Danish inventor thought of Brad Pitt movie as he cut off journalist’s head
COPENHAGEN — A Danish inventor told police his mind was filled with thoughts of the 1990s serial killer film Se7en as he cut off the head of Kim Wall, a Swedish journalist.
Peter Madsen, 47, was defiant as Jakob Buch-Jepsen, the prosecutor, read records of a police interview in which Madsen described how the macabre Brad Pitt thriller sprang to mind as he decapitated Wall on his submarine.
“I don’t think that there’s anything unnatural in that remark,” he told the court. “In that film, there is a scene where a person’s head is cut off.”
Madsen, renowned in Denmark for his amateur submarine and space projects, stands accused of murdering Wall to fulfil his violent sexual fantasies. The 30-year-old journalist joined him on his submarine on Aug. 10, 2017, to research an article on his amateur space project, but never returned.
Asked by the prosecutor if it was a coincidence he searched for videos of beheadings online just days before cutting off Wall’s head, the inventor retorted: “Jakob, would you think it was strange if you had seen a film about a nuclear bomb and then a nuclear bomb exploded?”
Madsen continued to maintain that Wall died after a malfunction on his submarine filled the vessel’s mess room with toxic exhaust fumes, after which he went into a psychosis and cut up her body to dispose of it.
He admitted to using a sharpened screwdriver to skewer parts of Wall’s body.
“I put some punctures in the body parts because I didn’t want them to be inflated by gases ... there was nothing sexual in it for me.”
Madsen described how he cut off Wall’s legs and arms in the vessel’s lavatory, and used a knife to cut off her head, describing the last act as “very unpleasant and not planned.”