Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERY: The Submarine Murder

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

In August 2017, Swedish journalist Kim Wall boarded a homemade submarine in Copenhagen to interview its inventor, Danish entrepreneur Peter Madsen, for a story. It was supposed to be a routine assignment, the kind of work she had done all over the world. She never came back. When the submarine sank the next day and Madsen was rescued alone, he claimed he had dropped Wall off safely on shore the night before. But his story kept changing, her body was found dismembered in the waters off Copenhagen, and the investigation that followed exposed a calculated and deeply disturbing crime. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy examines the death of Kim Wall, a talented young reporter whose curiosity took her into a killer's confined world, the shifting lies her murderer told to cover his tracks, and the chilling portrait of ego and control that emerged once the truth came to light.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap.

It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. A good reporter learns to get close to strangers to sit down with someone she's never met,

ask the hard questions, and come home with the story. Kim Wall was one of the best at doing exactly that. On the evening of August 10th, 2017, the 30-year-old journalist walked down to a dock in Copenhagen to interview a man she'd been trying to reach for months. He'd offered her something nowhere the reporter had gotten. A ride on his own private submarine. It was supposed to take a couple of hours. Kim was just days away from moving to the other side of the world for a new job,

and that night, she was throwing her own. going away party. She figured she'd slip out, get the interview, and be home before the party ended. Just after 8 o'clock, she sent her boyfriend one last text from Out on the Water. She said she was having an amazing time. She'd see him soon. She never did. This is the story of Kim Wall. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy and this is murder, true crime stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday,

with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crime house community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap, try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering cases with questions that I can't get out of my head. The ones where the evidence points in multiple directions, and every theory feels like a possibility.

I remember these episodes are also on YouTube with full video. Just search for Crime House Studios and be sure to like and subscribe. A heads up before we start. This story includes descriptions of sexual violence, dismemberment, and other graphic details. Please listen with care. Today I'm talking about the murder of Kim Wall, the Swedish journalist who had reported from some of the hardest places on earth. She survived war zones and dictatorships and cargo ships crossing the Pacific.

When she was killed, it happened a few miles away from a major European capital, doing the most ordinary thing a reporter can do. An interview. The man she was interviewing gave the police three different stories about what happened to her. Each one fell apart. And when detectives finally unearthed the truth, it turned a, beloved local celebrity into one of the most notorious criminals in Danish history. All that and more coming up.

Kim Wall was born on March 23rd, 1987 in southern Sweden. And in a way, her future was decided before she could even talk. Both of her parents were journalists. Her mother, Ingrid, and her father, Joachim, built their whole lives around the news. Every morning, the family read four. or five newspapers together at the table. The radio or the TV was almost always tuned to a news channel. And her parents took Kim and her younger brother along on assignments whenever they could.

By the time she was a year old, Kim had already tagged along on trips through a whole string of European countries. Wherever her parents' work happened to take them. And she soaked it all up. At just seven years old, Kim was already the kind of child who wanted to understand everything about the world, then tell everyone what she'd figured out. She never grew out of it.

By the time she finished high school, she knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life. She wanted to travel, meet people who were nothing like her, and tell their stories. So she made her dreams come true. Kim studied international relations at the London School of Economics. Then she earned a master's degree

journalism from Columbia University in New York, finishing in 2013 when she was 26. But she didn't wait for a diploma to start reporting. And while she was still a student, Kim was already going after stories most people wouldn't touch. She traveled to North Korea and wrote about the regime's strange attempt to build a world-class ski resort. She went to Sri Lanka and sat with survivors and veterans of a civil war that had dragged on for 26 years.

She even talked her way onto a small cargo ship and spent days crossing the open Pacific to reach the Marshall Islands, where the United States had detonated dozens of nuclear weapons back in the 1940s and 50s. She went so she could sit with the people who were still living with the fallout generations later. That was Kim.

She once described her beat as the undercurrents of rebellion. rebellion. She wanted to hand a microphone to the people history usually forgets. And everyone who met her, her professors, her fellow reporters, the people she interviewed said the same thing. They admired her curiosity and they trusted her. She had this way of making a stranger feel like the most interesting person in the room and actually meaning it. By her late 20s, Kim had built a serious career out of that gift. Her byline turned up in the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Atlantic. She reported from Haiti, Cuba, and all over. She came back with stories about ordinary people living through extraordinary things. For her, that was the whole point.

Not the danger, but the people. By early 2017, Kim was starting a new chapter. She was in a serious relationship with a Danish designer named Ola Stoba and the two of them were living together in Copenhagen in a neighborhood called Raffaalanen. It's a former industrial stretch along the harbor full of old shipyards and warehouses that have been turned into artist studios and workspaces. And it was right there in that scrappy, creative corner of the city that Kim found a story sitting practically on her doorstep. A group of amateur rocket enthusiasts were working out of some rented warehouses nearby. They were trying to build an open source crowdfunded space program from scratch with donated parts and volunteer labor. A handful of people chasing an impossible

dream on their own terms. It was exactly the kind of story Kim was drawn to. So she started interviewing the members and set her sights on the man at the center of it all. His name was Peter Madison. To Kim and to most of Denmark, Peter Madsen was a fascinating character. He was a self-taught inventor and a showman, the kind of guy the Danish press loved. They called him Rocket Madsen. He built rockets and submarines with almost no formal training, and he leaned into this image of a maverick genius who didn't play by anyone else's rules. It spent the 2000s building submarines by hand in a workshop at the Copenhagen Harbor.

His pride and joy was the one he launched in 2008, the UC3 Nautilus, named after the submarine in Jules Verne's 20,000 leagues under the sea. It was about 58 feet long and weighed around 40 tons, which made it one of the largest privately built submarines in the world of the time. For a while, Madsen even lived aboard it. He'd also co-founded an amateur spaceflight company called Copenhagen Sub-Orbitals with a fellow enthusiast named Christine von Benksson. Their dream was to build a rocket from scratch and one day launch a person into space.

But in 2014, the two men had a falling out. So Madsen left and started his own rival operations. Operation Rocket Madsen Space Laboratory. And he set himself a goal. Launch his own rocket before his old partners could launch theirs. That launch was supposed to happen in late August 2017. It was going to be his big moment. But that summer, Madsen's funding dried up and he had to cancel it.

And maybe that's part of why on August 10th, 2017, He finally answered a message from a persistent journalist who'd been trying to reach him for months. He needed the publicity, so he didn't just agree to talk to Kim Wall. He invited her out that very night for a ride on the Nautilus so she could interview him at sea. The timing was terrible. Kim and Ola were only about a week away from moving to Beijing, where Kim planned to dig into the people behind. China's booming economy. That night, the two of them were actually setting up for their own going away party at the apartment.

But the story was too good to pass up. So Kim and Ola made a plan. He would host the party. She would slip out for a quick trip around the harbor, get her interview, and be back before the night was over. She told Ola she was a little nervous about going underwater with a stranger, but she was fascinated by people who threw themselves completely into something, and Peter Madsen was exactly that kind of person. Around 7 p.m., Kim walked over to Madsen's workshop,

just a few minutes from her apartment where the Nautilus was docked. She'd never been on a submarine before. She and Madsen climbed up onto the deck, and the submarine pulled out into the harbor. It was just the two of them on board. Back at the apartment, Ola and some of their guests could see the whole thing. They watched Kim and Madsen standing together on the deck as the sub glided out across the water. Kim was smiling.

She turned and waved back at them, still dressed for a summer evening in a skirt and a light jacket. Then just after 8 p.m., Ola got a text from her. She sounded happy. She said, quote, I'm still alive, BTW, but I'm going down now. She told him, she loved him. And she added, almost as a joke, that Madsen had even brought coffee and cookies on board. She sent a few photos, too. In one of them, she's standing up in the submarine's tower, the wind in her hair, out on the open water with the city behind her. she looks completely in her element. And that was the last time anyone ever heard from Kim Wall. By 10 p.m. Ola was starting to worry.

The party was winding down. It was dark out. And Kim, who always kept him in the loop, had gone quiet. He called her again and again. Nothing. So he walked down to Madsen's workshop to check and found it closed for the night with no sign of the Nautilus anywhere in the harbor.

He tried to tell himself there was an explanation, maybe they'd lost track of time, maybe her phone had died, but the hours kept passing and the worst thoughts kept crowding in. Finally, at around a quarter to two in the morning, Ola called the police and the Navy

to report him missing. Then he got on his bike and started riding, riding along the coastline in the dark, scanning the black water, hoping to spot the submarine himself. Within hours, the search was on. The Coast Guard was combing Copenhagen Harbor with boats and helicopters, and by sunrise, with no sign of Kim, Madsen, or the Nautilus, it had become major news across Denmark. Then, late that morning, around 10.30, there was a break. A boat spotted the Nautilus out in Koogee Bay, southeast of the city near a lighthouse. Rescuers had even reached Madsen on the radio.

He said he was fine and heading back. The boat captain who found the sub, a man named Christian Isbach, pulled in close. He watched Madsen standing up on the deck, looking oddly relaxed for a man who'd been missing all night. Then Madsen climbed back down inside, saying he needed to check something. And that's when it happened. Air came rushing up from below, and the Nautilus started to drop. Ezebach watched the whole submarine disappear beneath the water in a matter of seconds. Madsen scrambled back up through the hatch just in time.

As the subs slipped out from under him, he jumped into the water and swam over to the rescue boat. Nobody else came out of the Nautilus. It went beneath the surface and was gone. The boat brought Madsen to shore where a crowd of reporters was already waiting. When they asked how he was doing, he gave them a thumbs up, but said he was upset that his submarine had sunk. He didn't say a single word about Kim Wall. The press didn't know she'd even been on board, so they weren't asking,

but Kim's loved ones watching all of this unfold were terrified. Where was she? And why did this man seem more broken up about a lost submarine than a missing person? The morning Peter Madsen came ashore, his submarine was at the bottom of the bay, Kim Wall was nowhere to be found, and the man who'd taken her out to sea didn't seem all that bothered by either. The police felt the same thing everyone was. watching did. Something was off. So they pulled Mattson away from the cameras and took him in for questioning. And that's where he told his first version of what had happened. He said there'd been

a mechanical failure at sea. The ballast tanks had failed. Those are the parts that let a sub, dive, and surface again. And once they gave out, water started pouring in. But he said Kim was fine. According to Madsen, once the sub started having trouble, he dropped her back on land at the tip of Refcheloun and gone on alone. The police didn't buy it. Kim still hadn't answered a call or a text since that night. There was no way she was on land perfectly fine. So the next day, August 12th, a judge ordered him held for 24 days while they investigated on a preliminary charge of negligent homicide. and it didn't take long for his story to come apart.

Rescuers combed the shoreline where he claimed to have let Kim off and found no trace of her, no sign she'd ever set foot there. So still in custody, Madsen changed his story. Now, he said Kim had never been dropped off at all. He said she had died on board in an accident. According to this new version, she was climbing a ladder inside the submarine when a heavy hatch swung loose and struck her in the head. He said he found her on the floor and that in a fog of panic and despair, he later brought the sub to the surface and buried her body at sea.

It was a devastating thing for Kim's family to hear, and it raised an obvious question if there really had been an accident, Why hadn't Madsen simply called for help? He wasn't stranded out in the open ocean. He was within cell phone range of a major city in a busy shipping channel. All he had to do was pick up the radio. The story didn't make sense. And to answer these questions, the police needed the one thing at the bottom of the bay that couldn't lie. The Nautilus itself.

On August 13th, Cruz managed. to raise the sunken submarine and tow it back to shore. They had to pump out around 9,000 gallons of water before they could even get inside. The seawater had washed away much of the evidence of whatever had happened to Kim, but not all of it. Investigators recovered traces of Kim's blood inside the Nautilus, along with some of her belongings. Whatever Madsen kept saying about dropping her safely back on land. She had clearly been down there inside that submarine and the machinery told its own story.

Investigators examined the ballast system, the thing Madsen blamed for the sinking and found nothing wrong with it. The submarine hadn't failed. According to the police, it had been sunk on purpose. Someone had deliberately opened it up to let the water flood in. And that lined up with what the rescuers had seen.

When they first found the Nautilus, it was floating just fine. It only started to sink after Madsen went back down inside. For the detectives, that changed everything. You don't sink your own life's work by accident. You do it to get rid of something. So the question stopped being what went wrong on the Nautilus and started being, what Peter Madsen was trying so hard to make disappear.

While all of this was happening, the search for Kim continued. Boats and helicopters swept the harbor and the bay. There were even dogs trained to smell a body in the water right from the deck of a boat. For 11 days, they found nothing. And for those 11 days, Kim's parents in Sweden and Ola and Copenhagen, and woke up every morning not knowing. Every ring of the phone could be the worst news of their lives or nothing at all. The whole country was following the story.

Kim had become a headline in a case she would have wanted to report on herself, and the people who loved her were living inside it, waiting. Then on August 21st, a cyclist was riding along a trail on the southern coast of Amma Island, a few miles from where the Nautilus had launched. He noticed something pale that had washed up on the beach. He got off his bike and walked closer to see what it was. It was a human torso. And whoever had put it in the water had strapped pieces of metal to it,

apparently to keep it from floating back up to the surface. Two days later, DNA testing confirmed what everyone had feared. The remains belonged to Kim Wall. That was the moment this stopped being a story about a missing person and a sunken submarine. Because Peter Madsen had never mentioned dismembering Kim's body. He'd never mentioned tying weights to it. His account of a tragic accident couldn't explain any of this, especially because an autopsy found that she had been stabbed 15 years.

times. Most of the wounds were in and around her genitals. So investigators did what good detectives do. They stopped listening to Madsen's story and started looking at the man telling it. While divers kept searching the water, detectives went to talk to the people around him. And what they found was a man almost nobody had really known. They started with his co-workers, the volunteers from Copenhagen suborbital and from his current outfit, Rocket Madsen's Space Laboratory.

These were people who'd signed up because they believed in Madsen and his mission, but after what had happened, they began to reconsider things they'd spent years explaining away because the charming showman had another side. side. Former volunteers described a man with a volcanic temper, someone who could turn on a dime.

They said that when something didn't go his way, he'd throw tools around the workshop in a rage. His staff learned to read the warning signs and to find excuses to slip out before an outburst hit. They also described behavior they'd written off as a dark sense of humor. He gave his workers' nicknames from Das Bout, the movie about a German U-boat crew. Sometimes he'd play at being a menacing officer, asking questions that made people skin crawl. At the time, they all told themselves it was just Madsen being Madsen. That temper wasn't new. It had been one of the reasons his partnership with Christian von Bankston blew apart back in 2014.

But people close to Madsen said he'd been especially unstable in the weeks before Kim's death. That canceled rocket launch was a public humiliation, one he'd been dreading for months, and it seemed to push him somewhere darker. Then detective started talking to people who knew Madsen outside of work, and the picture got even stranger. Away from the workshop, Madsen had an active life in Copenhagen's club and art scenes. He was married, though by his own account it was an open marriage and he saw other women too. Now, none of that is a crime and none of it makes someone a killer. Plenty people have unconventional private lives and that's their business. That wasn't what caught the detective's attention.

What caught their attention was something one woman told them. A female volunteer at his workshop said that on more than one occasion, Matt said, had talked to her about a fascination with death. He told her he was drawn to so-called snuff films, videos that show a real person being tortured and killed, and he told her that he was interested in making one himself. That was the thread investigators pulled next. They seized Madsen's laptop, his hard drives, and his phone,

and what they found confirmed the worst version of who he might be. This next part is hard to hear if you'd rather not skip ahead about a minute. On his devices, police found more than a hundred videos showing real violence against women. The lead prosecutor would later say some of them appeared to show women being decapitated and burned. I am not going to describe them beyond that, but I'll tell you the detail that stopped investigators cold. His most frequent search terms were words like throat, girl, and pain. And the night before he took Kim Wall out on the Nautilus, Madsen had searched the internet for terms including beheading and agony. Everyone had known Mattson used his submarine as a kind of stage, a place to influence.

impress people and live out his image. What no one had known was how violent the fantasies underneath that image really were. And this is the part that stays with me. All those volunteers, all those partners, all those people who thought they knew him, they'd each seen a piece of it. One had caught a flash of temper.

Another had nervously laughed off a joke about death. On their own, the pieces were easy to wave off. Just a difficult, eccentric guy being himself. It was only later laid side by side that they formed a picture. And then investigators learned that those fantasies hadn't stayed fantasies for long. At some point, a woman who'd been involved with Madsen came forward. She was an artist who lived near his workshop,

and she'd been seeing him in the weeks before King. Kim died. Out of respect for her privacy, her name was never made public. And like other partners, the police spoke to, she said that in person, Madsen had always been respectful. But late that summer, something had shifted. A few days before the deadly trip on the Nautilus, she was texting with Madsen struggling to focus on a work deadline, and she jokingly asked him to send her a threat, to motivate her. He answered by describing in graphic detail how he would invite a woman onto his submarine, take her out to see where no one could help her and kill her.

Then he would cut up her body and throw it into the water. At the time, she brushed it off as the kind of dark joke they shared. It was only after Kim died when she read what had happened that she saw how closely it matched what Mattson had described to her, and she wasn't alone. After talking to her, police spoke with two different women who said Mattson had invited them to go out on the Nautilus alone in the weeks before Kim was killed. One of them said he'd first asked her in May of 2017. She said no.

Then he texted her again out of the blue to invite her out on the submarine. That message came just two days before his voyage with Kim Wall. For the detectives piecing this together, it wasn't one strange text or one odd conversation anymore. It was a pattern over and over in those final weeks. Madsen had been trying to get a woman alone at sea on that submarine. Every one of those other women had said no or found a reason not to go. Kim Wall was the one who trusted him enough to step aboard, and the one time it worked, she never came home. By the fall of 2017, the eccentric inventor the public had adored was gone.

In his place was a man who seemed like a cold-blooded killer. And the more evidence that surfaced, the more guilty he appeared. In the weeks before, Kim Wall boarded his submarine, a workshop volunteer remembered seeing Peter Madsen with a saw sticking out of his backpack. A hand saw would later be pulled from the floor of Kooji Bay. And it turned out the rest of Kim was down there too. On October 6th, 2017, nearly two months after she disappeared, divers recovered her head, legs, clothing, and a knife sealed into plastic bags and weighed down with metal, just like her. torso and when forensic examiners finally got to study her skull they found something

really important there was no fracture no sign of blunt force trauma at all which meant the hat story simply couldn't be true the remains had been in the water so long that the examiners could never say for sure how Kim died prosecutors would later argue it was most likely strangulation or that her throat had been cut. But one thing was clear. She had not died the way Peter Madsen kept insisting she had. By January of 2018, the police had built their case. They formally charged Madsen with murder, aggravated sexual assault, and desecrating a corpse. And the indictment laid out something chilling. Skiphead 15 seconds if you don't want to hear this next part.

It said he'd brought tools on board, including sharpened screwdrivers and used them to abuse Kim before he killed and dismembered her. Now it was headed for a courtroom. And Peter Madsen, a man who'd spent his whole life performing for an audience, was about to face his biggest audience yet. On March 8, 2018, the trial of Peter Madsen began in Copenhagen. He was 47 years old. Danish trials work a little differently than American ones. In a case like this, the court can use a small panel instead of a full jury, which meant Madsen's fate would be decided by one judge and two lay judges.

More than 100 reporters packed the gallery to watch. Kim's parents were there too. They had traveled from Sweden to sit in that room and listen to a man explain in his own words what had happened to their daughter. And by all accounts, Madsen seemed almost eager to tell his side of it. Remember, by this point, he'd already given police two different versions. First, that he'd dropped Kim safely on shore, then that she died when a hatch hit her in the head. Now, on the stand, he offered a third.

This time, Madsen said that while the submarine was still on the surface, he'd stepped out onto the deck and sealed the hatch behind him. He claimed that while he was outside, an engine inside the Nautilus malfunctioned and filled the sealed cabin with toxic fumes. Kim, trapped inside, died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He said that when he came back down, he found her dead on the floor. He described trying to slap her awake as if he could somehow just reboot her. he kept comparing himself to the cyborg from Terminator 2, part man, part machine. The judge repeatedly had to stop him from wandering off into technical details about the submarine and steer him back to the basic facts.

And then he described what he did next. He admitted he dismembered Kim's body, but he framed it as a purely logical decision a practical problem to be solved. He said that when he couldn't carry her whole body up the ladder, he took it apart so it would be easier to move. He told the court, quote, a dead body does not deserve any special respect.

It was a stunning thing to say in a room where Kim's parents were sitting, but shocking as it was, his story still had to hold up, and it didn't. Piece by piece, the prosecution took it apart. They started with a carbon monoxide. A submarine expert from the Danish Navy testified that she tested the Nautilus and found no trace of it. And she added that the submarine couldn't have produced anywhere near enough gas to kill Kim the way Madsen described. Then a coroner backed her up.

Kim's lungs showed none of the signs you'd expect in someone who had died. from toxic fumes. So the accident story was gone. What replaced it was a portrait of who Madsen really was. The court had ordered a psychiatric evaluation, and the experts who examined him came back with a damning assessment. They found no remorse for Kim's death and no compassion for her family. they called him a pathological liar and a narcissist said he showed, quote, psychopathic traits, and warned that he was a danger to others. There was also physical evidence tying Madsen directly to what had happened. When he was arrested, investigators found specks of Kim's blood on him and scratches on his forearms. They also found traces of his semen in his.

his underwear, which the prosecution tied to the sexual assault. The prosecutors argued this had never been an accident. It was a plan. They pointed to his rage at the workshop, to the other women he tried to get alone on his submarine, and to the woman he texted a murder scenario just days before. and at the center of it all, they put those videos from his computer, the ones that pointed to a sexualized obsession with women's suffering and dying. The defense tried to push back on that picture.

Madsen argued the videos were no different from violent Hollywood movies, and his lawyers had hoped his wife would take the stand and vouch for his character, but she withdrew before she could testify and the two later divorced. That left Madsen with the final word, and he didn't use it to apologize.

When he got his last chance to speak, he stuck to his story. He said that Kim's death had been an accident. Then it was in the hands of the court. On April 25, 2018, the verdict came down. The judge said that Peter Madsen had, quote, failed to give trustworthy explanations for what happened aboard the Nautilus. He was found guilty of premeditated murder, aggravated sexual assault, and desecrating a corpse.

He was sentenced to life in prison. For most of the trial, Madsen had looked almost bored glancing around the courtroom, but when he heard the sentence, something shifted. He sat at the defense table for more than a minute, his eyes closed, his head bowed. Unlike his other displays, this reaction made sense. A life sentence in Denmark carries more weight than you might expect. It's rare to begin with, and it's normally reviewed after about 16 years to decide whether the person can ever be safely let out. But the psychiatric experts had recommended that Madsen beheld.

in secure custody, status Denmark reserves for its most dangerous offenders. That meant there was a real chance he would never be released. Mattson wasn't ready to accept that. He appealed his sentence, he lost, and this time, standing before the court, he finally apologized to Kim's family. He might think that's the end of the story. It's not. On October 20th, After two years behind bars, Madsen escaped. He was being held at Hare Stedvester Prison outside Copenhagen, and he'd used his time inside to build a fake gun and fake explosives. He threatened a prison psychologist, then an officer, then the driver of a van,

and bluffed his way out the front gate. Prison staff followed him and alerted police, and officers surrounded him about five. hundred meters away within minutes. In photos from that day, he's sitting in the grass with his hands behind his back while police trained their weapons on him. The next year, he was given an additional 21-month sentence for the escape. And then in a documentary that aired around that same time, Peter Madsen said something he had never said in a courtroom, asked directly whether he was the one who killed Kim Wall.

He answered yes. He said, quote, there is only one who is guilty, and that is me. After all the lies, all the shifting stories, it was the closest thing to the truth he'd ever offered, but it came far too late to matter to the people who loved her.

I don't want to leave you with Peter Madsen because this was never really his story. story. Throughout the long, awful ordeal, Kim's parents, Ingrid, and Yoakum, fought to hold on to who their daughter actually was, not a headline, not a body found in pieces, but an accomplished award-winning journalist who'd spent her short life giving a voice to people the world tends to ignore. Not long after Kim died, they created the Kim Wall Memorial. Fund. Since 2018, it's awarded grants to women and non-binary journalists whose reporting carries on what Kim cared about most, telling untold stories from all over the world about people who

usually go unheard. It's a way of making sure that the thing Kim did best keeps happening, even though she can't do it anymore. Every grant is another story she helped bring into the world. If you ever want to know who Kim Wall was, you don't have to take my word for it. You can read her work. And in one of her pieces, she wrote something that stuck with me. She said, quote, I want to know how the world works. That was Kim. Curious to the very end, she went out to do one more interview, chasing one more story, trusting that her curiosity, would carry her home. So maybe the best thing any of us can do today

is carry a little of that curiosity with us. Her hunger to understand people who aren't like us. Her belief that the small overlook stories are the ones worth telling. Kim Wall wanted to make a difference in the world and in the work she left behind and the journalists she's still helping today. she did.

Thanks again for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of another murder and all the people that affected. Murder, True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios here at Crimehouse. We want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today,

reach out on social media at Crimehouse on TikTok and Instagram, Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday, completely ad-free, no waiting for part two, plus ad-free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap, try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Tuesday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios.

This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Bertofsky, Lori Marinelli, Nicolette Tavallero, Mara de la Rosa, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. I'm Sarah Turney. And I'm Courtney Nicole. We're the host of the Crime House original podcast, The Final Hours. Crime has impacted both of our families, teaching us how the last conversations, the misbred flags, can change everything.

On the final hours, we examine the moments before a disappearance, and the questions that never got answered. A podcast that puts the moments before it disappears under a microscope. Listen to and follow the final hours, available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts

completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this, except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit pod on YouTube.