One Denmark From Murder

Kim Isabel Fredrika Wall, though pretty fresh in her career, was an established Swedish freelance journalist who traveled the world with her job. She grew up in Trelleborg, Sweden reporting for outlets including The New York Times. She graduated from the London School of Economics and earned two master’s degrees from Columbia University. She embarked on a globe-trotting career and reported from countries including Cuba, Sri Lanka and Uganda. In 2016, she was awarded the Hansel Mieth Prize for Best Digital Reporting for a multi-media report on climate change and nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands. In August 2017, She was days away from moving to Beijing, China with her boyfriend. Kim who was 30 at this point, had been chasing an interview for an article she wanted to write about Peter Madsen for several months. Peter is a Danish inventor who is something of a celebrity in Denmark. This was the final interview she was to complete before her move to China with her boyfriend Ole. Kim was hoping to interview Peter because of his ambition to build a rocket to launch into space. I got the impression that Peter Madsen is a bit like America’s Elon Musk. Kim and her boyfriend were preparing to host a farewell party before their planned move to Beijing on August 16 of 2017. Before the party, though, Kim got a text she had been waiting for. She had reached out to Peter Madsen repeatedly, requesting an interview and he finally replied to her. He invited her to interview him on board his midget submarine called the UC3 Nautilus that he built with a group of volunteers that cost about $200,000 (us) to make. Apparently, this is no small task. This thing was pretty small in comparison to typical subs. It had room for a crew of 8. It could, though, be operated by a single person from the control room. All controls and indicators were accessible from the captain's seat for controlling buoyancy, pumps, engines, air pressure, communication, video, and other electric systems. Part art project, part engineering feat, the submarine weighed 40 tons and had been built by volunteers at minimal cost from donated iron and other parts. Shortly after the launch of the Nautilus, Peter started another venture. He and a former NASA contractor named Kristian von Bengtson cofounded a company called Copenhagen Suborbitals. Their plan was to launch the first manned built-from-scratch rocket. Peter and Kristian financed Copenhagen Suborbitals with crowdfunded donations. It was, Kristian wrote in 2011, “the ultimate DIY project.” The projects made Peter a kind of antiestablishment celebrity in Denmark. “You had a sense that he was doing something different. It was something bigger. It was something worth being part of,” Robert Fox, a filmmaker who made a 2009 documentary about Madsen called My Private Submarine. A biography of Peter was published a few years later. Peter turned this fame into speaking engagements. In 2016, another filmmaker released a documentary called Amateurs in Space, about Peter and Kristian and their efforts to build a rocket. Apparently, watching the film, you see the men’s relationship fall apart. In June 2014, Madsen opened a new workshop of his own, Rocket Madsen Space Lab, in a hangar across the paved lot from his collaborative company with Kristian, Copenhagen Suborbitals. Kim heard about the rivaling rocketeers and she was eager to meet with Peter, being an envisionary and likely to become a central figure in future space travel design and other inventions. On August 10, a Thursday, Kim and Ole were preparing to throw a goodbye party. In the late afternoon, just as they were setting up for a barbecue on a dock by the water, Kim gets a text on her phone and she’s thrilled to see it’s Peter finally returning her attempts to reach him. He invited her to have tea in his workshop which isn’t far from where they were setting up for the BBQ. So, Kim walks over to the hanger and returns to the party about a half hour later to tell Ole Peter had invited her to take a ride on his submarine. She decided she couldn’t pass up the opportunity and passed up on the goodbye party to go for the interview. She asked Ole if he wanted to come along. He really wanted to go along, but felt one of them should stay since their friends had come for them. Kim promised to be back in a few hours. Just before boarding the Nautilus, Kim sent Ole a photo of the sub. A little later, she sent a photo of windmills in the water, and then another of herself at the steering wheel. A while later, Ole was tending to a dock-side fire when a friend told him to look up. He saw the setting sun and Kim aboard the submarine in the distance, waving toward him. Early in the evening, Ole received a text from Kim saying, "I'm still alive btw, But I'm going down now. I love you! He brought coffee and cookies tho." Kim was pretty new to journalism and she wouldn’t have known much more about Peter than had already been established in the media. It was only sometime later that details about his secret life would come to light. BREAK Peter was born in 1971 and grew up in a small town south of Copenhagen. His mother, Annie, was more than three decades younger than Peter’s father, Carl who was a pub owner. Annie had three boys from two previous marriages, and the marriage to Carl did not last long. Peter was six when his parents split up. Annie moved out with her other sons while Peter stayed with his aging father. Carl was a brutal man who beat his stepsons, though not Peter who was his biological son. It was Carl who stoked his son’s fascination with rockets, telling him, among other things, about a man who would become a hero to Madsen: Wernher von Braun, the Nazi aerospace engineer who later came to the US and helped develop the Apollo missions. Carl died when Peter was 18, and for the next few years, Peter bounced around, starting several degrees and apprenticeships—in welding, refrigeration, and engineering—before dropping out of each. As a teenager, Peter discovered the Danish Amateur Rocket Club but was eventually kicked out because he wanted to use fuels that others in the group felt weren’t safe. Other members of the club became frightened or disillusioned with Peter, saying things like, “saying his name would start the fire sprinkler system.” He spent his twenties and thirties organizing his life around the building of submarines and rockets. He often slept at the workshop where he built things. Peter’s obsession with submarines and rockets was all-consuming, but not to the exclusion of sex. An old friend of Peter’s, said that Peter was a regular at sexual fetish parties. He also frequented Travelgirls.com, a website that advertises meeting “thousands of adventurous girls who want to travel.” Deirdre King, who was Peter’s close friend for more than a decade, said that Peter could be doting. “I broke both of my hands once, and Peter came by every day for two months and brushed my hair,” she said. “He is a man who loves women.” The filmmaker of the film, “My private submarine,” said that “women found him fascinating” and that the Nautilus sometimes played a role in his seduction strategies. Like he would ask women aboard and try to woo them. Back at the farewell party, the celebration continued into the night and eventually moved to a nearby bar. It was well past the few hours that Kim had anticipated being gone and Ole was growing worried. The couple had a wedding to attend the next morning and it wasn’t like Kim to not at least text some updates. Ole went back to the pier to wait for Kim, but when she didn’t show, he finally went back home to try to get some sleep. He was so worried, though, he finally gave up on sleep, grabbed his bike and rode around the island in search of her. At 1:45 am, he called the police and a half hour after that, he contacted the navy. Just before 4 am, the police were notified of a possible accident by the local maritime rescue center. Soon after, helicopters and ships began searching the waters around Copenhagen. At 10:30 am, the Nautilus was spotted near a lighthouse in Køge Bay, near a desolate stretch of coastline. According to a local news report, at 11 am a man out on his boat helping with the search saw Peter in the submarine tower. He saw Peter go down the hatch, then reemerge as the sub began to sink. Peter then began swimming toward a nearby motor boat, where he was pulled out and taken back to land. By now, newsrooms had learned about the search for a missing submarine. Upon Peter’s rescue, reporters headed to the dock. When he stepped ashore, a reporter called out to Peter, asking if everything was OK. Peter turned around and gave the reporter a thumbs-up. He said he was fine but sad because his Nautilus had sunk. There had been a defect on the ballast tank, he said. BREAK Ole was at the dock where the press had gathered that morning as Peter gave his thumbs-up. He knew that something was off and braced for the worst. Later that day the police put out a statement saying that Peter had told them that he had dropped off Kim on the tip of the island. The police clearly did not believe him; they arrested him and charged him with involuntary manslaughter “for having killed in an unknown way and in an unknown place Kim Isabel Fredrika Wall of Sweden sometime after Thursday 5 pm.” The next day, a Saturday, Peter appeared in court at a closed-door session. This time, he had a different story. He hadn’t dropped Kim off on the island; she died in an accident onboard the submarine. He claimed a hatch had fallen on her head, and he panicked. He said he dragged her body out of the submarine by a rope and “buried her at sea.” On August 21, a cyclist riding along on Amager Island, not far from where the submarine sank, came across a torso that had washed ashore. The next day, DNA analysis confirmed that the torso belonged to Kim. A week later, a court approved the prosecutor’s request to change the charge from involuntary manslaughter to manslaughter. An autopsy later revealed that she had been stabbed 15 times in and around her vagina. Then, one month later, divers found Kim’s head, clothing, and a knife in plastic bags, in the waters not far from where her torso was found. They also found both her legs, tied to pieces of metal. In November, police divers found Kim’s arms in the bay. Despite these discoveries, Peter stuck to his story, well, his second story, that Kim had hit her head and died, and he disposed of her body, but he denied killing her or dismembering her. Even after divers found a saw that might have been used to dismember Kim’s body, even after the police searched Peter’s computer and discovered videos that appeared to show women being strangled, decapitated, and tortured—he stuck to his story. A freelance writer named May Jeong who had known Kim and was friends with her, wanted more information. She traveled to Copenhagen to learn more about Peter from people who had helped him build his submarine. One such person who had volunteered at Peter’s workshop, said he had been receiving calls from the police asking about a missing saw from the workshop. Some volunteers talked about Peter as a generous spirit, the kind of guy who would invite a friend who was feeling down “to take part in his little adventures as a means of cheering him up. Others said Peter could vacillate between rage and euphoria. One volunteer said he would behave like a child who just lost his toy or dropped his ice and when his mood turned, “most people would know what was going to happen, so they would get away from him before stuff started flying.” One former flame of Peter’s said that she had either seen or talked to Peter nearly every day in the weeks leading up to Kim’s death. One particular exchange was still bothering her. She said she and Peter had been sending cheeky, joking messages to each other. She had been having trouble finishing an art project that was a video, and she’d asked Peter to motivate her with a threat. The conversation began as a casual sexual exchange but quickly escalated. “He says he has a murder plan ready in the submarine, and I tell him I am not afraid, you have to be more threatening. He talks about the tools he wants to use, and I say, ‘Oh it’s not threatening.’ ” The scenario darkened to inviting a friend to the submarine, where they would suddenly change the mood and begin cutting her up. At the time, the woman didn’t give the exchange much thought; it was not something she took seriously. After a lull in the back and forth, she responded by sending him a video of horses. The moment passed. The police now have the texts. On October 30, the Copenhagen police reported that Peter had changed his account of that night in August yet again; he said Kim might have died from carbon monoxide poisoning. He also admitted to dismembering her body. On January 16, the police released a statement announcing that Peter was being indicted for homicide that “took place with prior planning and preparation,” and also charged him with “sexual relations other than intercourse of a particularly dangerous nature, as well as for dismemberment.” A week later, the full indictment provided more excruciating details: Madsen had brought onboard “a saw, knife, sharpened screwdrivers, straps, zip ties, and pipes.” Madsen had bound, beaten, and stabbed Kim before killing her, possibly by choking or cutting her throat, the indictment said. During his trial in March of 2018, Peter expanded upon his most recent version of what had happened aboard the Nautilus. He said the air pressure on board the submarine had suddenly plummeted while he was on the deck and Kim was in the engine room. The sub had filled with exhaust fumes and he had been unable to get back in. "When I finally manage to open the hatch, a warm cloud hits my face. I find her lifeless on the floor, and I squat next to her and try to wake her up, slapping her cheeks," he said. After trying for almost an hour to push her body out of the submarine, he said he mutilated her. Basically, cutting her into pieces so that he could pull her out of the sub. He said he had hidden the truth out of respect for the victim's family. During the trial, the prosecuter said it was unclear how Kim had died, but it was clearly intentional and with a sexual motive. Peter had already asked other women to join him on the sub that week but no-one else had come. A scientist from the Danish Technological Institute told the court that Peter Madsen's argument that Kim had died of exhaust fumes was possible, but only if the temperature on board had risen very high. A police witness told the court there had been no sign of exhaust fumes. Peter was given a life sentence. On October 20, 2020, Peter escaped prison. It was a jailbreak captured in sensational images on live TV. Using a mock gun and wearing a fake explosive belt, he threatened prison staff and made it about half a mile outside the prison walls, before being captured by armed police officers. Footage of his capture also showed bystanders at the scene screaming profanities at Peter. Peter said that he had decided to escape because he found the conditions in prison intolerable, and that he had grown desperate after he was refused visits from his partner. Life sentences in Denmark usually mean 16 years in prison, but convicts are reassessed to determine whether they would pose a danger to society if released and can be kept longer Peter was married during all of this to a woman who somehow has always stayed anonymous and was in the film industry. She divorced him after he went to prison and he ended up marrying a Russian exile. On 24 January 2020, a Danish documentary, Into the Deep, premiered at the Sundance Festival in Utah, USA.[52] The 90-minute documentary was directed by Australian-born Emma Sullivan and chronicles Peter Madsen and a group of volunteers helping Madsen with his projects – shot as it happens before, during, and after the murder of Kim Wall.[53] Variety called the documentary "riveting".[54] Marie Claire called it "gripping" and a "must-watch".[55] The documentary was initially intended to be distributed on Netflix. After a controversy arose, where participants claimed they did not give their consent to appear with their name and image, Netflix put it on hold.[56] On 22 April 2020, Netflix announced they withdrew from the deal.[57] Wikipedia, BBC.com, the guardian.com, New York Times, npr.org, esquire, nbcnews.com, theweek.co.uk, thecinemaholic.com, wired magazine