The Murder of Kim Wall

Who Kim Wall was

Kim Wall was a 30-year-old Swedish freelance journalist who divided her time between New York and Beijing. A graduate of the London School of Economics and Columbia Journalism School, she wrote for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper's, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy and Time. Her reporting tended to look at people and places that larger news organisations overlooked, with assignments in Sri Lanka, Haiti, Cuba and Uganda. In 2016 her work from the Marshall Islands, on climate change and the legacy of US nuclear weapons testing there, earned her the Hansel Mieth digital award.

In August 2017 she was in Copenhagen researching a profile of Peter Madsen, a Danish inventor who had built his own submarine.

A voyage that did not return

On 10 August 2017 Wall went aboard Madsen's homemade submarine, the UC3 Nautilus, in the waters off Copenhagen to interview him. She did not come back. The following day the submarine sank and Madsen was rescued alone. He initially told authorities that he had dropped Wall off on an island the previous evening.

Within days, on 13 August, Danish police said the evidence indicated that the vessel had been sunk deliberately. Madsen's version of events then changed: on 21 August he told police that Wall had died in an accident on board and that he had disposed of her body at sea. Two days later police confirmed that human remains found near Copenhagen were hers, and further remains were recovered over the following months, the last in November 2017.

Charges and the case against Madsen

Madsen was first held on suspicion of manslaughter and of mistreating a corpse. In September 2017 the charge was raised to murder. He continued to deny killing Wall, offering accounts of an accidental death that shifted over time, while admitting that he had disposed of her body.

Prosecutors argued that the killing had been planned and that its motive was sexual. Because there were no witnesses to what happened inside the submarine, their case relied on circumstantial evidence: forensic findings, material seized from Madsen, and the inconsistencies in his own statements. Pathologists were not able to establish a precise cause of death.

Conviction and appeal

On 25 April 2018 Copenhagen City Court found Madsen guilty of the premeditated murder of Kim Wall and of sexually assaulting her, and sentenced him to life imprisonment, the most severe penalty available in Danish law. These are court findings, not allegations: the conviction is final.

Madsen appealed only against the length of his sentence, not against the guilty verdict, asking for a fixed term instead of an open-ended one. On 26 September 2018 the Eastern High Court (Østre Landsret) rejected the appeal and upheld the life sentence.

Later developments

In September 2020 a Danish documentary series, Secret Recordings with Peter Madsen, broadcast extracts from more than 20 hours of phone calls between Madsen and a journalist. Asked whether he had killed Wall, he said yes, and said that the guilt was his alone. It was the first time he had admitted the killing, which he had denied throughout the trial; the recordings did not clarify exactly what happened on board.

The following month, in October 2020, Madsen briefly escaped from Herstedvester prison in suburban Copenhagen after threatening staff with an imitation gun and a fake explosive device. Police caught him about 500 metres from the prison after staff saw him get into a passing van. In February 2021 Glostrup City Court sentenced him to an additional 21 months for the escape. That term adds no time to his life sentence, but it may count against him if he later applies for release on probation. No later court decisions in the case were found in reporting through 2026.

Legal context and legacy

Life imprisonment is the harshest sentence in the Danish system, and unlike a fixed term it has no set end date. In practice, prisoners serving life become eligible to have their cases reviewed after a period that averages around 16 years, and they can be held for longer if they are still judged to pose a danger to others. That open-ended quality is why Madsen sought a fixed term on appeal, and why the High Court's decision mattered: it kept the open-ended term in place after prosecutors argued that the crime was planned and sexually motivated.

Wall's parents, brother, partner and friends set up the Kim Wall Memorial Fund, run with the International Women's Media Foundation. Since 2018 it has awarded annual grants of 5,000 US dollars to women and nonbinary journalists pursuing the kind of stories about subcultures and overlooked communities that Wall was known for, with recipients announced each year on her birthday. Her death also prompted wider discussion about the risks faced by freelance journalists, who often meet sources alone and without the support of a newsroom.