Journo's severed head, legs surface
Ghastly turn in submarine ‘killer’ probe
Danish navy divers recovered the severed head and legs of Swedish journalist Kim Wall — a find that debunks the tale of her death spun by her alleged killer, authorities said Saturday.
Wall, a 30-year-old Columbia journalism-school graduate, went missing Aug. 10 after she boarded Danish inventor Peter Madsen’s (right) self-built submarine for an interview.
Madsen, 46, said he buried Wall’s remains at sea after she died in a “terrible accident” aboard his UC3 Nautilus submarine when a 155-pound hatch slipped and hit her in the head.
But there was no evidence of fractures or blunt-force trauma to Wall’s decapitated skull, authorities said.
The evidence divers brought to the surface was straight from a horror story.
Wall’s (above) legs and head, along with her clothes, underwear, stockings, shoes and a knife were encased in plastic bags weighted down with metal pipes.
Copenhagen police investigator Jens Moeller Jensen declined to comment on the knife. Wall’s arms have not yet been found.
Her mutilated remains and clothing were found in wa-ters off the island of Amager, near where Walls’ torso was discovered on Aug. 21.
The torso was riddled with 15 stabb wounds and marks indicated that someone had tried to press air out of the body so it wouldn’t float, according to police.
The puncture wounds were sustained “around the time of death or shortly afterwards,” senior prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen said during a pretrial hearing, according to a translation in Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet newspaper. Madsen was no stranger to brutal executions of women, au-thorities say. Investigators previously found videos stored on his computer hard drive of women being tortured, burned, hanged and even decapitated. “We think itit’s video recordings of true killing of women,” Buch-Jepsen said. Madsen said in court that other peo- ple had access to the hard drive.
Wall, a freelancer based in New York and China, did not know Madsen before she embarked on his submarine in search of a story.
Authorities launched a search for the 40-ton, 60-foot-long submarine the day after it failed to return to port. They found Madsen and his submersible about 30 miles off Copenhagen. Just after Madsen was rescued, the submarine sank.
The inventor initially claimed he dropped Wall off on Refshaleoen island, but investigators didn’t buy his tale and arrested him.
Madsen is to remain in custody at least until Oct. 31 — though the term of his detention could be extended.
He is being held on charges of murder and indecent handling of a corpse. Exactly how Wall died remains a mystery.