Submarine Inventor Peter Madsen Charged With Murdering Swedish Journalist Kim Wall
Update, January 16, 2018: Peter Madsen has been charged with murdering Kim Wall.
Madsen has been charged with premeditated murder in addition to dismemberment and "sexual relations other than intercourse of a particularly dangerous nature." …
Madsen, who is scheduled to go on trial on March 8, could face a sentence ranging from five years to life if found guilty. Prosecutors said they were seeking a life sentence.
[CNN]
Update, October 4, 2017: More evidence has emerged about the death of Kim Wall, the Swedish journalist who died aboard a Danish inventor's submarine in August. Prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen told a court this week that investigators had found violent footage on submarine owner Peter Madsen's hard drive and that Wall's body had been stabbed 15 times.
Mr Buch-Jepsen said images "which we presume to be real" found on a hard drive believed to belong to Mr Madsen showed women being tortured, decapitated and burned.
An autopsy discovered knife wounds to Ms Wall's genitals and ribcage, which are believed to have been caused "around or shortly after her death."
However, an exact cause of death is yet to be established.
[BBC News]
Madsen claims that Wall died after accidentally hitting her head and that he subsequently sank his submarine in a suicide attempt. He will be held on murder charges for four more months.
Previously: Today, Danish police confirmed that a mutilated, headless body found washed ashore on Monday night is that of Kim Wall, a Swedish journalist who went missing almost two weeks ago. Kim had paid a visit to Peter Madsen, an engineer about whom she was reporting a story, on his private submarine on August 10. Here's what you need to know about Wall's career, Madsen's changing story and the police investigation into Wall's death.
Wall Was Working On A Story About Madsen When She Went Missing
Wall went aboard Madsen's submarine, the Nautilus, on the evening of Thursday, August 10 to conduct an interview with Madsen, 46.
Ms Wall, 30, was reported missing by her boyfriend in the early hours of 11 August, after she failed to return from the trip on Peter Madsen's homemade submarine, the Nautilus.
A freelance journalist who had written for the Guardian, New York Times and South China Morning Post, she is said to have been researching a feature about the inventor and the Nautilus, which he built in 2008 with crowdfunding.
[BBC News]
Madsen Is An Eccentric 'Hobby Engineer' Who Designed And Owned The Submarine
Madsen designed the Nautilus, which was ostensibly the world's largest private submarine. Madsen became the sole proprietor of the Nautilus in 2015 after fighting with a team of volunteers who helped maintain it.
In 2015, after a dispute with the group of volunteers maintaining it, ownership of the Nautilus was transferred to Mr Madsen, says a statement on the website (in Danish).
"You may think that a curse is lying on Nautilus. That curse is me," he had messaged members of the board, according to the statement. "There will not be peace on Nautilus for as long as I exist."
The craft finally re-launched earlier this year. It has a diesel and an electric motor and is 17.8m in length.
[BBC News]
Madsen now runs an organization called the Rocket-Madsens Space Laboratory, which aims to launch a human being into space.
Early In The Morning After Wall Disappeared, The Nautilus Sank
Not long after police began searching for Wall, the Nautilus sank off the coast of Copenhagen. Madsen was rescued from the submarine, but Wall was nowhere to be found. Madsen attributed the sinking to a ballast tank malfunction, but a witness said it looked like Madsen had sunk the submarine deliberately.
"I couldn't close any hatches or anything," Madsen told a Danish television station.
But a witness contradicted this. He told reporters that he saw Madsen emerge from the belly of the vessel and stay in the submarine's tower until water began pouring into it.
Only then did Madsen swim to a nearby boat, the witness said.
"There was no panic at all," he told a Danish outlet. "The man was absolutely calm."
Madsen First Said He Had Dropped Off Wall In Copenhagen But Later Said She'd Died In An Accident
The details of the "accident" that Madsen said took Wall's life aren't known.
Mr. Madsen initially told investigators that he and Ms. Wall had gone out on the submarine, which he had designed, on the evening of Aug. 10 for an article Ms. Wall was working on, and that he had dropped her off later that night in a remote section of the port of Copenhagen.
But he later changed his story, telling investigators that Ms. Wall died accidentally on the submarine, which sank, and that he had buried her at sea.
Madsen has been charged with "negligent manslaughter" and is being detained by police.
Wall's Badly Mutilated Body Was Discovered By A Passing Cyclist On Monday
On Monday, August 21, a cyclist found a headless torso on the edge of Amager Island, the island on which part of Copenhagen is situated.
Her torso — missing its arms, legs and head — was found by a cyclist on the edge of Amager Island on Monday afternoon, near where the submarine sank on Aug. 11. A postmortem examination began that night.
Police matched the body's DNA with Wall's DNA obtained from her hairbrush and toothbrush. Other physical evidence suggests violence aboard the Nautilus and an attempt by Madsen to ensure that her body sank.
[L]ead investigator Jens Møller said that the police have found Wall's blood in Madsen's submarine, the 'Nautilus', and the torso that had been found had metal parts tied to it to prevent it from floating to the surface.
Møller also said that the torso had sustained post-mortem damage as if someone was trying to release all the air and gases from the body and ensure that it remained submerged.
Wall Is Being Remembered By Family And Friends As A Dedicated Journalist
In a Facebook post written after Wall's remains were identified, Wall's mother, Ingrid Wall, described her daughter as a courageous, hard-working journalist who traveled the world in the hopes of telling the stories of marginalized people. The Independent translated her message from the Danish:
"During the horrific days since Kim disappeared, we have had countless evidence of how loved and appreciated she was, as a human and friend as well as a professional journalist.
"From all corners of the world, evidence of Kim's ability to be a person that makes a difference." …
Her mother said: "She has found and told stories from different parts of the globe, stories that must be written. Kim travelled for several months in the South Pacific to let the world know what is happening to the population on the islands that sink. She allowed us to travel to the Haiti earthquake, to the torture chamber of Idi Amin in Uganda and the minefield in Sri Lanka.
"She gave voice to the weak, vulnerable and marginalised people. That voice had been needed for a long, long time, now it has been silenced."
BuzzFeed interviewed several of Wall's friends and colleagues, who remembered her as a "badass" and an "artist."
"What's so fantastic about the stories Kim writes is not that she writes about things no one has reported on, but her ability to give her subjects incredible humanity, to write their stories in a vivid and most of the time, a humorous way, and to put individuals' stories into a bigger social and historical context," said Yan Cong, a photographer from Beijing, who became close friends with Wall in the last 18 months.
The pair had worked together on an article about Beijing's "beautification campaign" and they struggled to find a publisher. "But Kim would take any risk to work on stories she cares about so wholeheartedly that the results don't seem matter to her," said Cong.
[BuzzFeed]