Kim Wall and the interview aboard the Nautilus

What happened

Kim Wall was 30, a Swedish freelance journalist. In August 2017 she was living in Copenhagen with her partner, Ole Stobbe, and the two of them were about to move to Beijing. On the evening of August 10 they were getting ready for their farewell party.

That was when Peter Madsen got back to her. Madsen was a Danish inventor known for building rockets and for the UC3 Nautilus, one of the largest privately built submarines in the world, and Wall had asked him for an interview earlier in the year. He texted to say she could come aboard. She agreed to go out for about two hours and boarded around 7 p.m. She was photographed standing in the tower as the submarine slid out of the harbour at Refshaleøen.

The Nautilus did not come back. At 1:43 a.m., Stobbe called the police.

The search

At about 10:30 the next morning the submarine was spotted in Køge Bay, and half an hour later it sank. Madsen was pulled from the water and arrested. Wall was not with him. He told police he had dropped her off on land the night before.

Investigators came to believe he had sunk the submarine on purpose.

On August 21, a cyclist found part of Wall’s body on a beach on the island of Amager. Metal had been attached to it to keep it from floating. By then Madsen had changed his account: he now said she died in an accident on board, and in a September court hearing he said the hatch cover had struck her on the head.

On October 6, police divers working with Swedish cadaver dogs found bags in Køge Bay with more of her remains. Examiners found no sign of the blow his story needed. Madsen’s explanation shifted again. Now he admitted dismembering her body but said she might have died from exhaust fumes while he was up on deck. Tests found no trace of exhaust gas in her lungs. The last of her remains were recovered in late November.

The trial

In January 2018, Madsen was charged with murder, sexual assault and indecent handling of a corpse. Prosecutors told the court that police had found videos on his computer of women being killed. Because Wall’s body had been recovered in parts, examiners could not establish exactly how she died.

On April 25, 2018, Copenhagen City Court convicted Madsen on all three charges and sentenced him to life in prison, rejecting his account that her death was an accident. He appealed the sentence, and in September the High Court of Eastern Denmark upheld it. Two years later, in a Danish documentary, he admitted killing her.

In October 2020 he briefly escaped from prison by threatening a staff member, and was caught about 500 meters from the prison.

Wall’s family and friends created the Kim Wall Memorial Fund, which pays for women and non-binary journalists to report the kind of stories she chased.