◆ READER DISCRETION ADVISED ◆ This article contains accounts of murder and the disposal of human remains. It is written with full respect for Kim Wall and sourced entirely from official court records and verified journalism. Reader discretion is advised.
She was a journalist who had reported from North Korea, Uganda, Haiti, and Sri Lanka — one of the most fearless foreign correspondents of her generation. On a summer evening in August 2017, she boarded a homemade submarine in Copenhagen harbour to interview an inventor. She sent her boyfriend a text saying she would be home later that night. She was thirty years old. She was never coming home.
THE JOURNALIST
Kim Wall was the kind of journalist that serious publications spend years trying to develop and rarely manage to keep. Swedish-born, educated at the London School of Economics and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, she had built a career as a freelance foreign correspondent that took her to places most reporters never reach and produced stories that most editors never find.
She had reported from North Korea — one of the most closed and controlled societies on earth, a country that requires a particular combination of tenacity, composure, and intelligence to navigate as a journalist. She had reported from Uganda, from Haiti in the aftermath of its earthquake, from Sri Lanka. She had written for the Guardian, the New York Times, Time Magazine, Der Spiegel, and dozens of other outlets. She was not someone who stumbled into difficult situations. She was a professional who sought them out deliberately, assessed their risks carefully, and managed them with the competence of someone who had been doing it for years.
Her work was characterized by a specific quality of attention — the ability to locate the human story inside the political one, to find the individual experience within the large-scale event and render it in language that made the reader understand why it mattered. People who worked with her described a reporter with exceptional instincts and exceptional discipline. Someone who asked the right questions and waited for the full answer before moving to the next one.
In the summer of 2017, she was in Copenhagen developing a profile of Peter Madsen — a self-taught Danish engineer who had, with volunteer labour and considerable resourcefulness, built a working submarine from scratch. It was the kind of story she was drawn to: eccentric, human, the unconventional ambition of someone operating outside the ordinary boundaries of what people with his resources were supposed to be able to do.
She arranged an interview. She arrived at the harbour on the evening of August 10th. She boarded the UC3 Nautilus.
She sent her boyfriend a text saying she would be home later that night.
That was the last message anyone outside that submarine received from Kim Wall.
THE INVENTOR AND HIS VESSEL
Peter Madsen was forty-six years old and had cultivated a public reputation as an eccentric visionary. He had co-founded an amateur rocket programme. He had built the UC3 Nautilus — at the time of its construction, the largest privately built submarine in the world — using salvaged components and the work of volunteers who believed in the project. He was the subject of a documentary. He gave interviews. He presented himself with the comfortable ease of someone accustomed to being found interesting.
What investigators would later establish — from digital evidence recovered from his devices, from the testimony of people who had known him, and from the physical evidence aboard the Nautilus itself — was that the version of Peter Madsen available to the public was not the complete picture. Behind the eccentric inventor persona was a documented history of disturbing interests and behaviour toward women that had been escalating over a period of years before Kim Wall boarded his submarine.
When she arrived at the harbour that evening, the Nautilus was moored and ready. She boarded. They departed into the harbour. Night came.
She did not come home.
THE DISAPPEARANCE
When Kim did not return that night or the following morning, her boyfriend contacted the police. A search of Copenhagen harbour was initiated. The Nautilus was located the following day — not moored where it had been, but partially submerged in the water some distance from the harbour.
Peter Madsen was pulled from the sinking vessel and brought to shore. He was questioned immediately about Kim Wall's whereabouts. His account was specific and confident: he had dropped her off safely at a Copenhagen harbour the previous evening before an accident sank his submarine. She had been alive and well when she disembarked. He could not understand why anyone was concerned.
Investigators checked the harbour where he claimed to have dropped her. There were no witnesses. CCTV coverage of the area showed nothing consistent with his account. The tender boat he described using to bring her ashore could not be located. His account had no supporting evidence of any kind.
Then his account changed.
He told investigators that Kim had in fact died aboard the submarine — that she had been struck by a hatch cover that fell accidentally, killing her instantly. He had panicked, he said. He had not known what to do. He had made a terrible decision and disposed of her body at sea. It had been an accident. He had not harmed her.
Ten days after Kim Wall boarded the Nautilus, a cyclist on a path near the Amager coast found a human torso floating in the water.
It was Kim Wall.
Ten days after she boarded the submarine, her torso was found floating near the Amager coast. In the weeks that followed, police divers recovered her remaining body parts from the seabed — each one weighted down, deliberately scattered across the bay. The accident narrative could not survive what the evidence showed.
WHAT THE EVIDENCE ESTABLISHED
The recovery of Kim Wall's remains was not a single event. It was a prolonged, meticulous, deeply distressing process that extended over weeks as police divers worked the waters of Copenhagen Bay systematically. Her torso had been weighted — objects deliberately attached to prevent it from surfacing. It had surfaced regardless, as a result of decomposition gases overcoming the weight rather than any failure on the part of whoever had placed them. Her remaining body parts were recovered from the seabed and along the coastline over the following weeks, each one weighted in the same deliberate fashion.
The accident narrative did not survive contact with the post-mortem findings. The injuries to Kim Wall's remains were inconsistent with an accidental blow from a falling hatch cover. The manner in which her body had been dismembered and distributed across the bay was inconsistent with a panicked, improvised response to an unexpected death. The weights themselves were consistent with preparation rather than improvisation.
Investigators examining the Nautilus recovered tools and materials consistent with premeditation. Digital evidence from Madsen's devices — his computer, his phone, accounts and files accessed in the period before August 10th — revealed a documented and escalating interest in extreme violence against women. The picture that assembled itself from the physical and digital evidence was not of a man who had responded catastrophically to an unexpected accident. It was of a man who had made specific preparations before Kim Wall arrived.
He had brought tools aboard. He had brought restraints. He had done these things before a journalist climbed down into his submarine to ask him about his dreams.
Madsen continued to adjust his account throughout the investigation. He eventually acknowledged Kim's death aboard the vessel and acknowledged dismembering and disposing of her remains, while maintaining to the end that her death had not been intentional. The court that tried him reached a different conclusion.
THE TRIAL
Peter Madsen was tried in Copenhagen in the spring of 2018. The prosecution presented the physical evidence, the digital evidence, the post-mortem findings, and the full timeline of events across the period of the investigation. Madsen's defence maintained that whatever had occurred aboard the Nautilus, it had not been premeditated murder.
On April 25th, 2018, the Copenhagen City Court convicted Peter Madsen of premeditated murder, sexual assault, and indecent handling of a corpse.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment — the most severe sentence available under Danish law and one applied in only the most serious cases. The sentence was upheld on appeal. In October 2020, Madsen attempted to escape from Herstedvester Prison, producing a fake explosive device and taking a female staff member hostage before being apprehended outside the prison walls. He was returned to custody. The escape attempt added further charges.
He remains in prison. His sentence stands.
KIM WALL
The tendency in cases like this is for the victim to be reduced to the circumstances of her death — to become, in public memory, the woman who boarded a submarine and did not return, rather than the woman who spent a decade crossing the world to bring back stories that needed to be told.
Kim Wall was thirty years old when she died. She had already built a body of work that most journalists spend entire careers attempting. She had reported from places that most people never visit, on subjects that most readers would never otherwise encounter. She had done it with rigour, with compassion, and with the specific skill of someone who understood that the point of foreign correspondence was not the foreign — it was the correspondence. The human transmission across distance and difference.
She had a partner who waited for her to come home from Copenhagen harbour. She had parents who had watched her career with the mixture of pride and fear that comes from loving someone who goes to difficult places and trusts that her training and her judgment will bring her back. She had colleagues and friends and sources who had trusted her with their stories because she had shown them, repeatedly, that she would handle those stories with care.
The last story she was working on was a profile of an inventor with a submarine. It should have been a good piece. It should have run and been read and been forgotten in the way that good features are eventually superseded, displaced by the next piece and the one after that, the continuing output of a journalist who had many more stories left to tell.
The Kim Wall Memorial Fund, established by her family, supports female journalists working in international and conflict reporting — the territory Kim had made her own. It ensures that the work she devoted herself to continues, carried by women who might not otherwise have had the resources to do it. It is the most fitting memorial her profession could offer.
She sent a text saying she would be home later. She had reported from North Korea and Uganda and Haiti and Sri Lanka. She boarded a submarine in a harbour in Copenhagen on a summer evening because she was a journalist and it was her job and she was very good at it.
Her name was Kim Wall.
Remember her name rather than his.
- Sources & Further Reading: This account is based entirely on public court records from the Copenhagen City Court proceedings of 2018, the verdict of April 25th, 2018, and verified journalism covering the case including reporting by the Guardian, BBC News, the New York Times, and Danish outlets DR and Politiken. The post-mortem findings and forensic evidence are documented in the official court record. Peter Madsen's 2020 prison escape attempt is documented in Danish police and court records. The Kim Wall Memorial Fund is documented at kimwallfund.com. This article is written with full respect for Kim Wall and her family and is sourced entirely from the public record. Peter Madsen's life sentence remains in force as of the date of publication.