The Submarine Case

Peter Madsen was a Danish inventor and self-taught engineer known for amateur rocket projects and for building the UC3 Nautilus, a privately made submarine about 58 feet long. On the evening of August 10, 2017, Swedish freelance journalist Kim Wall, 30, went aboard in Copenhagen to interview him for a feature story.

The submarine never returned with her. The next morning the Nautilus sank in Køge Bay, and Madsen was picked up alone, first claiming he had dropped Kim off on land. Investigators concluded he had sunk the vessel on purpose. On August 21, Kim’s torso washed up on the shore of Amager, and divers later recovered more of her remains in weighted bags. Madsen’s explanation kept shifting. He eventually admitted cutting up her body but insisted her death had been an accident.

A Copenhagen court rejected his story. On April 25, 2018, Madsen was convicted of murder, sexual assault, and desecrating a body, and sentenced to life in prison. The High Court of Eastern Denmark upheld the life sentence that September. In a 2020 documentary he admitted to killing Kim. That October he briefly escaped from Herstedvester prison using a fake gun and was caught nearby.