The Murder of Emilie Meng

Who Emilie Meng was

Emilie Meng was a 17-year-old from Korsør, a harbour town on the west coast of Zealand, Denmark. On the night of 9 to 10 July 2016 she went out in the nearby town of Slagelse with two friends and returned with them by train. At about 4 a.m. on Sunday 10 July the three said goodbye at Korsør station, and Emilie began to walk home on her own. Later that morning she was due to sing at a local church service at 9.30, but she never arrived, and she was reported missing the same day.

A long search and a discovery on Christmas Eve

Her disappearance became one of the most widely followed missing-person cases in Denmark. Police searched intensively, the national media covered the story for months, and members of the public sent in a steady flow of tips. For almost half a year there was no sign of her.

On the afternoon of 24 December 2016 a passer-by walking in the Regnemarks Bakke area near Borup, west of Køge, found a body in a lake roughly 60 kilometres from Korsør station. Police confirmed the next day that it was Emilie. They stated that she had been the victim of a crime and said they believed her body had been placed in the lake shortly after she disappeared. Hundreds of people later gathered at Korsør station to remember her.

An investigation that went cold

Despite the scale of the inquiry, the case remained unsolved for more than six years. As part of the work, police collected DNA from around 1,450 people and compared it with traces from the investigation, without identifying a perpetrator. Police later acknowledged how frustrating the long wait had been for her family.

A separate abduction and an arrest

The breakthrough came through a different crime. On the weekend of 15 and 16 April 2023 a 13-year-old girl was abducted near Kirkerup in south-west Zealand. Police found her alive on 16 April, around 27 hours after she went missing, and arrested a 32-year-old local man. During the investigation that followed, officers turned their attention to the unsolved Meng case.

On 26 April 2023 police announced that the man had been provisionally charged with the abduction, rape and murder of Emilie Meng. He was also charged over an incident in November 2022 in which a 15-year-old boarding-school student was threatened and the subject of an attempted rape. Police said they had seized a Hyundai i30 in Slovakia that the man had owned in 2016. Through his lawyer he denied the new charges, and at that stage they remained allegations to be tested in court. He was later publicly identified as Philip Patrick Westh.

Trial and verdict

The case was heard at the district court in Næstved, where professional judges sit together with lay jurors in serious criminal cases. Westh admitted that he had abducted the 13-year-old and sexually assaulted her while holding her for about 27 hours, but he denied killing Emilie Meng and denied the attack on the 15-year-old. The prosecution relied on DNA traces, on a roll of tape found at his home that the court found matched tape connected with Emilie's death, and on material from his possession, including violent pornography and short stories he had written about fantasies of abducting women.

On 28 June 2024 the court rejected his denials. The jury was unanimous, and Westh, then 33, was convicted of Emilie Meng's murder, of the offences against the 13-year-old and of the assault on the 15-year-old. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, the most severe penalty available under Danish law, and ordered to pay a total of 574,000 Danish kroner in compensation to victims and bereaved relatives.

Appeal withdrawn and a later confession

Immediately after the verdict, defence lawyer Karina Skou said Westh would appeal, seeking acquittal on the counts he had not admitted or, as an alternative, a lighter sentence. The appeal was due to be heard by the Eastern High Court in October 2025, but in September 2025 his lawyer said he had dropped it, leaving the district court judgment in place.

In May 2026, according to the Danish outlets Berlingske and DR as reported by Swedish broadcaster TV4, Westh admitted for the first time that he had killed Emilie Meng. He had denied the murder throughout the legal process and confessed after being questioned again. His lawyer told DR that he wished to take responsibility. The admission came close to ten years after Emilie disappeared.

Why the case matters

In Denmark the case became a symbol of both public solidarity and the limits of a conventional investigation. A large police operation, thousands of tips and mass DNA collection did not identify the killer for almost seven years, and the eventual solution grew out of the rapid rescue of a child in a separate case. The outcome also shows how Danish criminal procedure works in practice: suspects are first provisionally charged while evidence is gathered, guilt in the most serious cases is decided jointly by judges and lay jurors, and a convicted person may appeal to a High Court for a full rehearing.