Murder mystery: the evil genius and the girl in the submarine
A missing woman, a headless, limbless torso, a home-made submarine and a strange self-obsessed home inventor – the mysterious death of Danish journalist Kim Wall has all the bizarre hallmarks of a Scandi crime novel, writes William Langley.
Afew fading flower bouquets lie on the quayside cobblestones near the place where Kim Wall last walked on dry land. Winter is closing in on Copenhagen, its ornate spires glisten in the moonlight and its pretty harbour glows beneath swinging lanterns, but this most civilised of cities remains gripped by its strangest, darkest murder mystery.
Six months ago, Kim, a free-spirited, 30-yearold journalist, boarded a home-built submarine – the brainchild of a brilliant but eccentric Danish inventor, Peter Madsen. On the evening of August 10, the pair sailed out into the Scandinavian sunset. A photograph, taken by a passing pleasure-boater, shows Kim standing in the conning tower, smiling with her auburn hair flapping in its usual unruly twist. She was not seen alive again.
Eleven days later, a naked female torso was found washed up on a small island south of Copenhagen. The head and limbs had been
chopped off, and weights attached in an attempt to prevent it surfacing. The torso bore multiple stab wounds and DNA tests showed it to be Kim’s.
By the time of this horrific discovery, Madsen, 46, was already in police custody. A day after leaving harbour with Kim, he had been rescued from the sea, 50km offshore, and explained to the coastguards that his cherished, 40-tonne submarine, the UC3 Nautilus, had sunk after a ballasttank malfunction. He affected surprise at the news that Kim was missing, saying he had dropped her off several hours earlier at a dockside restaurant.
This explanation lasted only as long it took investigators to locate and salvage the Nautilus. Inside, they found bloodstains and shreds of Kim’s clothing. Madsen then offered a different version of events, claiming she had died after a 50kg hatch cover had accidentally fallen on her head. Fearing he would be held responsible, as the craft’s builder, he panicked and threw her into the sea.
As the days went by, more body parts were recovered, including
Kim’s severed head, which showed no sign of any lethal impact. On October 28, after months of interrogation, Madsen admitted dismembering her body, and dropping it into the sea, but he continues to deny killing her.
The case, with its vivid characters, bizarre plotlines and gruesome detailing, has been likened to a real-life ‘Scandi-Crime’ novel. It has made headlines all over the world, and dominated news coverage in Denmark, where – as Ben Hamilton, editor of the English-language Copenhagen Post, says – “it has become a kind of obsession, the one thing everybody here talks about.” Yet despite all the attention, and one of the biggest murder
He could be all charm one moment, then in a rage.
inquiries in Danish history, almost no one can suggest a convincing explanation of what may have happened.
Dressed in threadbare camouflage fatigues for his most recent appearance at the Copenhagen main courthouse, Madsen bears little resemblance to the caricature ‘evil genius’. Slender and tousle-haired, he smiles lightly and nods at people in the room. When he speaks he is polite and to the point, but he seems only mildly interested in what is happening around him. Still, as the evidence piles up, a picture is emerging of man whose dashing public persona disguised an inner one, filled with anger and deviance.
It was this other Peter Madsen, allege the prosecutors, with whom Kim, petite and vivacious, went to sea on that fateful August night.
Born in neighbouring Sweden, into a family of journalists, Kim had already forged a reputation for fearlessness. She had reported on voodoo in the Caribbean, climate change in Africa, and feminism in China, and her stories had appeared in major publications including The New York Times and London’s Guardian. Colleagues spoke of her as having an endearing mix of diligence and playfulness.
“She was a rare breed,” remembers fellow reporter Laura Dimon, who met Kim at journalism school in New York in 2011. “She’d ask about digging up city election records, and in the same breath remind you, with great delight, that Shakira was pregnant.”
At the Wall family’s home in the small port of Trelleborg, just across the Swedish frontier, Kim’s mother, Ingrid, says she and her husband, Joachim, are not ready to talk about the case. Instead, she directs me to a social media page, on which she has written: “We cannot yet grasp the extent of this catastrophe, and there are many questions that must be answered. During the horrific days since Kim disappeared, we have had abundant evidence of how loved and appreciated she was as a human and friend, as well as a professional journalist.”
Others on the site describe Kim as “unique”, “persistent”, “quirky” and “awesome”.
The more you hear about her, the more you sense that Peter Langkjaer Madsen, the enigmatic visionary of the Copenhagen waterfront, was just her kind of story. With his powerful charisma and virtuoso brain, Madsen had grown into something of a folk hero in Denmark. Besotted with machines – particularly rockets – from an early age, he had built his first powered projectile when he was seven, firing it 400 metres into the garden of an old people’s home! After dropping
We cannot yet grasp the extent of this catastrophe.”
out of engineering college – claiming it had nothing to teach him – he started his own space-exploration program, vowing to “take mankind beyond anything it has yet imagined”. The scientific establishment sniggered until he blasted a rocket 8km into the atmosphere from a floating platform in the Baltic Sea.
As if aerospace was an insufficient test of his talents, he also turned his energies to submarines, completing the Nautilus – the world’s largest privately built sub – in 2008. As he sailed in triumph around the choppy waters of the Copenhagen archipelago, an admiring public hailed him as a home-grown version of Captain Nemo, the hero of Jules Verne’s classic 19th century adventure story Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Yet, as with the fictional Nemo, who seeks vengeance on a world he has grown to despise, there was a darker, less understood side to Madsen.
“He could be all charm one moment and in a rage the next,” says Thomas Djursing, author of a biography of Madsen. “He was incredibly passionate about his work, and he took any kind of setback badly. He’d had a few problems with his projects recently, and
I think it affected him. He’d started saying things like there was a curse on him.”
Even those who worked closely with Madsen, and admired his energy and brilliance, wondered what really drove him. He seemed to have no close friends, no interest in money, no settled domestic life, and while there was talk of a wife, no one appeared to know who she was. He was keen on women, though, and with his rugged looks and vibrant personality, took full advantage of what he described as his
“open marriage.”
One woman who fell for him was blonde Danish-American Deirdre King, 38, a former employee of the Nautilus project. “The thing that made Peter so attractive to women was his mind,” she told Denmark’s
Ekstra Bladet newspaper. “He is fascinating to be around, and I think a lot of women felt that. He is flirtatious, and definitely not your regular date. He can get angry about things, but I don’t believe he would ever harm a woman. I’ve never met anyone who would say that.”
What has now been revealed as the darker side of Madsen’s character seems to have led him to the seamy fringes of Copenhagen’s nightlife. In court he has admitted to a long-time interest in sado-masochism, and to attending a private club called Kinky Salon, which describes itself as “an arty, playful, fun, sex-positive costume party…we do sexy things in the name of art, and arty things in the name of sex.”
A spokesman for the club says it cannot discuss individual members.
“I am interested in the whole field of eroticism,” Madsen told the court, but denied he had ever engaged in “violent” sexual activity with anyone. When asked about the finding of videos showing women apparently being decapitated on a computer in his workshop, he replied: “It is not my computer. It belongs to
the laboratory. Anyone could have used it.”
At a briefing outside the courthouse, Copenhagen’s chief prosecutor, Jakob Buch-Jepsen, says he is certain a “very strong” murder case will be brought against Madsen, and the trial is likely to begin in the next few months. “We already have a lot of evidence,” he says, “and we are finding more all the time.”
Yet the investigation remains riddled with doubts and questions. Kim was bold, but she wasn’t reckless. Madsen was unconventional, but he wasn’t crazy. Both had a mutual interest in the trip being a success. She was planning an extended trip to China and wanted a story to sell. He had learned that publicity often brought new investment for his projects.
“He had taken plenty of other journalists out on trips,” says Djursing. “I think he enjoyed it, and I never heard of there being any problems.”
Denmark, a small, prosperous country with a low murder rate and a high degree of sexual tolerance, is still struggling to digest the horror of what has been uncovered. Many people feel uncomfortable with the ‘Scandi crime’ comparison, yet theories – some persuasive, others bizarre – continue to fly around Copenhagen’s waterside bars over glasses of Akvavit, the local spirit.
Among the theories are that Madsen, short of money after falling out with his partners two years ago, was using the sub for drug-smuggling, and that Kim was trying to expose him. Another is that other, unidentified, people may have been on the Nautilus, who Madsen is covering up for.
“Every time you meet people for dinner,” says Jerzy Sarnecki, a criminologist at Stockholm University, “you hear a new version of what might have happened. I don’t think all this helps, and we should stick to what we know.”
“What’s missing is an obvious motive,” says Ben Hamilton. “Would Madsen, given what we know about him, have done something like this? I think a lot of people are looking at it differently now. At first it was seen as a kind of Agatha Christie mystery, but as the details came out people were revolted. Now they want it settled.”
Several of Kim’s colleagues have noted the bitter irony of a woman who had sneaked into North Korea and reported from a contaminated nuclear site in the Pacific, dying just 50km from her comfortable family home in Sweden. Yet Kim survived in danger zones precisely because she knew what risks not to take.
Why, then, did she go out alone with a man she didn’t know on a voyage which – under Danish maritime law – was illegal?
Madsen wasn’t interested in money for himself, but he needed it for the projects which had become his obsession. According to a source who worked with him on building the Nautilus, the nine-year-old craft was barely seaworthy, and in need of a major refit. With no authorisation to carry passengers, Madsen was trying to market the sub as a sightseeing attraction, offering dockside visits to tourists. A promotional video on a website he set up says:
“We guarantee a fun, inspirational experience that will be long remembered.” But the sparse, claustrophobic interior of the Nautilus bore no resemblance to the fantastical opulence of the fictional Captain Nemo’s craft. Only a few people at a time could get aboard, and the video suggests that all they saw was a control room with a few crude dials and levers, a periscope and a gloomy passageway leading to a cabin.
Kim had no reason to assume she was in danger. And as many of her colleagues have pointed out, front-line female journalists can’t forever stick to the safe options.
Whatever happened out on the dark, chilly waters of the Copenhagen Sound brought two remarkable careers to an end. Only Madsen, now in an isolation cell in the city’s Vestre prison, knows the truth. And for now he isn’t saying.
Among the theories is that he was using the sub for drug-smuggling.