Sexual fantasist gets life for killing journalist on his submarine
A DANISH inventor, Peter Madsen, was yesterday 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-year-old’s body and throwing her remains overboard in waters off Copenhagen, but claimed her death was accidental.
Ms Wall, a freelance reporter, had set off with the self-titled “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 Buchjepsen accused Madsen of attempting to carry out “the perfect crime”.
He said Madsen killed Ms 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 Den- mark 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 Ms Wall’s family the details of her painful suffocation.
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.
The prosecution also presented as evidence the fact that on the night before Ms Wall boarded his vessel, he googled “beheaded girl agony”, which Madsen tried to claim was “pure coincidence”.
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.”
Ms Wall’s parents told Swedish media they did not wish to comment on the case. The Danish court rejected their claim for £16,000 damages, saying the journalist had moved out, but granted her boyfriend, who reported her missing, £10,800. The court ordered seizure of the scuttled submarine.