Ride the Reading Rocket With Miss Sandy
It was meant to be only a "brief trip to Scandinavia," Swedish journalist Kim Wall assured 1 of her New York editors.
The Nordic jaunt — a stopover en route to the new life she was planning in China — would include a visit with family, and then a fun interview with an eccentric Danish inventor who congenital his ain submarine.
It was precisely the type of intrepid pursuit that marked her budding career.
At just 30 years sometime, Wall had already written almost voodoo in Haiti, explored Idi Amin's torture chambers in Uganda, and covered the effects of nuclear testing in the Republic of the marshall islands.
She once even managed to slip into Democratic people's republic of korea.
"She had an uncommon enthusiasm and happiness," said Howard French, one of Wall's journalism professors at Columbia University. "She really was that kind of person who threw herself into the fray with every enthusiasm."
She had done this even earlier beginning journalism school in New York in September 2012. In August, when a gunman opened burn down outside the Empire State Building, Wall rushed to the scene, recalled another Columbia professor.
A story about a charismatic amateur scientist who fancied himself a existent-life Captain Nemo every bit he trolled Danish waters in his DIY vessel seemed tame by comparison to her other assignments — merely it was still too good to decline.
So on the evening of Aug. 10, the petite redhead dressed smartly in an orange fleece and blackness-and-white skirt waited on a dock on Refshaleøen, an island on the outskirts of Copenhagen.
Soon, she descended a ladder into Peter Madsen's submarine, and never made it out alive.
Two years ago, in a dispute with volunteers who helped him build his UC3 Nautilus, Madsen sent an odd text message.
"At that place is a curse on Nautilus," he wrote, according to his website. "The curse is me. In that location volition never be peace on Nautilus equally long as I exist."
Madsen, 46, is at present suspected of killing his interviewer, but what precisely happened on lath the vessel remains as murky equally the waters he explored.
At least initially, there seemed little for the young freelancer to fear.
Fifty-fifty though he had a reputation for volatility, Madsen was a local celebrity, well known, and oft-interviewed by Danish journalists.
He was a creative genius who treasured his liberty, which sometimes included "sexual experimenting in fetish groups" even though he was married and "lives with a partner he loves," his biographer, Thomas Djursing, told The Post.
But his first love was his submarine. Madsen was trying to enhance money to refurbish his 9-twelvemonth-sometime creation, and frequently gave tours of the sixty-foot-long vessel while it was docked near Copenhagen. Danish law prevented him from taking passengers out to bounding main. Information technology's unclear why he broke the rules with Wall aboard.
"Nosotros guarantee a fun, inspirational experience that will be remembered," promised Madsen on a crowdfunding site where he said he could suit groups of upward to 200 people for two-hour tours. But only a few people at a time could clasp in the claustrophobic interior, with its curved, light dark-green walls. Footage posted online shows a control room studded with an assortment of dials, a crudely fashioned periscope, and a warren of rooms, i with a small cot covered with a wolf-grayness blanket.
According to Swedish printing reports, Madsen had antipathy for some reporters who he felt had belittled his accomplishments in the past. One Danish photographer called him "a crazy person."
"I mean, making infinite rockets and sailing around in homemade submarines is not normal beliefs, but I've never seen him lay a mitt on anyone," photographer Bo Tornvig told a Swedish daily. Tornvig has covered Madsen in the past.
In 2008, but as the 21-yr-onetime Wall was settling in to her international relations studies at the London School of Economics, Madsen, then 37, was already completing work on the Nautilus, his tertiary submarine.
Madsen was born in a small boondocks on the western declension of Kingdom of denmark in 1971, and his parents divorced when he was a toddler. Until he was 4 years old, he lived with his mother and iii one-half-brothers, according to Djursing, the author of "Rocket Madsen: Denmark's Do-Information technology-Yourself Astronaut."
Madsen then went to alive with his elderly and abusive father, "and constantly moved from identify to place," Djursing said.
Did Wall know anything about the amateur scientist who had successfully launched a rocket when he was in middle schoolhouse, before she ready off to interview him in a submarine — a bars space with no easy leave?
Madsen'south father was a carpenter who had once synthetic barracks for German language soldiers occupying Denmark during the Second World State of war, according to press reports. His begetter died when Madsen was a teenager.
In a video on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo — where he sought $50,000 to repair the UC3 Nautilus — Madsen said that his fascination with submarines began when equally a 12-year-onetime he saw "Das Kicking," a 1981 film nigh the High german coiffure of a U-gunkhole equally it plows through the waters of the Atlantic during World War II.
"I was fascinated by this amazing vessel and its capabilities," Madsen said in the video. "The whole idea of sailing underwater . . . kept me dreaming for many years."
Madsen enrolled in engineering schoolhouse, merely did not complete his degree — although he all the same dreamed of building his ain submarine and rocket.
"Peter owns very little of value, and has never owned much other than a bag of clothes and a shelf of books about rocket fuel, the Second World War and the Apollo projection," Djursing said. "He has never lived in a normal business firm or apartment for long, but has lived nigh of his life in his workplaces or in the submarine."
Like Madsen, Wall too was obsessed.
She was built-in on March 23, 1987, in Trelleborg, a quaint seaside town of nearly 29,000 in southern Sweden. Her family's Facebook photos show idyllic seascapes, brightly painted wooden houses, spirited lawn family unit gatherings, community runs on a sandy beach and the antics of the family's dearest St. Bernard.
Despite its remote location, Trelleborg is oddly connected to the world and international history. It boasts one of the country's largest ferry terminals, which connects passengers to Frg and Poland. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin famously traveled through Trelleborg on his way back to the Russian Revolution after a period of exile in Switzerland in 1917.
These days, Trelleborg is probably better known for the nude statue of a adult female which overlooks the nearby harbor. The statue is modeled after Uma Thurman's grandmother — Birgit Holmquist — and depicts a adult female in a potent and defiant posture. The arms and head are thrown back and the whole body seems open up to experience, poised to soar.
Wall's pocket-sized-town Scandinavian roots ironically prepared her to soar, and launched her career in the wider world.
From an early age, Wall'southward passion for journalism and social justice were instilled in her by her photojournalist begetter, some of whose Facebook postings commemorate the anniversary of the 1986 bump-off of Olof Palme, Sweden'southward most progressive prime minister.
Kim was born a year later on the unsolved shooting, which still resonates among many progressive and liberal Swedes equally the day that the state lost its innocence.
"Kim's father was a pretty renowned photographer and a big influence on her career," said retired Columbia professor Sandy Padwe, who start in the fall of 2012 taught Wall in his bones reporting class.
A March Facebook mail shows Wall holding a drinking glass of wine at a eatery to celebrate her 30th birthday. Her begetter wrote in English: "Today is years since I had to have care of the girl for the first time . . . What a journeying she has made always since!"
Wall'southward remarkable journey began after she graduated from the prestigious Malmö Borgarskola secondary schoolhouse, whose alumni include a Swedish prime minister and the Hollywood extra Anita Ekberg. She went on to spend a year at nearby Lund University, where US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg taught herself Swedish in lodge to write a book on Swedish ceremonious procedure in the 1960s.
She went on to the prestigious London School of Economic science, where she earned a bachelor'southward degree in political science and international relations in 2011. She also earned two graduate degrees — 1 in journalism in 2013 and another the next year in international diplomacy — both from Columbia.
Past the time she left Columbia, she spoke eight languages, including Mandarin, which she hoped to put to expert utilise this yr.
Colleagues and editors told The Post that Wall spoke little about her personal life, and no one contacted by The Mail could identify the boyfriend who had alerted police afterwards she disappeared.
In one of her concluding emails, she told a longtime editor nearly her plans for the first story she would do after settling in Red china this month.
"I'll be working on a long form story on neo-Maoism (all recommendations for reading and experts to interview would be so welcome!)," she wrote on June 29 to Jonathan Landreth, the managing editor of China File, the online mag on United states-Mainland china Relations at New York's Asia Club.
Landreth, a fellow Columbia Journalism School graduate, mentored Wall after she graduated iv years ago. In June, they had planned to meet for one of their usual lunches, over back-scratch at an Indian restaurant or fries at an Upper East Side diner, he told The Post.
But Landreth was about to go on vacation, and Wall was headed off on her "brief trip." She didn't give him details well-nigh the curious submarine story, and information technology'southward unclear if she was even on consignment for a specific publication when she went to interview Madsen.
Plans for lunch fell through.
For Landreth it would be the last fourth dimension he heard from Wall — until the news of her disappearance and death earlier this month.
"See you the next fourth dimension I'm in NYC (probably won't be long)," she wrote in the email Landreth shared with The Post.
"All my all-time, M."
Now, Wall is the story, her tale more suited to the pages of a twisted Nordic crime novel. Indeed, the grisly findings are difficult to believe.
Madsen repeatedly denied killing Wall and desecrating her remains — but his story changed with each telling.
He claimed he dropped off Wall on Aug. 10 at Halvandet, the trendy dockside eatery where they met, he told authorities. He was alone on his sub when it began to experience "a minor problem with a ballast tank that turned into a major issue," he told a local Boob tube station.
The side by side day, the Danish Navy rescued him, as his pride and joy was taking on water. All smiles, he gave a thumbs-up to the press who came out to chronicle the plight of their odd local celebrity.
"I am glad, but lamentable that the Nautilus went down," he told them.
Days later, the search for Wall intensified, and authorities said that Madsen changed his story.
He told them the reporter died in an accident and that he "buried" her at body of water.
Police establish traces of Wall'southward claret in the submarine after they recovered the forty-ton vessel, which they say Madsen deliberately sank equally the search for Wall went into high gear.
And and so, terminal calendar week, a nude headless torso of a woman was plant floating in the waters off a beach southward of Copenhagen.
Deoxyribonucleic acid tests revealed that the torso belonged to Wall.
And she wasn't simply dismembered. Police said that the air was deliberately squeezed from her body, which was weighed down with pieces of metal to ensure that it would sink.
Prosecutors in Denmark said they will bring murder charges confronting Madsen, who is scheduled to appear in court next month. He has been in police custody since Baronial 12 on suspicion of "negligent manslaughter," and will undergo psychiatric testing, AFP reported.
As in many criminal cases in Kingdom of denmark, much of this investigation remains behind closed doors.
Did Wall know anything about the apprentice scientist who had successfully launched a rocket when he was in middle schoolhouse, before she set off to interview him in a submarine — a bars space with no easy exit?
It is "a black irony that Kim, who has been in North Korea…would disappear in Denmark," 1 of her colleagues wrote in the Swedish tabloid Expressen.
Other colleagues speculate that Madsen came on to the pretty journalist, peradventure she fought off his advances. "It'south a spooky reminder that women'due south safety can't exist shrugged off as a problem specific to developing countries — as if the W is allowed to misogyny," Sruthi Gottipati wrote in The Guardian.
Her family remains in stupor that "something could happen to her in Copenhagen, just a few kilometres from her childhood home," her mother Ingrid wrote in a Facebook post subsequently Wall'southward remains were identified.
Her male parent, Joachim Wall, told The Post in an e-mail that he is notwithstanding as well numb to speak at length about his love daughter.
"We haven't taken in all of what has happened," he wrote.
Source: https://nypost.com/2017/08/26/inside-slain-journalists-fateful-submarine-ride/
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