Peter Madsen was, maybe, a Danish Elon Musk. He was a submarine builder and important into engineering and a face in the media.
He was born on January 12, 1971 in Denmark, to parents Annie and Carl. He grew up on the island of Zealand. His home life was turbulent. Annie was 36 years younger than Carl. Annie had three other boys from two previous men. Carl was allegedly abusive toward his three stepsons. Annie left when Peter was six, taking the children with her. After a couple of years, Madsen returned to his father, with whom he shared an interest in rockets. His love of rockets would stay with him the rest of his life. Then, while attending primary and secondary school in Høng, Madsen with the help of chemistry and physics teacher Johannes Fischer, developed his first large rocket at Høng and built it in his father’s workshop. In 1987, Madsen was accepted at the gymnasium (upper secondary school) in the nearby town of Kalundborg. Besides that, Peter never had a formal education. He was self-taught in pretty much everything he did. He would join rocket clubs and engineering groups and he took courses in welding and engineering to learn something about submarines.
He was basically being funded by people and organizations that saw his potential. He was outgoing and made a name for himself. In the spring of that year he was going to the depths of the ocean and the depths of space.
In May 2008, Peter co-founded Copenhagen Suborbitals with Danish Architect Kristian von Bengtson, an amateur space program that built homemade rockets. On the 3rd of May, he launched the Nautilus, which at the time, was the largest privately made submarine in the world. Around 2008, Peter Madsen said: “I’m a maker of extreme machines. I’d say, I am originally educated a little bit as an engineer, a little bit as a naval engineer, a marine engineer. I discovered that with the skills that I gained, I can build a submarine… On a test day, I’ll sit on a rock crying, because it’s so hard to organize people and to make it all work. And there’s so much you have to think about, and you can be very, very alone in it...”
UC3 Nautilus, a submarine, had been built over three years by Peter and volunteers. It costed roughly $200.000 to build and it was crowdfunded. It was a small one, for about eight people in it. Madsen built three submarines: UC1 Freya, UC2 Kraka and UC3 Nautilus.
He lived on the Nautilus for a time. He was everywhere: interviews, news reports, documentaries and even at a Tedx talk in 2013.
Peter married in 2011 a filmmaker. Her identity was never released. Madsen said that he had lived in an “open relationship”. In 2014, Peter left Copenhagen’s Suborbitals after having an argument with the other co-founder. Peter was described as eccentric at the best of times. The same year, he set up a new space company, called Rocket Madsen’s space laboratory (RML). Madsen blogged about his activities on the website of the Danish news magazine. The goal was the development and construction of a crewed spacecraft. From 2016, RML was developing a nano satellite launch vehicle using venture investments.
In 2015 Peter said the Nautilus was cursed and that there would never be peace on the Nautilus as long as he existed. This takes us to 2017 on the last voyage of the Nautilus.
In 2017 spring a freelance journalist, named Kim Wall, promising young journalist at the beginning of her career, learned about Madsen and she wanted to interview him, but he refused. Kim was from Sweden. She grew up in Trelleborg, pretty much right on the Sweden-Denmark border. She traveled the world writing about the things that were in it. Kim was 30 years old. She graduated from the London School of Economics and worked in Australia for the European union and in India and in Hong Kong. She studied at Colombia in New York and in 2017 she had been around the globe more than once. In 2017 she was planning on moving to Beijing with her boyfriend, Danish designer Ole Stobbe. On the 10th of August 2017, as Kim and her partner were preparing ‘a goodbye party’, Kim got a text from Peter. He accepted to meet her.
She went off and met him and then not long after she texted her partner that Peter had offered to take her out on Nautilus. She was going to be there for several hours. Her boyfriend began to worry, because it was almost evening. They had to leave early the next morning and he couldn’t reach out to her. He even went to look for her, to see if there was any sign of her or the submarine. With no sign of Kim or submarine, he called the police at 1 45 a.m. and reported Kim missing. Boats and helicopters started searching the area. Just after 10 a.m. on the 11th of August the Nautilus was spotted. Peter was in the tower and the submarine was sinking. Peter began swimming toward a nearby boat and was taken ashore. By this time news had spread that Kim Wall was missing. He told media that everything was fine, showing thumbs up.
The following day, a court ruled that he be held in pre-trial detention for 24 days on a charge of negligent homicide. Madsen initially claimed that he had dropped Wall off on land at the night before the sinking. He later changed his statement, saying that she had died on board in an accident, and that he had buried her at sea. He claimed that he accidentally dropped the hatch on her head when she was getting in, and he panicked, tied a rope around her, got out of the submarine and pulled her out with the rope. According to the Danish police, the submarine was deliberately sunk, contradicting Madsen’s explanation regarding a technical fault.
On August the 21st someone was riding the bike around Amager island, between Refshaleøen and Køge Bay. Along the shoreline he came across a human torso.
DNA confirmed it was Kim. A month later divers found inside plastic bags Kim’s head, clothing, limbs, a saw and a knife.
Investigators found on Peter’s computer at Rocket Madsen some files, a lot of sadistic pornography such as strangling, asphyxiation, decapitation, impalement etc. There were many of that. Peter Madsen was a regular at sex fetish parties, according to a report from Wired magazine. He was allegedly practicing asphyxiation sex. He apparently was picking up women and taking them to his submarine. He had been a member of a BDSM group, but they expelled him. Their explanation was that he was too passive.
The autopsy showed she’d been stabbed 15 times in and around her vagina and the charges against Peter were changed from involuntary manslaughter to manslaughter.
In January 2018, Madsen was charged with murder, indecent handling of a corpse (due to dismemberment), and sexual assault (due to stabbings in genital region). The murder was premeditated. Peter had brought a saw, a knife, sharp screwdrivers, zip ties and so on. He bound Kim because restraint marks were on her wrists and ankles. He tortured her. The motive was purely sexual, the prosecution said, as well as he planned to torture and murder her. He allegedly intended to record it.
In April 2018, he was convicted of the August 2017 murder of Swedish journalist Kim Wall on board his submarine, UC3 Nautilus, and sentenced to life imprisonment which typically amounts to 15 years in Denmark. He appealed his sentence and lost it.
A psychiatric evaluation of Madsen described him as a narcissistic psychopath, lacking in empathy but not psychotic or delusional.
Madsen was admitted to the hospital in August 2018 after being assaulted by an 18-year-old inmate in Storstrøm Prison. Madsen was also in a relationship with a female prison guard.
On 20 October 2020, Madsen escaped from prison. He threatened guards with a pistol. He was arrested again in a residential area near Herstedvester Prison. When police discovered that he was in possession of a pistol-like object and was wearing a belt that could potentially contain explosives, he was surrounded until bomb experts had determined that it was a decoy. On 9 February 2021, a Copenhagen court handed down a 21-month prison sentence to Madsen, for his attempted escape from jail. The additional sentence was not added to the life sentence, but may play a role if a future probation request is made.
Peter Madsen 11 months before the murder.
“One perspective would be and this is as just me asking you as ordinary people. You are aware of the fact, maybe, that psychopath exists amongst us, human predators that walk around and grabed people and used them and throw them out used and, maybe, stalked them afterwards. There are human predators amongst us. And psychopathic people are often very charismatic and they are excellent speakers. They are convincing, they have illusion of self- grandiosity, and have no regard for anyone else and he will try really to punish those who have been under his spell. He will try to punish them afterwards by stalking them, by talking badly about all those things. There is possibility that you would simply come upon a human predator. And I wouldn’t know! Because, do the psychopath know that he is a psychopath?! I am not sure.”
