Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, bingers. Welcome back to the pod. And I'm just going to jump right into it. Have you all been following this story of the Titan submersible?
I certainly have. And for me, it's been the most compelling non-crime news story in years. And what's weird on our end is we had planned today's episode over a month ago before the Titan and Ocean Gate were on anyone's mind. And the intersections between that story and this story are pretty eerie because today's story also involves a maverick inventor and his homemade submarine. So let's, pardon the pun, dive in.
Peter Madsen was quite the character in the Danish media. He was like a termite version of Elon Musk, and he was known around Denmark as Rocket Madsen.
Madsen had made a name for himself internationally in the late 2000s as an inventor and as the founder of a non-profit called Copenhagen Suborbitals, which was sort of like Denmark's answer to SpaceX. Except unlike SpaceX, Copenhagen Suborbitals was entirely crowdfunded and all of its members were volunteer amateur space enthusiasts like Madsen.
Their goal was to send a human into space on a homemade rocket ship. It was a novel concept and Peter Madsen seemed to have a clear passion for science, engineering, exploration of space and of the sea. He built his first homemade submarine in 2002, the UC-1 Freya, which was the first ever private submarine in the Kingdom of Denmark.
a history-making vessel. In 2005, he made history again when he constructed the UC-2 Krakow, which was a midget submarine. And yes, it's okay to use the word midget in this context, and only in this context.
And this was also history-making because it was Denmark's first diesel-electric amateur sub. Construction of this sub took two and a half years and 3,600 man-hours. But it still was only a prologue to his piece, the UC3 Nautilus, which was his biggest and most impressive sub, submerged for the first time in October 2008, the same year Copenhagen Suborbitals was founded.
The Nautilus had a capacity for eight crew members and a crush depth of about 1,400 feet. Now crush depth meaning the deepest a submarine can sink before it implodes due to the water pressure. So this was a recreational vessel for underwater sightseeing and not designed to go especially deep.
In fact, it had port windows all around for a virtually panoramic view. But all was not going along swimmingly, pardon the pun again, at Copenhagen Suborbitals. In 2014, long gestating tensions between Madsen and others at his company caused Madsen to leave in what he called a professional divorce.
But the reality was Madsen was such a so-called rugged individualist that he didn't work well with others. He wasn't an effective leader and wasn't skilled at bringing people together and unifying them. He was a lone wolf sort, and he also never finished any kind of engineering class or degree. He was self-taught all of the way. In the larger framework of an institution, Madsen struggled to stay afloat—no pun intended—
and some who worked with him on his rockets and subs felt he was out of his depth. Pun also not intended. Freelance journalist Kim Val was intrigued by personalities just like Madsen's. Big, bold, a maverick, a pioneer, paralleling Elon Musk in his entrepreneurship and in his seemingly tireless drive to push himself into space and underwater.
Kim Val was 30 years old and fast becoming a rising star in journalism. She lived with her boyfriend in a collective on Riffshell Island in the harbor of Copenhagen, incidentally right next door practically to Peter Madsen's workshop and laboratory, which was a converted hangar where he pretty much lived.
In March of 2017, Kim reached out to Wired Magazine to pitch a story about Madsen and his DIY rocket ships and how Madsen was now competing with his former company, Copenhagen Suborbitals, in a space race reminiscent of the U.S. and Russia's competition to get to the moon, but on a smaller, more personal scale.
Wired was interested and gave her the green light. So she reached out to Madsen and began corresponding with him.
But it wouldn't be till several months later that she finally got the chance to meet with him on what seemed like a whim on Madsen's end. It was on the afternoon of Thursday, August 10th, 2017, and Kim and her boyfriend were getting ready to throw a goodbye party. They were preparing to move halfway across the globe to Beijing and had only a few more days left in Copenhagen.
But then Kim got a text message, a text message from Peter Madsen, inviting her to join him at his workshop for tea. This was the opportunity she'd been patiently awaiting for several months. So of course she jumped at it. Madsen's workshop and laboratory were right around the corner from her apartment, so she was only gone for half an hour.
But when she returned home, she told her boyfriend that she'd have to miss the goodbye party because Peter Madsen had invited her out on his submarine, the Nautilus, and she just couldn't pass it up. Nervous as she was to board an amateur's homemade submarine, she asked her boyfriend if he wanted to come. He was on the fence, but he thought about it and ended up falling on the side of no.
He hadn't called off the goodbye party and he didn't want to disappoint the friends they'd invited. So he figured he'd carry on without her and she could just join them later in the evening when she got back from the submarine trip. He kissed Kim goodbye and she promised to be back in just a few hours.
A short time later, her boyfriend named Ole got a text message from her. It was a picture of the Nautilus and she was on it. A few minutes later, she sent a picture of herself at the steering wheel of the sub. It looked like she was about to go on a fun mini adventure with a quirky and well-funded local celebrity.
Meanwhile, her going away party, which was just a small gathering, was held quayside and while Ole was managing the barbecue grill, his friend nudged him and pointed toward the sunset. Ole looked up and saw Kim on the submarine waving at him. I'm still alive, by the way, she later texted him, but I'm going down now. I love you.
The going away party continued late into the early morning hours, moving from the quayside to an area tavern. Ole was waiting on Kim to return, as they also had a wedding to attend that next morning. Eventually, he returned to their room and he went to bed, but he couldn't sleep. He was worried too much about Kim, who had been out of touch for hours longer than expected.
So he mounted his bike and began pedaling around the island, looking for her, thinking perhaps she'd gotten lost in the dark, or maybe she'd fallen and broken a leg or something. He looked around everywhere between their home and the lab, but he saw no sign of her.
Exhausted, he popped into Madsen's lab and surprised Madsen's wife, who was there by herself. He explained to Madsen's wife that he was looking for his girlfriend, who had last been seen earlier in the evening boarding the Nautilus with Madsen. His wife seemed surprised to hear this, and confused.
She had received a text message from her husband just a few hours earlier, which read, I'm on an adventure on the Nautilus, all is well, sailing in calm seas and moonlight, not diving, kisses and hugs to the cats. He made no mention of any other passenger on the submarine. It was a quarter to two in the morning at this point, and Ole decided to call the police and then the Danish Navy to report Kim, his girlfriend, missing.
Two hours later, the local maritime rescue center contacted the police to inform them of a possible accident in the water. It didn't take long for helicopters and watercraft to begin searching the waterways, and the news began to make the rounds very quickly. The famous inventor, Peter Madsen, the journalist, Kim Wall, and the submarine Nautilus were all missing.
Kim's friends and family stood by and hoped for good news, hoped that the submarine was all right, that it hadn't sunken or imploded, and that Kim was okay. It seemed unthinkable that Kim, such a tenacious and adventurous spirit who had spent time in some of the world's most dangerous places, could have perished in a submarine accident right here at home and only three days before moving to China.
Kim had traveled the world chasing stories, visiting places as far flung from Denmark as the Marshall Islands, Kenya, and Cuba. She even managed to slip past the border of North Korea once and then safely back out.
Kim was nothing if not worldly. Born in Sweden, she studied at the Sorbonne University in Paris and the London School of Economics. She then moved to Brooklyn and eventually graduated the top of her class from the master's program at Columbia University's School of Journalism. And although she was still working on a freelance basis, her career was on the fast track to major success.
Her work having been published in the New York Times and The Guardian, among other places. She had been awarded fellowships with the International Women's Media Foundation to travel to Uganda and Sri Lanka. She did a 6,000-word feature for Harper's Magazine called The Weekly Package, How Cubans Deliver Culture Without Internet, which took her to Cuba to explore how Cubans stream film and media in a land without internet access.
That story was published in July 2017, less than a month before the sub went missing with her supposedly aboard. Kim was such a remarkable person, and I could easily fill up an entire binged episode focusing just on her and the many accomplishments that filled her first 30 years on this planet.
She was a conscientious and principled journalist. Her work on climate change in the Marshall Islands netted her accolades and journalism awards. Her stories were human interest stories with a strong lean towards social justice and also a taste for quirky stories with big themes.
She was a magnetic presence at parties where she could hold court for hours with anecdotes from her travels and her story assignments. To her friends and colleagues, Kim was a rock star, born to tell stories and driven by curiosity and compassion. So it just felt like an impossibility that a light that shone so brightly could just vanish in the cold, dark waters of the Copenhagen harbor.
On the morning following the sub's disappearance, a man who was assisting the search in his boat caught sight of what had eluded the other searchers. He spotted the Nautilus submarine. It was near a lighthouse in Ku Bay off a deserted stretch of coastline southwest of the island. Madsen himself was observed to be up top on the conning tower before going down the hatch inside the sub for a few minutes and then re-emerging just as the vessel began sinking.
Madsen then jumped into the water and began to swim toward a nearby motorboat, which rescued him and took him back to the island. To his rescuers, Madsen seemed surprisingly calm and focused, maybe even preoccupied. When they arrived at the shore, news reporters were already at the scene and they asked him if he was all right, what had happened.
He turned around and gave a thumbs up before explaining that the sub had sunk due to a defect on a ballast tank. But where was Kim Val?
The police wanted to talk to Madsen, urgently, and brought him in for questioning. He explained to police that he had dropped Kim Val off on the tip of the island the previous night and resumed sailing solo. But his story wasn't adding up, and investigators felt that Madsen was lying. They were so convinced he was lying, in fact, that they didn't let him go home.
Instead, they arrested him, charging him with involuntary manslaughter for, quote, having killed in an unknown way and in an unknown place, Kim Isabel Frederica Val of Sweden, sometime after Thursday, 5 p.m.
Contributing to this decision were observations that had been made during the initial medical evaluation of Peter Madsen, who had fresh scratches on his forearms and dried blood on his nostril, blood whose DNA was determined to belong to Kim Val. Back at his lab, Madsen's friends and interns continued to give him the benefit of the doubt.
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None of them showed any sign of Kim that would have corroborated his story. And so eventually, Peter Madsen's story changed. Like any pathological liar, he adapted his account to what he knew police knew. And suddenly, he was admitting to them that, yes, okay, Kim Val was dead.
But it had been an accident, he claimed. What had happened was, as he was helping her into the submarine, the vessel's 155-pound steel hatch suddenly fell onto her head, and she promptly died from her injury. He then panicked, he claimed, and fearing how he might be held liable, he pulled her body out of the Nautilus with a rope and, quote, buried her at sea.
But then, on the morning of August 21st, a man was riding his bicycle along Amager Island near where the Nautilus sank.
Because of this, the submarine was then raised off of the seabed and inspected, and it was obvious that the sub had been deliberately sunk. It was no accident, as Madsen had claimed.
The charge against Madsen was upgraded to manslaughter at this point, pending further information, and an autopsy was performed on just the torso. The forensic pathologist found that Kim Val had suffered nearly 40 stab wounds, many of them concentrated in her genital area, and some of them were inflicted post-mortem. There were also several lesions on her torso consistent with blunt force trauma inflicted on her while she was still alive.
A month went by while Peter remained in custody, sticking to his story. Divers continued searching for the remainder of Kim's remains, and after many long and fruitless dives in the area where the submarine had been sunk, they finally made a series of major discoveries. Beginning with a bag found underwater that contained a shirt, a skirt, socks, and a pair of shoes, all belonging to Kim Val.
The bag also contained a knife and lead weights to keep the bag from surfacing. A few hours later, a human leg was found, and then another human leg, and then another bag weighted down by metal and cable ties containing a human head, and then an orange-handled saw.
These body parts, all of which were later confirmed to be Kim Val's, showed signs of ligature bondage. Yet Madsen maintained that the death was accidental just the way he described. The submarine hatch closed on her head and she died. And he insisted that he didn't dismember her body. I guess her body just fell apart like that and the pieces found their way into those plastic bags.
But when Kim's head was examined at autopsy, there were no skull fractures that would have been consistent with Madsen's story about the hatch falling onto her head. And here's the remarkable thing. For the 11 months leading up to this fateful submarine voyage, all the way up to the day of, which was August 10th,
Madsen was being followed around by a documentary camera crew, led by an Australian filmmaker named Emma Sullivan, who, like Kim Val, found Madsen intriguing enough to center him in a story documenting his work. In interviews filmed in Madsen's hangar days before Kim Val went missing, many of the items found in those plastic bags on the seafloor—the orange-handled saw, the knife, metal pipe, sharpened screwdrivers—
can be seen hanging on the walls and in the work area. If you don't understand how eerie this is, this man had a camera crew following him around. They videoed him around the weapons used in Kim's murder.
And of course, after Kim Val's death, those items had disappeared from his workshop, which began to paint a picture of a premeditated murder, where Madsen loaded up his sub with these items, knowing full well he intended to kill. Police searched Madsen's hangar and confiscated his computers and hard drives. And on one of his hard drives, they found disturbing videos.
Videos that appeared to be snuff clips. A snuff clip or a snuff movie is footage that appears to depict an actual homicide. And that's what was found on Madsen's computer. Videos of women being strangled, tortured, burned alive, having their throats cut and beheaded. And less than 24 hours before Kim Val boarded his submarine,
Madsen had performed searches on his computer using words like beheading, girl, and agony. But when he was presented with the contents of this hard drive, Madsen claimed the hard drive wasn't his property and that interns had access to his computer.
like he was trying to pin something on his unpaid volunteers. And one of those interns recalled Madsen talking to him about snuff websites. Madsen would also frequently talk about killing people, though he would talk about it in a seemingly humorous way.
One of his female interns just a week before Kim's fateful voyage had sent Madsen a playful text message in which she asked him, can you send me some little death threats? Maybe I can get this work done faster. I'm working so slowly. To which Madsen replied gleefully, you must be bound in nautilus. I bind you to pierce you with a skewer. Then the pocket knife comes forward. I'm looking at your throat. Where is the pulse? And
And then he wrote, I have a murder plan ready, which is a great pleasure. And he had texted that same intern the morning of Kim's disappearance, inviting her on a ride in the submarine. So it easily could have been her instead of Kim.
Also, just one day before Kim boarded his submarine, Madsen had canceled an upcoming submarine trip planned for August 11th and a rocket launch that was scheduled. So all of this suggested that the murder was premeditated. Prosecutors believed he planned to kill the next woman who rode alone with him on his submarine. And that person just ended up being Kim Val.
They believed that Madsen tied Val to a submarine and tortured her for sexual gratification. Another video they found among Madsen's property was a self-shot video of Madsen setting up an apparently hidden camera in the hangar bedroom, pointed directly at the bed. At this point, the charges were upgraded again, and the prosecution was seeking a life sentence.
The three counts he was now facing were premeditated murder, indecent handling of a corpse, and sexual relations other than intercourse of a particularly dangerous nature. The prosecution stated that Madsen had made significant and continued efforts to manipulate and influence the investigation.
And at trial, Peter Madsen suddenly presented a whole new story. He had changed his story yet again, and this would be his third version of what had happened. He was now claiming that Kim had died from carbon monoxide poisoning, and he had lied to spare her family the knowledge of a slow, horrible death.
Madsen claimed he was outside at the time and that the interior pressure prevented the hatches from opening. His account was that he yelled for Val to shut down the engines, allowing him to reenter the sub, and at that point he found her lifeless body. He
He said he'd gone up top to the deck when suddenly due to an operation error, the interior pressure increased inside the sub, preventing the hatch from opening. He said he yelled down to Val, who was sealed inside, to shut down the engine so he could re-enter the sub, but once he was back inside, it was too late.
Toxic fumes filled the cabin and Val was dead. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out.
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Madsen probably knew this story would be hard to disprove considering the length of time most of her body had been exposed to the water and allowed to decompose. It was hard for the medical examiner to determine if carbon monoxide had played any role in the death of Kim, whose throat had also been cut. And so his defense team was claiming that there was no forensic evidence disproving Peter's story, which remember was the third story he had told about how she died.
So his defense team was arguing for just a six-month sentence for dismembering a body. He said he dismembered her because he panicked. He said he had fallen asleep next to Kim's dead body and woke up contemplating suicide while deciding what to do next, ultimately opting to dismember her. And he didn't see why it mattered because, in his words, she was already dead.
And he flashed the ghost of a grin while saying this. I had a big problem, he explained. What do you do with a big problem? You cut it up into smaller pieces. Yeah, very practical thinking there.
And insofar as the stab wounds in Kim Val's torso near her genitals, Madsen claimed that he had inflicted them post-mortem to make sure that oxygen and other gases would exit the torso and prevent it from rising to the surface. Which it did, nonetheless. But the medical examiner contradicted this, pointing out that many of these wounds were superficial and served no functional purpose other than torture.
At no point during the trial did Madsen seem to show any sort of remorse. It looked as though Madsen was bummed about his ordeal and feeling put upon. "He just wanted to go home to his cats," he told the court. He had three cats, he said, and proceeded to name them. It was looking like Madsen was a prototypical psychopath. And the irony there is that Madsen himself went on a long tangent about psychopaths during one of his interviews with Emma Sullivan for her documentary.
which I highly recommend, by the way. It's called Into the Deep, and it's currently streaming on Netflix. In his rant about psychopaths, Madsen talks about how there are human predators among us and how easy it is to come upon psychopaths without even recognizing them as such. He talks about, quote, illusions of self-grandeur, and he asks the question, does the psychopath even know he's a psychopath?
Words that ring so much differently on this end of the knowledge that Madsen himself is a predatory and a psychopath. On April 25th, 2018, Madsen was found guilty on all three counts and given a life sentence.
And alright, straight away, Madsen's prison stint became an eventful one. In August of that year, he had to be hospitalized after another inmate beat the living crap out of him. And then that same year, a 40-year-old female prison guard fell in love with Madsen, who began making plans to move in with him after he got out of prison, which wasn't ever going to happen since he was serving a life sentence. But maybe that guard had advanced knowledge of what would happen in October of 2020, and
when Peter Madsen escaped from prison. The jailbreak from prison was captured on live TV in footage that showed Madsen brandishing a pistol, which was later learned to be a fake and wearing an explosive belt, which was also fake. He threatened prison staff and fled about half a mile before being apprehended by armed police officers.
In a smartphone video shot by a bystander, Madsen can be seen handcuffed in the grass, still wearing his prison uniform while being shouted at by locals. I think with stories like this and what we've learned in recent years about high-profile sex offenders like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein is that no corner of life is safe from predatory psychopaths. Madsen was right in that predators do walk among us, blending in unsuspectedly.
And sometimes those predators hide in plain sight, in the most conspicuous way, in the public eye. Such was Peter Madsen's arrogance that he thought he would get away with a crime as brazen as the one he committed, despite being so visibly a public figure with cameras following him around, and with it being no secret that Kim Val was going aboard his submarine with him that night. Or maybe the power of his impulses were so strong that he just couldn't control himself.
But the way this murder was so premeditated tells me it was something greater than mere impulse that drove Peter Madsen to kill. Well, that's our story for this week. But don't reach for the towel just yet. We'll be heading back into the water for next week's episode. So slather on another layer of sunscreen and join us again. I'll see you then.