Meanwhile, in Denmark, the trial of Peter Madsen is about to begin, on the 8th of March. The charges have been announced, as pre-mediated and prepared murder, improper handling of a corpse and sexual assault. The case has become a quite horrifying affair.
Sit-Rep:
Peter Madsen is (well, was) an engineer-entrepeneur. One of his creations is the private submarine UC3 Nautilus. Last summer, on the 10th of August, journalist Kim Wall boarded this submarine on an intended interview of Madsen, and a tour of the Öresund. They embarked 19:00 in the evening, and would disembark at Bornholm island, at about 14:00 the following day. That was the last time she was seen alive.
The vessel later sunk of the Danish coast, at eleven in the following morning. Madsen was rescued by a nearby vessel, but Ms. Wall was nowhere to be seen. He claimed that she had disembarked in Copenhagen at 22:30 the night before. The Danish police, however, thought that something was decidedly off, and detained him. Ms. Wall could not be found.
Then, on August the 23rd, a torso washed ashore. It was identified as belonging to Ms. Wall. It had been weighted down, and punctured. Madsen is thus held on suspicion of improper treatment of human remains, and suspicion of murder. Navy divers searches the area and recovers further body-parts, Ms. Wall's clothes and a knife and a saw.
What he has claimed:
After the assertion that she disembarked in Copenhagen proved false, he later claimed that an accident had occured while at sea; at one point, a heavy hatch had fallen down on her head while she was ascending a ladder. It does not hold when examined against the evidence. He claims to have, once he discovered that she had been killed, 'buried her at sea' (as he put it), and later, the vessel sank due to a technical malfunction.
There was also, briefly, a report out that Madsen had claimed that Ms. Wall had died due to suffocation when carbon monoxied gas exhaust entered the vessel while he was on deck. However, his legal defence denies this, and maintains now that he does not know how she died.
The physical evidence:
The sunken submarine was later discovered, salvaged and analysed. Foremost, it disproves that it sunk by technical fault, but was scuttled intentionally. Further, it contained blood and hair samples, and a pair of women's underwear. The bodyparts has further disproved Madsen's claims. Ms. Wall's remains shows no injuries that would correspond with deadly head trauma, which makes the hatch cover fairy-tale impossible. There are stab wounds, either connected to her death or (if regarded generously towards Madsen) inflicted shorty afterwards.
There are also details of evidence that has currently not been released for public knowledge, but one can infer that they strengthen the prosecution greatly. Some, I imagine, are simply too frightening to release lightly. There is, of course, another over-arching inference one can make, and that is simply that dismembering and dumping the body at sea is a very peculiar way to react to the accidental death of a passenger.
However, on further investigation, the case turns horrifying.
An earlier line of inquiry, once his claims of accidental death had proven shaky, was that he may had lost his temper and gone violent after an inopportune question during the interview. However, while it is quite possible to murder someone in an act of fury, it is very unusual to then be able to dismember the corpse. In most cases, dismemberment and dumping of bodies suggest pre-planning, and a certain state of mind. It is not the common reaction of someone distraught at an accidental death.
Further, some of the stab wounds from the recovered body are of a violent, sexual nature, and that is further re-inforced when compared to some of the material seized from Madsen's computer, which concerns violent pornography, beheadings, and other depictions of brutality for enjoyment. He has further been witnessed consuming such things before. It paints a dark picture of his personality.
In brief, the prosecution claims that Madsen spirited Ms. Wall away, with the intention of torturing, killing and dumping her at sea, and that he did so, somewhere between 19:00 on the 10th of August, and 10:30 the following day.
The main question for the court, at present, is effectively if Madsen had invited Ms. Wall with the intention to play at Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea meets Girl With the Dragon Tattoo from the beginning, or if that idea developed during the trip. The prosecution is leaning towards the former, and appears to believe itself sufficiently equipped to prove it. From it, one can infer that they have likely secured equipment Madsen brought to that end.
Good Lord... This is a time when one sets aside the findings, and must take a deep breath. I cannot even begin to imagine how it must have been for the investigators, disentangling this horrid event, and trying to build a picture of this terrifying man. The perspectives that unfold when one imagines the case are beyond all nightmares in the world. Indeed, I can understand why specific details are withheld from the public, for merely cataloguing this summary has been a frightful business.
Luckily for justice, Madsen's schemes to escape has been frustrated at every turn. The body and the submarine have been recovered, and can be analysed to disprove his claims, and taken with the circumstantial evidence, helps build a very strong case against him. Indeed, it is quite difficult to believe how he could possibly have invisioned himself getting away with it.
At present, it seems that life imprisonment is the only possible outcome of the case for Madsen. Since the gallows are out of the question, that is the best possible conclusion one could hope for. That man appears to be a very nasty piece of work, indeed, and one can only hope that he will be in safe containment, far away from the public, for the rest of his life.
Naturally, since the trial is yet to begin, and Madsen is yet to be proven guilty in court, he must be afforded a chance of innocence. But I must say that if, by some extra-ordinary co-incidence, he is indeed innocent, then I shall eat my keyboard.
(Why the EU thread? Well, it has developed into a general Western Europe news area, and this particular case has had some international interest before.)
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