- The Danish inventor Peter Madsen has been sentenced to life in prison for killing the journalist Kim Wall.
- Madsen invited Wall to board his homemade submarine in August. He was the last person to see her alive.
- Gruesome details of Wall’s death have emerged over the past few months.
An eccentric Danish inventor has been sentenced to life in prison for killing Swedish journalist Kim Wall.
Peter Madsen, a 47-year-old entrepreneur and aerospace engineer, was the last person seen with Wall after he invited her on his home-made submarine last August.
The submarine sank, Madsen escaped, and Wall’s dismembered body washed up on Copenhagen’s shores days later, police said.
Wall was 30 and worked as a freelance journalist. The invitation onboard the UC3 Nautilus in Copenhagen was a response to Wall’s request to meet him so she could write an article about him.
Several horrific details of the death have emerged over the past few months. Prosecutors have found evidence that:
- Wall died either from strangulation or having her throat cut.
- Her body was dismembered, with chunks of metal attached to her remains apparently so they would sink to the bottom of the sea.
- Her head, legs, and clothes were dumped in a plastic bag in the sea.
- Madsen used a saw, knife, and tapered screwdrivers to hit, cut, and stab Wall before she died.
- Wall was stabbed multiple times in the genitals, according to a post-mortem exam of her remains.
- She also stabbed with syringes, which resulted in needlestick wounds on parts of her body.
- The journalist was strapped to pipes inside Madsen's vessel, likely with straps Madsen had brought on board or with her own stockings.
A Copenhagen court on Wednesday convicted Madsen of murdering Wall, sexual assault without intercourse for the stabbing of Wall's genitals, and violating her corpse, tweeted Julie Thomsen, a reporter at the trial.
Madsen previously denied murder and sexual assault, and plans to appeal the verdict.
He also changed his story a number of times after Wall's body parts were found. He originally claimed the journalist was killed by a metal hatch slamming shut on her inside the submarine, then said she died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
In court he admitted, however, dismembering her body in order to lift it out of the vessel's hatch.
"What do you do when you have a big problem?" he said, according to Sky News. "You divide it into something smaller."
Click here for Business Insider's full coverage of Kim Wall's disappearance and Madsen's trial.
