Death on sub ‘an accident’
INVENTOR TELLS TRIAL HE DISMEMBERED BODY
Ina video tribute to the late Kim Wall, one friend remarks that the young Swedish journalist “seemed to be utterly and uniquely unafraid of going into uncharted territories.” On Aug. 10, 2017, Wall’s curiosity was to send her on a journey from which she would never return, when she boarded the submarine of well-known Danish inventor Peter Madsen. What happened after Wall, 30, got on the UC3 Nautilus as the sun set over Copenhagen has gripped Denmark ever since. On Thursday, Madsen, on trial for her murder and dismemberment, said little to clear up the mystery. Sitting on his hands as he testified at the opening of his trial in Copenhagen City Court, Madsen appeared irritated as he brushed off suggestions of sexual activity with Wall before or after her death.
He told the court that Wall “had a wonderful evening until it ended in an accident.”
He described how he found Wall lifeless after a sudden pressure problem in the submarine.
“I could not open the hatches. I heard Kim, it was not good,” he said. He added that he tried to give her first aid when he finally reached her, but stopped because it was impossible to stay inside. “There was a risk of having a submarine with two deaths,” he told the court. Madsen had offered shifting explanations for Wall’s death prior to the trial. He initially told authorities he had dropped Wall off on a Copenhagen island several hours into their submarine trip. Then he said that Wall died accidentally inside the submarine when a hatch fell and hit her on the head. He has admitted to dismembering Wall’s body before he “buried her at sea,” saying he could not lift her up the submarine tower in one piece to throw her overboard so he had to cut her up. Earlier on Thursday, prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen opened the trial by describing in detail how Wall’s body parts were found on the ocean bed. Buch-Jepsen said a psychiatric report has concluded the 47-year-old inventor has “no empathy or feelings of guilt,” adding he is an intelligent man “with psychopathic tendencies.” Wall grew up in southern Sweden, and studied at Paris’ Sorbonne university, the London School of Economics and Columbia University in New York, from where she graduated with a master’s degree in journalism in 2013.
She wrote freelance for The New York Times, The Guardian and other publications. On the Remembering Kim Wall website, she is seen telling the camera of her career ambitions.
“This is exactly the kind of stories I like to do,” she says, speaking from a vessel in the Pacific after she had visited a nuclear waste site on Ene- wetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
“Where I can combine onthe-ground, shoe-leather reporting with a foreign policy lens. Hopefully I’ll carve out a space for myself in the male-dominated world of foreign policy.” Caterina Clerici, a friend from Columbia, told The Associated Press Wall had “a soft spot for misfits, for places and people that did not conform.”
On the evening of Aug 10, 2017, Wall and her partner, Ole Stobbe Nielsen, had been throwing a goodbye party before moving to China. That evening, however, Wall received a text message from Madsen saying an interview was possible. She had been trying to speak with him for months, and she left the party to join him, lest she lose her chance. In 2008 Madsen had co-founded Copenhagen Suborbitals, a private aerospace consortium that in 2011 launched a homemade, nine-metre rocket eight kilometres into the sky — a step toward its unrealized goal of launching a person into space.
When Madsen fell out with his former partners in 2014, however, he had gone on to open his own operation, Rocket Madsen Space Lab. Wall was said to be writing a story on the rival rocket ventures.
Writing for Wired last month, Wall’s friend May Jeong reported that Wall’s boyfriend was “insanely close to saying yes” to going on the submarine trip, but decided against it because people had gathered at their home.
“A while later, Stobbe was tending to a quayside fire when a friend told him to look up,” Jeong wrote. “He saw the setting sun and Wall aboard the submarine in the distance, waving toward him.”
Early the following morning a search was launched after Stobbe raised the alarm when he stopped getting texts from Wall. Madsen was rescued from the sinking, nearly 18-metrelong submarine at around 11 a.m. that day, but insisted he had dropped Wall off at a nearby island hours earlier. The inventor was arrested, and on Aug. 12 appeared before a pre-trial custody hearing facing preliminary manslaughter charges, which were later upgraded. Wall was not found until Aug. 21, when a dismembered torso was discovered in the sea off Copenhagen. In the weeks that followed, divers found mutilated body parts in plastic bags on the ocean floor, one by one. The Nautilus was surfaced on Aug. 13, and investigators eventually found dried blood inside. Upon its discovery, it emerged that Wall’s torso had been stabbed multiple times.
Police believe Madsen sank the submarine on purpose, and found videos of women being tortured and killed on his personal computer in his hangar. He did not make the videos himself, investigators said. Prosecutor Buch-Jepsen said the cause of Wall’s death has yet not been established, but said her blood was found on the military-style bodysuit that Madsen wore when he was arrested, and on Madsen’s nose.
If found guilty, he faces between five years and life in prison.
I COULD NOT OPEN THE HATCHES. I HEARD KIM, IT WAS NOT GOOD . ... THERE WAS A RISK OF HAVING A SUBMARINE WITH TWO DEATHS. — PETER MADSEN, DANISH INVENTOR