Tag Archives: Murder

WAS AMANDA KNOX REALLY INNOCENT OF KILLING MEREDITH KERCHER?

The Amanda Knox story captured worldwide attention during the years she passed through the Italian legal system and was convicted—twice—of complicity in murdering her college roommate, Meredith Kercher. Now, the international spotlight is again upon Amanda Knox with the new Matt Damon movie Stillwater being based on her case. In Stillwater, Matt Damon’s fictional  character pursues justice for his daughter who is wrongfully accused and falsely imprisoned for murder. It leads to questioning if this was the truth in the real Amanda Knox story and that Knox was really innocent of killing Meredith Kercher.

There’s a lot of internet information on the Amanda Knox murder case. Some of it’s factual. Much is sensational tabloid junk about “Foxy Knoxy”—the “Ice Lady”—disseminated by socially dysfunctional trolls operating from surplus metal sea-cans converted into dwellings via an extension cord hooked to one bare light bulb. To find out the truth, it’s necessary to first look at the overall facts and then examine how the Italian legal system handled the case through a dragged-out, eight-year-long process.

In 2007, Amanda Knox was a 20-year-old student from Seattle, Washington. She moved to Perugia in central Italy (slightly north of Rome) to further her journalism studies as Perugia was well-known for outstanding universities and educational opportunities—a popular place for foreign students. Here, Knox met a British exchange student, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, and they shared a ground-floor, four-bedroom apartment with two other young ladies.

Quickly, Knox became romantically involved with a young Italian man, Raffaele Sollecito, and Kercher did the same with Giacomo Silenzi. At the time, Knox also worked part-time in a nightclub run by Patrick Lumumba. It was this pentagon of five that the Italian prosecutors would present as a sex game gone wrong that resulted in Meredith Kercher’s death.

Meredith Kercher

On the evening of November 1, 2007, Knox, Sollecito, Silenzi, and Kercher socialized with others at Sollecito’s apartment near to where the ladies roomed. Present was a man named Rudy Guede who was invited by one of the group but who was unknown to Knox and Kercher. Around 9 pm, Kercher excused herself from the gathering and walked back to her residence alone. Bit by bit, the gathering broke up leaving Knox and Sollecito to overnight there together.

At midday on November 2, Knox repeatedly tried to phone Meredith Kercher. She got no answer and became concerned so Knox and Sollecito went to the co-habitation and found Kercher’s bedroom door locked. Knox tapped on the door and called out but Kercher didn’t answer. Then Knox and Sollecito noticed some bloodstains, including a bloody footprint, in the bathroom.

Being alarmed, Knox called her mother in America who directed Knox to call the Italian police. She did so. However, there was a significant delay which was advanced as part of the prosecution’s later case against Knox and was supported by a timeline presented through cell phone records.

The first attending police officers were not homicide detectives. They were an Italian version of postal inspectors crossed with communication fraud investigators. There hadn’t been a murder in Perugia in over twenty years, so it was a considerable time before “competent” scene processors and trained murder cops arrived. Naturally, the scene was contaminated and the ensuing DNA evidence used in convicting Amanda Knox of murdering Meredith Kecher was compromised.

What the scene processing showed was Kercher had been attacked, raped, and had her throat cut in her bedroom. Her official cause of death was exsanguination (bleeding out) after being injured with a sharp-edged weapon. Kercher’s bedroom window was open and the investigators deduced that to mean that a break-in had been staged with the real killer setting the crime up to appear that a stranger was involved.

Police initially treated Amanda Knox as a witness. She was questioned on different occasions, but the homicide investigators slowly formulated a theory that Knox was lying to protect the actual murderer. They also developed a motive theory that Kercher was killed because she refused to take part in a multi-person sexual trist. An orgy.

On November 6, the Italian homicide detectives again brought Knox in for questioning. This time it turned into a full-on, hard-core interrogation that lasted hours. This is a complex and controversial part of the Amanda Knox story and precise details—at least as precise as possible because the authorities did not audio or video record it (rather they elicited a written confession from Knox)—can be read on the website amandaknoxcase.com under The Interrogation of Amanda Knox.

In Amanda Knox’s written confession, she states to have been present while her nightclub boss, Patrick Lumbumba, raped and murdered Meredith Kercher. Knox did not supply any motive or any details which only an involved person would know. Lumbuba was arrested on the strength of Knox’s statement and it was shortly proven, beyond all doubt, that Lumbumba had an air-tight alibi and he was flat-out innocent.

Rudy Guede

 

Amanda Knox was held in custody while the prosecution put an indictable case together. Meanwhile, the scene forensic evidence identified a DNA profile from semen on Kercher’s body. They conclusively linked it to Rudy Guede who had been at the social gathering on the evening when Kercher was last seen alive. Guede was arrested in Germany where he confessed and indicated that Amanda Knox had nothing to do with Kercher’s murder.

By now, the Italian legal system had a freight train rolling along the justice track. Instead of applying the brakes, the police, prosecutors, and judges threw more coal on the fire and kept on persecuting Amanda Knox. This was due to the archaic inquisitional system Italy was trying to gentrify into a western adversarial legal framework.

The common US-style evidence rules didn’t apply in the Italian arena. Despite Amanda Knox being hardline interrogated for hours without legal representation, being informed of her rights, denied food, water, and toilet facilities, slapped around, and breaking down in the middle of the night, the Italian court accepted Knox’s coerced confession as solid evidence that had to be admitted under their law structure. It didn’t matter that the prosecution’s perceived motive—some kinky sex game—had no factual basis, and it didn’t matter that Knox’s boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, provided Knox with her air-tight alibi. No, the Italian legal machine went right on persecuting Amanda Knox.

Knox stood trial through the summer and fall of 2009. Her case received massive public attention and the British tabloids sensationalized it like nothing ever seen. This was now the day of the emerging internet where chatrooms and social media made a spectacle of the trial and a massive mess of Amanda Knox’s life.

Amanda Knox was convicted of Meredith Kercher’s murder on December 4, 2009. She was sentenced to 26 years in jail. She appealed and had her murder conviction overturned on October 3, 2011, now having served nearly two years in an Italian prison.

In March of 2013, Italy’s Court of Cassation ordered a new trial and on January 30, 2014, she was once again convicted for killing Meredith Kercher. By now, Amanda Knox was back in America and was not returned to Italy during her new appeal. On March 27, 2015, Italy’s highest court again overturned her conviction and her legal persecution was over.

Any rational person would have to ask how this miscarriage of justice could possibly happen. The answer to that is as complicated as the Amanda Knox story, if that’s possible to fully tell. It’s a murky mix of systematic incompetence and utter lack of regard for the truth. In the high court final ruling, the judge cited “sensational failures”, “glaring errors”, “investigative amnesia”, “guilty and culpable omissions”, “ignorance of expert forensic testimony that demonstrated contamination of evidence”, “outright falsification of forensic evidence”, and “a case without any foundation”.

The horrific Amanda Knox wrongful conviction story is best told by Amanda, herself. In a recent interview with The Atlantic titled Who Owns Amanda Knox? , Amanda says:

Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions again and again because others continue to profit off my identity, and my trauma, without my consent. Most recently, there is the film Stillwater, directed by Tom McCarthy and starring Matt Damon and Abigail Breslin, which was, in McCarthy’s words, “directly inspired by the Amanda Knox saga.” How did we get here?

In the fall of 2007, a British student named Meredith Kercher was studying abroad in Perugia, Italy. She moved into a little cottage with three roommates—two Italian law interns, and an American girl. Less than two months into her stay, a young man named Rudy Guede, an immigrant from the Ivory Coast, broke into the apartment and found Meredith alone. Guede had a history of breaking and entering. A week prior, he had been arrested in Milan while burglarizing a nursery school, and was found carrying a 16-inch knife. He was released. A week later, he raped Meredith and stabbed her in the throat, killing her. In the process, he left his DNA in Meredith’s body and throughout the crime scene. He left his fingerprints and footprints in her blood. He fled to Germany immediately afterward, and later admitted to being at the scene.

I am the American girl in that story, and if the Italian authorities had been more competent, I would have been nothing more than a footnote in a tragic story. But as in many wrongful convictions, the authorities formed a theory before the forensic evidence came in, and when that evidence indicated a sole perpetrator, Guede, ego and reputation led them to contort their theory to maintain that I was still somehow involved. Guede was quietly convicted for participating in the murder in a separate fast-track trial, and then I became the main event for eight long years.

While I was on trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher, from 2007 to 2015, the prosecution and the media crafted a story, and a doppelgänger version of me, onto which people could affix all their uncertainties, fears, and moral judgments. People liked that story: the psychotic man-eater, the dirty ice queen, Foxy Knoxy. A jury convicted my doppelgänger, and sentenced her to 26 years in prison. But the guards couldn’t handcuff that invented person. They couldn’t escort that fiction into a cell. That was me, the real me, who returned to that windowless prison van, to those high cement walls topped with barbed wire, to those cold, echoing hallways and barred windows, to that all-consuming loneliness.

Ten years ago, at the age of 24, I was acquitted, and I tumbled into a kind of purgatory. I left one cell and immediately entered another: the quiet of my childhood bedroom. Outside, the telephoto lenses were fixed on my closed blinds. Prison had given me an appreciation for all the freedoms I’d taken for granted. Freedom showed me how many I still lacked.

As I walked back into the free world, I knew that my doppelgänger was there alongside me. I knew that everyone I would ever meet from then on would have already met, and judged, her. I had been acquitted in a court of law, but sentenced to life by the court of public opinion as, if not a killer, then at least a slut, or a nutcase, or a tabloid celebrity. Why doesn’t she just go away already? Her 15 minutes are over.

In freedom, I had become a pariah. Looking for work, going back to school, buying tampons at the pharmacy, everywhere I went I met people who already thought they knew who I was, what I’d done or not done, and what I deserved. I was threatened with abduction and torture in broad daylight; I was threatened with having Meredith’s name carved into my body. Strangers sent me lingerie and bizarre love letters. All over the world, people believed they knew me, a warped assumption that turned me into a monster to some and a saint to others. I felt like I was always standing behind that cardboard cutout, Foxy Knoxy, saying, Hey, back here, the real me! Even most of the strangers who offered kindness and support didn’t truly see me. They loved her.

It’s hard to make friends, to date, to be a regular person when everyone you meet has a preconceived notion of who you really are, whether positive or negative. I could have chosen to hide out, to change my name, to dye my hair, and hope no one recognized me ever again. Instead, I decided to embrace the world that had dehumanized me, and all those who turned me into a product.

From the moment I was arrested, my name and face and trauma became a source of profit for news organizations, filmmakers, and other artists, scrupulous and unscrupulous. The most intimate details of my life, from my sexual history to my thoughts of death and suicide in prison, were taken from my private diary and leaked to journalists. Those journalists turned my darkest fears into fodder for hundreds of articles, thousands of blog posts, and millions of hot takes. People speculated about my mental state and sexuality, they diagnosed me from afar, they used my predicament as a metaphor, they made TV movies about me, based characters in legal shows on me, and the worst of them took every opportunity they could, while I was in prison and while I’ve been out, to shame me for something I didn’t do, to shame me for living while Meredith is dead, to shame me for being in the very headlines they write, for being in the photographs they take without my consent. The hypocrisy and the cruelty are maddening. And yet, being under that microscope has given me insight into how wrong a media narrative can be, how easy it is for all of us to consume other people’s lives as if they were mere content to fill up our Twitter feeds.

This focus on me led many to complain that Meredith Kercher had been forgotten. But whom did they blame for that? Not the Italian authorities. Not the press. Somehow it was my fault that the police and media focused on me at Meredith’s expense. The result of this is that 14 years later, my name is the name associated with this tragic series of events I had no control over. Meredith’s name is often left out, as is Rudy Guede’s. When he was released from prison in late 2020, the New York Post headline read: “Man Who Killed Amanda Knox’s Roommate Freed on Community Service.” My name is the only name that shouldn’t be in that headline.

I never asked to become a public person. The Italian authorities and global media made that choice for me. And when I was acquitted and freed, the media and the public wouldn’t allow me to become a private citizen again. I have not been allowed to return to the relative anonymity I had before Perugia. I have no choice but to accept the fact that I live in a world where my life, and my reputation, are freely available for distortion by a voracious content mill.

———

There is no doubt—no doubt whatsoever—that Amanda Knox really is innocent of killing Meredith Kercher, She’s a true victim of crime, a victim of commercial tabloids, and a victim of vicious trolls.

COLIN PITCHFORK MURDERS — THE BIRTH OF DNA FORENSIC EVIDENCE

Colin Pitchfork. Just the name conjures up a devilish image—an evil monster—a story-villain of homicidal psychopathy. But Colin Pitchfork wasn’t a fictional work, though, like Hannibal Lecter. Pitchfork was a real serial murderer and sexual deviant who raped and strangled at least two teen girls in England in the mid-1980s as well as committing countless sexual offenses. And he was the first killer in the world to be convicted through DNA forensic evidence.

Four decades later, DNA forensic evidence is commonplace. So commonplace, in fact, that juries expect it. Through a phenomenon called the CSI Effect, clever defense counsels can plant doubtful seeds in jurors’ minds where they’ll wrongfully acquit a perfectly guilty person if there’s no DNA evidence linking the accused to the crime.

That wasn’t the case with Colin Pitchfork. He was perfectly guilty of murder, and DNA evidence proved it. We’ll look at the Pitchfork case facts in a moment and then do a DNA Forensic Evidence 101 crash course, but first let me tell you a bit of my police investigation background and why I have the authority to write this piece on the birth of DNA forensic evidence.

In the 1990s, when DNA evidence was under development, I was an active homicide detective with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Serious Crimes Section. I was peripherally involved in surreptitiously collecting a biological sample from a suspect (later convicted) in the first DNA evidence trial in Canadian courts. Ryan Jason Love was taken down solely through DNA evidence for the 1990 murder of Lucie Turmel, a female cab driver who Love stabbed to death in the resort town of Banff, Alberta.

I was in the right place at the right time (DNA career-wise) in 1995 when Canada passed Bill C-104 Forensic DNA Analysis, a federal law. This legislation authorized search warrants for DNA sample collection on uncooperative suspects. The day the bill passed senate assent, I investigated a violent sexual assault where a police dog tracked and not-so-gently tackled a fleeing suspect. I executed the first DNA search warrant in Canada that resulted in convicting serial rapist Rodney John Camp.

Enough about me and my DNA exploits. Let’s take a quick look at the Colin Pitchfork murders and then try to make simple sense of this complicated business called DNA forensic evidence.

The Colin Pitchfork Murders

In November 1983, 15-year-old Lynda Mann’s body was found in the Narborough area of England, approximately one hundred miles northwest of London. She’d been beaten, raped, and murdered along a deserted pathway known as the Black Pad. Forensic evidence, at that time, determined semen on her was from a relatively common blood type that matched ten percent of males. The case fell cold after months of extensive investigation.

A second girl, 15-year-old Dawn Ashworth was found dead in July 1986. She’d also been beaten, raped, and strangled in a secluded Narborough footpath called Ten Pound Lane. As with Lynda Mann, the same semen type was on and in her body.

The Ashworth investigation revitalized the Mann file and the two cases became the Narborough Enquiry. Famed American crime writer Joseph Wambaugh would later write his book The Blooding about the phenomenal effort British authorities put into the investigations. Homicide detectives knew they had a serial killer—the similar blood types, the locations, and the modus operandis (MOs) were too strikingly similar to suggest otherwise.

The question was who donated the semen and how police could conclusively prove it.

Enter Alec Jefferys and his scientific team at the British Forensic Science Service. They’d been hard at work identifying Deoxyribonucleic Acid—the DNA double-helix molecule that provides a genetic fingerprint that’s unique to an individual except for identical twins. Jefferys & Company knew they were onto a world-changing forensic evidence breakthrough, and they used the Narborough Enquiry as a test case.

Initially in the Ashworth file, a strong suspect developed. He was a developmentally challenged youth named Richard Buckland who confessed under duress to the Dawn Ashworth murder. However, Buckland strongly denied the Lynda Mann slaying.

Alec Jefferys

By late 1986, Alec Jefferys’ team had their DNA identification process to the point where they were confident it could withstand courtroom scrutiny. The police took a blood sample from Richard Buckland and delivered it to the Jefferys lab. Conclusively, the lab results said, Buckland was not the semen donor in either the Mann or Ashworth killings. However, the DNA profile conclusively proved the Narborough killer was the same man.

Richard Buckland was a first—the first wrongfully accused person to be exonerated by DNA forensic evidence. Relying on a false confession is a law enforcement lesson harshly learned by detectives, but the British investigators moved on to find the real killer. The question was how?

The answer was a process of elimination.

The Narborough Enquirers took on the monumental task of getting blood samples for DNA analysis from as many late teen and adult males in the Narborough region as possible. This became known as “blooding” suspects and, after over 4,500 bloodings, it paid off.

Colin Pitchfork

In August 1987, police got a tip that one Ian Kelly had fraudulently submitted his blood sample to cover up for a friend, Colin Pitchfork. Both men worked as bakers in Narborough, and the plan backfired. Police took blood from Pitchfork under a court order. It matched the semen DNA profile in the Mann and Ashworth murders.

Colin Pitchfork confessed and got a life sentence. He also admitted to performing around 1,000 indecent exposure acts as well as other violent sexual assaults. Pitchfork’s motive for killing Lynda and Dawn, he said, was not for sexual gratification. He did it because the girls could identify him.

Since the first blooding that led to DNA forensic being soundly based in worldwide courtrooms, and even compounding the frustrating CSI Effect problem, DNA extraction and processing science has advanced leaps and bounds. Today, processing DNA for forensic evidence is mostly routine. Here’s a brief look—call it a crash course—in DNA Forensic Evidence 101.

DNA Forensic Evidence 101

Scientists have studied genetics since the early 1800s when Gregor Mendel suggested his theory that all living organisms had genetic blueprints that described and allowed their physical structure. Mendel also theorized all living organisms shared basic hereditary traits. Mr. Mendel did an interesting experiment with peas and proved that dominant and recessive genes got passed from parent to offspring. It’s a principle applying to peas and humans alike.

In the 1860s, Friedrich Meischer was the first to identify DNA in human blood white cells. (Note: DNA molecules do not appear in red blood cells because red cells are not really cells—they don’t have a nucleus which DNA needs to build a cell—DNA being the building blocks of cells.) By the 1920s, mainstream science widely accepted the DNA theory of genetics and inherited traits. And in the 1950s, famed genetic scientists James Watson and Francis Crick accurately described and isolated chemical structure in the double helix molecule.

Knowledge of this structure, the double helix, allowed Alec Jeffreys and his team to develop extraction, multiplication, and comparison techniques of DNA signatures within all species. DNA blueprints are present in the smallest of life’s creatures like gastropod mollusks to the largest like blue whales and are around 99.9% similar in every living species known to science. It’s that small 0.1% difference that makes species, and specimens within each species, entirely unique.

Your human body produces around 230 billion new cells each day. Nature programmed you for cell division where, uncontrolled by your conscious actions, your cells will divide into two with the new half receiving behavioral instructions from the old half. People being people and nature being nature, there are always small errors or slight changes to the genetic blueprint. Over time and through trillions of cell splits, we all become slightly different. Except, of course, for monozygotic or identical twins. (Science now finds tiny differences in monozygotic DNA structures at the mitochondrial level, but that’s for DNA 301.)

Genetic mistakes, or unintended differences, are where forensic scientists capitalize for evidence. Variances in DNA replication or sequences are called Single Nucleotide Polymorphism or SNPs. These variances normally go unnoticed, health-wise, but they’re the reasons things like hair and eye color vary, metabolisms aren’t the same in family members, and possibly why some seem to have God-given talents.

There really isn’t a lot known about why some relatives have two left feet and why some are Olympic athletes, but one thing that can be taken to the evidentiary bank is each human (save for those pesky twins) have tiny DNA blueprint variances, and that’s where the forensic folks go when examining DNA evidence.

Without stepping into DNA Forensic Evidence 201 or beyond, what’s needed for this crash course is knowing about markers and loci. DNA scientists break down the individual biological sample they’re examining and give it a barcode snapshot similar to a binary code. They have highlights called markers and loci which show unique traits of the sample. Quite simply, they make a graph of the markers and loci then compare the sample they’re questioning against the “known” one. If the markers and loci match, it’s an identification.

Caution! Spoiler Alert: DNA forensic evidence matching isn’t an exact science. It’s a complicated and precise process but, unlike fingerprinting with ridges, valleys, whorls, deltas, and accents which are 100% physically conclusive—to the elimination of all other humans in the world—DNA matches rely on conclusions based on statistical probabilities. However, the statistical matching models return such enormously large matching probabilities of 1:13 billion and such, that this circumstantial opinion or viewpoint is regularly accepted by juries as cold, hard fact.

DNA Forensic Evidence 101 isn’t the place to examine specific processing techniques like Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP), Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), Short Tandem Repeats (STR), or Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (ALFP). It’s not the place to touch on Touch DNA (Low Level DNA), Mixtures, Rapid DNA, CODIS, or Southern Blot analysis. But it’s worthwhile knowing the DNA evidentiary processing chain from crime scene to courtroom. It goes like this:

Collection — where a biological sample is found at a crime scene.

Extraction — where DNA is released from the cell at the lab.

Quantification — where the lab determines how much DNA they have to work with.

Amplification — where the lab copies the DNA to characterize it.

Separation — where the lab separates amplified DNA for identification.

Analysis and Interpretation — where the lab compares DNA to other known profiles.

Statistical Computation — where the lab calculates a match’s probability.

Quality Assurance — where the lab triple checks process accuracy.

Evidence Delivery — where the lab testifies about their conclusion(s).

In 1987, the birth of Colin Pitchfork’s DNA evidence process was slow, labor extensive, and extremely expensive. It might have even been painful. That’s no longer the case, as four decades has taken this science—originally deemed pseudoscience—and molded it into fast, economical, and highly reliable forensic evidence used around the world. Now, if science could find a permanent remedy for the CSI Effect, that’d be a real breakthrough.

So, you’ve graduated from the DyingWords crash course in DNA Forensic Evidence 101 and your certificate is in the mail. If there’s enough interest, I may run crash courses 201 and 301 where I’ll invite some expert DNA guest lecturers to explain the differences between loci and markers and why the Southern Blot is so slow compared to Rapid and maybe talk fun stuff like Touch DNA, Mixtures, CODIS, and Dirty. In the meantime, if you’d like to continue with this third-degree program, here are five Forensic DNA websites well worth checking out:

http://www.forensicsciencesimplified.org/dna/DNA.pdf

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/bc000657.pdf

https://wyndhamforensic.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/WyndhamForensic_Presentation_DNAAnalysis.pdf

https://www.fbi.gov/services/laboratory

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3561883/

KIM WALL — THE SUBMARINE SNUFF FILM VICTIM

When it comes to bizarre crimes with a demented mindset and a disgusting motive, it doesn’t get much worse than this. Most people around the world have heard something of the Scandinavian case where inventor Peter Madsen murdered journalist Kim Wall on board his home-built submarine and then dismembered her body and dumped it in the sea. Parts of Kim were found in intervals during a massive search by the Danish police. Madsen was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. It’s only now, after a highly-rated miniseries called The Investigation was released, that the motive has publically surfaced. It appears Peter Madsen made a snuff film using Kim Wall as the star.

This murder case has a history to it and a blind coincidence that allowed it to happen. Before going into details of who Kim Wall and Peter Madsen were, as well as the strand of fate putting them together—alone—and on that fateful submersible boat, it’s necessary to do a quick case-fact review. Here’s what happened.

Kim Wall was a top-notch journalist who interviewed Peter Madsen, an eccentric entrepreneur, for a peculiar story. On August 10, 2017, Madsen invited Kim onboard his midget submarine, UC3 Nautilus, in Koge Bugt on the south side of Copenhagen, Denmark. Kim arrived at 7:00 p.m. for a scheduled two-hour ride and talk. She was never seen in one piece again.

By 1:40 a.m. on August 11, Kim’s boyfriend and partner reported her overdue and missing. So were Peter Madsen and the Nautilus. The police started an air and water search when light broke. At 11:00, searchers spotted the Nautilus surfacing near Koge Bugt. When they approached, Madsen scuttled the ship and it went to the bottom in minutes.

Peter Madsen swam free and a rescue boat fished him out. Madsen claimed that he’d dropped Kim Wall off on shore the previous evening and he kept cruising alone until a mechanical problem caused him to surface at which time a ballast tank failed and flooded the sub’s inside. The police didn’t believe it. Not a word.

In this Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2017 photo, a private submarine sits on a pier in Copenhagen harbor, Denmark. Danish police say a DNA test from a headless torso found in the Baltic Sea matches with missing Swedish journalist Kim Wall, who is believed to have died on the private submarine. (Jens Dresling/Ritzau Foto via AP)

They filed an involuntary manslaughter charge which, under Danish law, allowed the authorities to keep Madsen in custody while they investigated. A salvage crew raised the sub and searched it. Kim Wall was not inside, and there was clear evidence the sub had been intentionally sunk.

While searchers combed the shore and divers covered the bottom, the police looked into who Peter Madsen was. He was well-known in Denmark, and the worst-kept secret was he belonged to the sub-culture (excuse the pun) of the underground fetish scene of B.D.S.&M. Bondage-Dominance-Sadism-Masochism.

Kim Wall’s torso washed up at an Amager, Denmark, beach on August 21. She’d been stabbed 15 times in the genitals and ribs. Her legs and arms had been cut off. So had Kim’s head.

Once confronted with the body evidence, Peter Madsen changed his story. He claimed Kim was accidentally killed when a heavy hatch cover fell on her head. Madsen said he panicked and choose to get rid of her body. He explained the bodily mutilation was necessary to remove her from the boat as it was impossible for him to drag her lifeless form up the ladder and through the conning tower. So, he said, he dismembered Kim Wall to make it efficient.

An incredible performance by Danish divers located Kim’s remaining pieces. This took continual underwater grid searching that lasted into November. When Kim’s head was located in a weighted bag, like each of the other parts had been sunken, there was no blunt force trauma evidence. One of the bags contained a saw. Another a knife. And all had metal pipes in them.

Again, Peter Madsen changed his story. Now he said Kim had been accidentally gassed by the diesel engine fumes, and she died of carbon monoxide poisoning. No, the pathologist differed, her torso contained intact lungs and there was no CO evidence in them.

Peter Madsen shut up and remained mute while the police put a painstaking case together. Part of the package that prosecutors presented to a judge (not a jury) involved the backgrounds of Kim Wall and Peter Madsen. This included the strange strand of fate that put Kim on Peter Madsen’s boat.

Who Was Kim Wall?

Kim Isabela Fredrika Wall was a thirty-year-old Swedish woman. She was a high achiever, a world traveler, and a terrifically talented journalist—a professional freelance writer. Kim was single but attached to a long-term boyfriend, and she was also tightly attached to her family—a younger brother and her parents, Ingrid and Joachim Wall.

Kim Wall was a straight-A student who went on to earn double Masters Degrees at the London School of Economics and Columbia University in New York City. One was in journalism. The other was in international relations. As in grade school, Kim Wall was an honors student and at the top of her class.

Besides being intelligent, Kim was sympathetic. She was a champion of the underdog and always looked for the human side of the story within the story. And in search of the story, Kim Wall traveled to far reaches like Uganda, Kenya, Cuba, Cambodia, and even into Russia and North Korea. She wrote about smuggled Beatles recordings in to communist countries, feminism in China, Idi Amin’s despot reign, and nuclear waste in the Marshall Islands.

Kim looked for eccentric stories with quirky interests. Her freelance work appeared in TIME, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Wired. It was a Wired commission that aligned her with Peter Madsen.

Who Was Peter Madsen?

Peter Langkjær Madsen was a forty-five-year-old Dane. He. too, was well-traveled. But unlike Kim Wall’s natural and well-balanced smarts, Masen was the fine line between genius and nutjob. He also had sexual kinks and a ferocious temper.

Madsen was a bit of a Danish celebrity. His narcissism played right to the crowd and his psychopathy gave him absolutely no remorse if he abused people as he went about getting what he wanted. Madsen had no formal post-secondary education, and he was self-taught in engineering skills.

Peter Madsen called himself an “inventrepreneur”. He was opportunistic and enthusiastic—a dog with a bone when on a new venture. He pursued two main interests, underwater exploration and space travel. He did design and personally build the Nautilus. However, he used other people’s money to crowdfund it.

By 2017, Madsen tired of the ocean. He’d done enough and now turned to the stars. With a financial partner, they formed Copenhagen Orbitals which was a rocket design-build company. Madsen, however, was impossible to work with so they split up and Madsen started a competitor called Rocket Madsen’s Space Laboratory, again using investor capital.

The Strand of Fate

The Copenhagen Orbitals-Rocket Madsen’s Space Laboratory rift became a publicized feud. It caught media attention because of the high-profile space ventures these two intended under the Danish flag and for the eccentric personalities of the fighting pair. Tragically, it caught Kim Wall’s attention, too.

Wired Magazine is an American emerging technology monthly publication owned by Conde Nast. An editor at Wired was familiar with Peter Madsen and his self-taught submarine expertise. Now the editor got wind that Madsen was into rockets and space. Kim Wall got the commission to go find Peter Madsen and see what all the fuss was about, including the fuss between Madsen and Copenhagen Orbitals.

Kim Wall had a hard time connecting with Peter Madsen. He pretty much ignored her emails and calls. Kim did interview the ex-partner and research the new Danish aerospace emergence, but Madsen remained elusive.

That was until late in the afternoon of August 10, 2017. Kim Wall had given up on contacting Peter Madsen. She’d taken on a new assignment in China and had full plans to leave for the Orient on August 11’s morning. In fact, her boyfriend had arranged a large going-away party for her that evening.

At around 4:00 p.m., Kim Wall received a text from Peter Madsen. He’d agreed to an interview and asked her to stop by his laboratory. She did. They had a quick chat. And then Madsen invited Kim to the Nautilus for a two-hour exclusive. Not turning down the scoop, Kim bowed out of her party and, at 7:00 p.m., she boarded the ship—never to be seen alive again.

The Trial Evidence

The Danish police and prosecutors did an incredibly thorough job in sourcing evidence and securing a murder conviction. They were able to forensically link Kim Wall to the ship and Peter Madsen to Kim. They used Madsen’s conflicting statements to turn the tables when he took the witness stand and showed his instability by testifying on his own behalf in first and third-party viewpoints.

The prosecutors built a vivid image of Peter Madsen’s mindset. They called witness upon witness who knew Madsen and his unusual history. That included people from his sex life and people from his business world. Slowly—witness by witness and evidence piece by evidence piece—the prosecution sculpted a man with a mindset capable of luring an innocent woman to her fate of dismemberment.

Most damaging of all was what Peter Madsen did to himself. On his computer, retrieved from the hard drive, was a jamb-packed album of smut. He’d downloaded archives of violence against women, torture, and even snuff. The night before Kim’s murder, his search engine history contained “throat-slitting”, “beheading”, “girl”, and “execution murders”.

If that didn’t sink him, this did. Four different women testified that Peter Madsen contacted them during the day of August 10, 2017. He invited each of them to a 7:00 p.m. meeting on board the Nautilus. Each of the four declined. Kim Wall was the fifth Madsen called. She accepted.

As for the coup de gras, a witness described seeing Peter Madsen enter the Nautilus on August 10. In one hand, Madsen held a knife and a saw. In his other—a video camera.

The Danish judge accepted all the evidence proving Peter Madsen had planned and deliberately set out to murder a woman on the evening of August 10, 2017. By a strand of fate, that woman was Kim Wall.

The video camera was never found, so we’ll never know exactly what went down on film. But there’s no reasonable doubt about it. Kim Wall was a submarine snuff film victim.