The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
How the nightmare unfolded
Around 7pm
Kim Wall boards the UC3 Nautilus, the homebuilt vessel belonging to inventor Peter Madsen, at Refshale Island in Copenhagen.
10.30Am
The submarine is located in Køge Bay. At 11am the submarine suddenly sinks. Madsen is rescued.
The police announce that Madsen is a murder suspect. He denies the crime.
5.44pm 11.30Am
No body has been found inside the submarine. There is clear evidence that it was sunk intentionally.
A cyclist finds a dismembered body in the water on Amager Island.
A plastic bag containing Kim’s head, another with her clothes and a knife, and two legs are discovered in Køge Bay. There are no fractures to the cranium, which contradicts Madsen’s version of events.
It becomes known that Madsen confessed during a hearing that he had cut up Kim’s body and thrown parts of it into Køge Bay.
At 2.05am, Jens calls and gives us the news that there is no longer any doubt. It’s Kim’s mutilated body the cyclist found at Amager on Monday.
A few hours later, Jens, dressed in a black shirt and black jacket, stands in front of a crowd of journalists and announces the unthinkable – it is our daughter who is dead and violated.
Science has given us the answer we dreaded.
O ver the next yea r, the investiga tion into K im
W a ll’s dea th c ontinued. Initia lly, Madsen claimed Kim had died accidentally when the submarine hatch hit her on the head. But as the evidence against him built up, his case unravelled. During this time, Kim’s parents slowly started piecing together their new reality, determined that their daughter’s legacy would be about her exceptional life – not the manner of her death.
It’s a beautiful day when we say our final farewells to Kim. The sun shines and the Baltic, still for once, glitters. We’ve chosen to have an outdoor ceremony just a few hundred yards from our home. Here Kim played as a child, jogged as a grown woman, walked the dog and enjoyed the peace so far away from the bustle of some huge metropolis.
This is an end, a step along the way, but an incredibly heavy one. Once the guests are seated, Jocke carries the urn with Kim’s ashes; I follow with Tom and Ole, carrying a portrait of Kim, which I place on a pedestal next to the urn. It is simple, beautiful and so incredibly sad. Later, Jocke says, ‘That’s the heaviest burden I’ve ever had to carry.’
We don’t call it a funeral – it’s a final farewell. The message has gone out on the grapevine: we wanted absolutely no TV cameras destroying this time, and there aren’t any.
Friends come from all over the world and it ends up being a lovely farewell, just as we wanted. The municipal official describes Kim in a way that gets us to smile through our tears. When the last guests have placed their flowers and said their goodbyes, I suddenly see a butterfly flitting around the blooms. The beautiful creature with its delicate wings moves from one blossom to the next. For me, it’s a symbol that Kim is still with us, if in an entirely different form.
We end the ceremony by walking a few hundred yards across the beach meadows to Kim’s heart memorial [made from stones washed up on the beach]. We each take a stone from the sea and form the letters K-I-M. It says everything in its simplicity. One journey is over; another one has begun.