If there was a trailer of the “submarine case” summarized in keywords, it could not be missing: Denmark, famous inventor, Swedish journalist, dismemberment, rape, torture, lies, UC3 Nautilus. The documentary Unfathomable (Into the Deep) came to Netflix to remind us Kim Wall and how Pietro Madsen killed her
August 2017
The 10th August 2017Kim Wall embarks on the dwarf submarine in Køge Bugt, Denmark UC3 Nautilus created by the famous local inventor Peter Madsen.
She, a Swedish journalist and freelance globetrotter, leaves her farewell party for later with her husband, Ol Stobbe. On the 16th, if things go well, they will move to China.
It’s a text message postponing your plans. Madsen is inviting Kim to interview him aboard his dwarf submarine. The inventor reminds you of your contact at the beginning of the year; he rekindles his curiosity about Peter’s rockets and submarines.
Wall enters the Nautilus at 7pm. It will only be two hours, he thinks.
It is 1:43 am on August 11th. Ole calls the police because he doesn’t know anything about his wife or Peter.
At 10:30 a submarine is sighted in the Køge bay: it is the nautilus. Madsen is alone. The inventor’s colleagues breathe a sigh of relief, although they are shocked that Kim is missing. Some go out to look for it near the coast.
Half an hour passes. The boat mysteriously sinks. The Nautilus returns to its natural habitat: the bottom of the sea.
Madsen is arrested. Your colleagues and friends don’t understand why. There are two official reasons: the sinking of the submarine and the disappearance of Kim. The Dane is in custody for 24 days manslaughter.
Peter claims he left the woman on land before the submarine sank.
On August 21, a cyclist begins to deny: by chance he finds the journalist’s bust with fifteen stab wounds on the beach of Amageralmost all in the groin area.
Pietro Madsen
Peter Madsen’s passion for inventions (especially rockets and submarines) dates back many decades.
Until August 10, 2017 Madsen was known, among other things, for launching a homemade rocket made in his garage into the air on March 3, 1986. His small ship that day rose 100 meters above the ground.
During his adolescence and young adulthood, he was confronted with local personalities from the world of science and research who saw in him a bright future as an inventor.
His charisma and constant good humor helped him. He never failed to share his philosophy of life out loud: “You must have fun”.
Knowing that his relatives and colleagues regarded him as something of a prodigy, Madsen took advantage of it financially. And so he lived. The Dansk Amatør Raket Klub (DARK) missile club he was a part of ended up considering him an “unspeakable”. And he too hated them. He regarded them as competition from him.
He informally learned about welding and engineering and made three submarines: the UC1 Freya, UC2 Kraka and UC3 Nautilus. It took three years to build the crime scene. It cost $ 200,000.
Already established in the field of inventions, he founded Copenhagen Suborbitals, a space program with which he piloted five homemade rockets and two simulated space capsules, and the RML Spacelab ApS laboratory, whose goal was the development and construction of a vehicle manned spacecraft.
The Netflix documentary revolves around this laboratory where Madsen and his group of young volunteers who believed in him worked.
His loves, two: a wife from 2011 to 2018, with whom he had an open relationship; a wife from 2020 to 2022, a Russian-Mauritian opposition activist, named Jenny Curpen39 years old, with political asylum in Finland.
September and October 2017
Peter now says that Kim accidentally died aboard the Nautilus and that she later dumped her body overboard. According to the new version of him, Wall hit his head against the submarine hatch and died.
At the same time, the prosecution finds on Madsen’s computers videos of brutally murdered women. One of his “trainees” of him reiterates: “He mentioned a website where you can see the victims of the crime scene. He asked me if I knew.”
On 6 October, police divers find two bags in the bay. The content: Kim Wall’s head, legs, clothes and a knife.
six days later, a saw with an orange handle in the water.
Madsen is getting more and more complicated.
The rest of the year
End of November. Police find Kim’s arms. Even in the bay.
The investigation tries to adapt the woman’s body to other crimes without answers: they cannot. It all ends with Peter Madsen. His young volunteers no longer believe in him.
The prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen confirms that there is no DNA of Peter on Wall’s body, but there is sperm of him on his underpants seized in August.
The more cornered, Peter comes out with crazier talk.
The Dane, not happy with his earlier version of the story, now admits that he dismembered the body of the Swedish woman, but did not intentionally kill her.
It is no longer the hatch that caused Wall’s death, but the poisonous exhaust gases that entered the submarine while on deck.
Something else still denies it: the autopsy. Wall’s bust, the specialist on duty assures in no uncertain terms, shows no signs of exhaust gases in the lungs.
And not only that: he confirms that the wounds made to the groin were such as to prevent his body from floating once in the water.
2018
January 16. Madsen is charged with murder, indecent treatment of a corpse and sexual assault.. She assures him of her accusation: she tortured Wall before slitting her throat or strangling her.
8th of March. The trial begins in Copenhagen. All of Madsen’s volunteers testify against him and flee the laboratory where they worked together.
April 25 the inventor is found guilty of three counts and sentenced to life imprisonment.
There is no room for appeals. The crime was completely brutal.
The confession
Two years later, after a failed prison escape attempt and being beaten in the complex’s hospital by an inmate, Madsen spoke.
And it did so with great solvency.
Interviewed in prison by a journalist who recorded him for 20 hours without him noticing, Peter confessed: “There’s only one culprit, and that’s me”.
As if that were not enough, he replied “yes” when the reporter asked him if he had actually killed Kim Wall.
The conversation with the confession was broadcast on Discovery with Madsen’s permission. End of all doubts.
Unfathomable
The title of this note is not arbitrary: in Unfathomable you can see how the local media of the time called Madsen’s crime “the worst in Danish history”. The director Emma Sullivanhowever, he didn’t make the film for it.
The director had contacted Madsen long before the inventor boarded the Nautilus with Wall on the fateful 10th August.
In an email revealed in the film, it can be read that Madsen accepts Sullivan’s proposal to follow him around with his camera so that the world can witness his unorthodox working methods and how he was building a spaceship. home made.
For this reason the shocking scenes follow one another: there are interviews with Madsen in which the inventor, without realizing it (or not), anticipates what he is about to do; Madsen recordings from the day of the murder; First-person impressions of Peter’s relatives after learning of the inventor’s arrest.
If you have come this far in the article, Unfathomable’s surprises are probably not the same anymore, but the highlight of the documentary, which is to see the behavior of a real and smiling murderer “loved by all”, will continue to shake you. forever.
Source: Clarin
