Inventor jailed in death of journalist
BRUSSELS • A Danish inventor, Peter Madsen, was Wednesday jailed for life for the premeditated murder and sexual assault of Swedish journalist Kim Wall on his homemade submarine.
Madsen, 47, had confessed to cutting up the 30-yearold’s body and throwing her remains overboard in waters off Copenhagen, but claimed her death was accidental.
Wall, a freelance reporter, had set off with the selftitled “inventrepreneur” to interview him on his vessel, having planned a feature on him for a magazine.
During the trial, which lasted 12 days and involved evidence from 36 witnesses, special prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen accused Madsen of attempting to carry out “the perfect crime”.
He said Madsen killed Wall in a macabre sexual fantasy, showing the court video footage, found on the inventor’s computer, of women being tortured, beheaded, impaled, and hanged.
“He committed a cynical, planned murder of a particularly brutal nature,” the judge at Copenhagen City Council said as she read out the guilty verdict, adding that Madsen “dismembered the body in order to hide the evidence of murder.”
A black-clad Madsen looked shaken by the verdict and swiftly signalled he would appeal. A life sentence in Denmark typically lasts about 16 years and he will be only the 25th person serving one in the Nordic country.
Madsen, known for his exploits in amateur space travel, confessed to stuffing the award-winning journalist’s head, arms and legs into plastic bags, weighing them down with metal pipes before tossing them into the sea. He later scuttled his midget submarine, UC3 Nautilus.
After changing his story several times, Madsen testified that she died when the air pressure failed and toxic fumes filled his vessel while he was up on deck. He claimed he had cut up the body to spare Wall’s family the details of her painful suffocation.
He also said at one point, “What do you do when you have a large problem? You make it smaller.”
The court found the circumstances were enough to find Madsen’s version of events “untrustworthy”, citing the fact that he took on board a saw, plastic strips and a sharpened screwdriver just before the voyage.
On the final day of evidence, Madsen, who had described himself to friends as “a psychopath but a loving one”, told the court: “I’m really, really sorry for what happened.”