home in St. Petersburg on Feb. 14, 2025 after the pair chatted on Grindr, according to a copy of the probable cause affidavit that was obtained by PEOPLE.
She returned the next day, but things quickly turned sour when Gress’ girlfriend Michelle Brandes, 35, falsely accused Corsette of stealing his ring.
Gress then proceeded to beat Corsette for the next five days, and even sent photos of the young girl’s injuries to multiple people, including his own mother, according to the affidavit.
None of those individuals contacted law enforcement.
“There was a total of five photographs, and in each photograph Corsette looked to be in increasingly worse physical condition,” the affidavit said. “Corsette was nude in each photograph and had bruises and marks on most of her body. In the last photograph, Corsette’s head was so swollen that she was almost unrecognizable.”
Gress confessed to all these actions after his arrest, but claimed that it was Brandes who actually murdered Corsette when she “took a ball from a pool table in the backyard, put it in a sock and shoved it down Corsette’s throat and then wrapped her face in plastic wrap,” according to the affidavit.
He said that he told Brandes “not to cover the nose” and that “he couldn’t get to Corsette quick enough to poke holes in the plastic before she died.”
The couple’s third roommate later told police that she believed Brandes took the ring in order to “get Gress to not like the girl because she was jealous.”
Once Corsette had passed away, her body was taken to the home of Brandes’ mother, where Gress dismembered and decapitated the teenager while Brandes put her remains in trash bags, according to the affidavit.
The three roommates then went to eat fried chicken and play mini golf with the trash bags sitting in the car, before traveling 50 miles to dispose of the body in a dumpster.
It was on that same day — Feb. 24, 2025 — that Corsette was first reported missing to the Gulfport, Mississippi Police Department.
Brandes has also been charged with murder and kidnapping but entered a plea of not guilty to both charges.
Corsette’s family, meanwhile, has filed a lawsuit against Grindr on behalf of her estate that lists nine causes of action for which they are seeking monetary damages, including: wrongful death, negligence, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, participation in a sex trafficking venue, and deceptive and unfair trade practices.
“Grindr’s negligent conduct directly set in motion the chain of events that exposed M.C. to danger,” states the civil suit. “The acts of M.C.’s attacker were not independent of Grindr’s wrongdoing but were facilitated and made substantially more probable by Grindr’s deliberate failure to implement meaningful safeguards against underage access and exploitation.”
Gress will be back in court on Nov. 4 for the penalty phase of his trial.
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Read the original article on People
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