They find each other instantly. Exhausted and relieved they decide to have a beer after the test.
Caterina Clerici from Milan, Kim Wall from Trelleborg – both studying abroad, but wanting to go further, outward and forward. That’s why they have just been sitting in a classroom in London, sweating over the first entrance exam to get in to Columbia University’s prestigious course in journalism in New York.
While drinking beer it's like they interview each other, on politics and culture, about each others biographies.
For Kim Wall not working with journalism has never been an option, raised with a father who is a press photographer and a mother reporting for the local newspaper Trelleborgs Allehanda. As a child she has sat in the passenger seat with her parents on their way to jobs, and understood that journalism can both fulfill and feed her curiosity.
For Kim Wall is curious. Alert and bubbly, with her eyes open, and a feeling that the world is calling in her heart.
After their education at Columbia in New York, to their surprise both were admitted, Wall and Clerici start writing articles together.
The two-year-younger friend is impressed by the way that Kim Wall can get people to loosen up and open up – a key feature of a storytelling reporter.
“I remember when we were in Haiti,” says Caterina Clerici. “We were going to meet a voodoo priest who didn’t really want to speak to us. Then Kim started to talk about his sweater, which had a picture of Justin Bieber, the pop artist, on it. Kim immediately found a common denominator, whoever she met.”
The Refs peninsula lies in Copenhagen’s port. It’s a battered and shabby piece of land where the colour has faded from the old industrial buildings, and where men at bachelor parties shoot paintballs among the gravel pits.
At the foot of the peninsula, under an enormous graffiti painting of a wolf, lies an old hangar. In the hangar software developer Rune Henssel lifts a pointy cone in his arms. He has moulded it in carbon fibre and now he will put it up on the seven-meter long rocket standing in the middle of the hangar, by the vehicle’s nose.
Rune Henssel is dreaming about the future, ten years from now, when the amateur organization Copenhagen Suborbitals will be the first people in the world to send an amateur astronaut into space in a homemade rocket. That’s the goal.
“For humanity to survive we must colonize space. If we manage to put a person in one of our rockets before anyone else does, the eyes of the world will be on us. A couple of Danes, doing this on a budget of less money than Nasa spends on cakes.”
But Copenhagen Suborbitals do have competition, someone who wants to be the first to get to the stars. They operate in a rusty steel hall across the gravel, and they call themselves Rocket-Madsen’s Space laboratory.
The space laboratory’s star, 45-year-old Peter Madsen, is famous in Denmark as an eccentric man with dark depths and extreme heights. As a young teenager he built his first rocket from sewers, nitric acid, lattice and detergent. He launched the rocket from behind the school playground.
Peter Madsen also founded Copenhagen Suborbitals, but after making himself impossible there, by attacking other members in group e-mails sent to the whole organization, he was excluded from his own society in 2014, creating a new team. That’s why there is now a space race in the port of Copenhagen.
The last few months have been intense for both the amateur organizations on the Refs peninsula. They have been sprinting to be the first to launch their rocket 14 kilometers into the air, from an area in the water outside of Bornholm.
The authorities have permitted them to launch the rockets during the last weekend of August, but before that Rocket-Madsen's space laboratory has to transport a launching ramp to Bornholm. The ramp will be transported by UC3 Nautilus, the submarine that Peter Madsen has built and named after Nemo’s vehicle in Jules Verne’s story ” 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”.
But before that Madsen will make a trip on the submarine together with a Swedish journalist. She has e-mailed him and explained that she wants to do a piece on him.
After her education in New York, Kim Wall gets many prestigious jobs. She writes about Havana’s underground internet providers for the reputable American magazine Harper’s, about Chinese investors taking over a mall in Kampala for the hip magazine Vice, about vampires and hipster beards for British The Guardian.
Peter Madsen grows up by himself with a father who smells of musk and cigars, he is violent and authoritarian, forbidding his son to meet his mother.
She is drawn to somewhat quirky phenomena, especially if they can be connected to world politics – together with her colleagues she can discuss public documents in the same breath as she bubbles over the fact that pop star Shakira is pregnant.
A young and brave reporter, capturing atmospheres and scenes, finding a voice. For her story on nuclear tests on the Marshall Islands she is awarded the prestigious Hansel Mieth Prize for digital reporting.
It might look more glamorous than it is: freelancing on the international market is hard work. Wall often travels on her own budget to places; just to do research, try her hypothesis, see if there is really a story. After that she can start the job of finding scholarships and buyers.
During the summer Kim Wall talks about the tough conditions of the trade, when she visits New York and stays over in Caterina Clerici’s apartment in Brooklyn. Wall is there to do the typical tour of Manhattan: having coffee with editors, making herself known, reminding them that she has ideas that need to be published.
The two friends take a long walk in East Village when Kim Wall reveals her plans of moving to Beijing in the autumn. She feels that she has made enough contacts in the publishing world in the US and Great Britain, making the trip possible financially. And there is a need for a young voice for the readers to understand the budding, dynamic China.
Also, which Wall finds important, it’s time for a young woman to fill the shoes of the old male correspondents.
Peter Madsen grows up by himself with a father who smells of musk and cigars, he is violent and authoritarian, forbidding his son to meet his mother. But the father does have a good eye for Peter, he goes to the city to buy nitric acid for his experiments for example, but he beats Peter’s half brothers.
When Carl Madsen dies Peter keeps a hammer, a chisel and a hacksaw from his belongings, the rest he sells in a flea market. In the biography ”Rocket-Madsen – Denmark’s do-it-yourself astronaut” he describes the death of his father as when part of a rocket falls to the sea: no more contact.
Peter Madsen’s life is full of these kinds of departures.
He quits his engineering studies as soon as he knows enough to be able to build a rocket. He does the same with a welding course.
After blowing up a rocket and developing explosive fuel from concentrated hydrogen peroxide, endangering other peoples’ lives, he is thrown out of the Danish club for space amateurs.
His behaviour seems boundless, with a moody unpredictability. There is a creative dynamic, but also something more destructive.
He lacks self-awareness, and knows that he is hard to work with. In his biography he describes himself as a chief surrounded by native Indians, he doesn’t believe in democracy when it comes to building rockets and submarines.
What happens in the interior of the submarine this Thursday evening only Peter Madsen knows for certain, and he is in custody on suspicion of murdering Kim Wall.
When the conflict with Copenhagen Suborbitals is at its most violent, in February 2014, he writes on his blog: ”Prima donnas are impossible. They have a hell of an ego and a hell of a temperament and can’t be controlled. They are difficult to cooperate with, despite their good traits. I don’t know if I have any of the good traits of a prima donna, but I definitely have some of the bad ones”.
It’s around seven in the evening of August 10, 2017, when Peter Madsen directs UC3 Nautilus from the Refs peninsula harbour.
Half an hour later a father with small kids on an evening sail with his boat, sees the strange vehicle. With his son in the foreground he takes a few photos of the inventor and the journalist, standing in the submarine’s tower. Kim Wall waves to the child, the sun is pink in the horizon. It’s a beautiful evening. After this the contours of the path of events are fuzzy.
What happens in the interior of the submarine this Thursday evening only Peter Madsen knows for certain, and he is in custody on suspicion of murdering Kim Wall.
What we know is that Madsen during the evening sends a text message to a colleague at the space laboratory, cancelling their planned submarine trip to Bornholm the following day. We also know that the submarine is close to colliding with a trade ship. That happens around midnight, just off the Oresund Bridge, between the Danish mainland and the island of Saltholm. Madsen’s vehicle doesn’t have lanterns and the crew of the trade ship are lucky to notice the submarine in the moonlight, and avoid collision by thirty meters.
A few hours later, at 2.30 AM, Kim Wall’s boyfriend becomes so worried he calls the police to report that his girlfriend is missing.
When the coast guards try to get in contact with the submarine they get no answer.
On Friday morning the disappeared submarine is breaking news in Denmark, and people in the vicinity go out in their boats to help with the search. At 11 A.M. Kristian Isbank, a supplier of marine products, spots Peter Madsen in the Köge bay, south of Copenhagen. The submarine is positioned on the surface. Madsen is standing in the tower.
Several boats join the search. The inventor calls at them to stay away, he shouts that he needs to fix something and it can become dangerous. He disappears from the tower and is out of sight for a while; then comes back up, crossing his neck with his hand as if to signal that something has gone wrong. Then he jumps in the water and swims to one of the boats, which picks him up.
At the same time the submarine starts sinking, and after half a minute it disappears under the surface. When Madsen meets the press waiting in Dragör’s harbour he is poised, smiling to the camera.
”I’m a bit sad of course,” Madsen says. ”Seeing Nautilus go down was intense.”
A policeman takes him to a waiting car, Madsen is wearing his camouflage overall.
”Something went wrong with her ballast tank. Nothing really serious, until I tried to repair it. Then it suddenly became very serious.”
He says he was the only person on-board when the submarine sank. The day before he had been joined by a female journalist, he only remembers that her name was Kim. He dropped her of on the Refs peninsula, he says, at a popular summer restaurant called Halvandet, at 10.30 on Thursday evening.
The police don’t believe Madsen’s story, instead they arrest him on suspicion of causing Wall’s death.
Dogs don’t find any traces of Kim Wall on the Refs peninsula and when the police technicians search UC3 Nautilus they determine it has not sunk because of a technical fault, as Madsen has claimed. Instead it has been consciously sunk.
Of course this becomes international news. The inventor and the young journalist who disappears without a trace in a homemade submarine.
The day before he had been joined by a female journalist, he only remembers that her name was Kim.
The speculations start: UC3 Nautilus lacks signal systems and it is impossible to know how the submarine has moved during the night – the police cannot rule out that Kim Wall could have been taken to Germany.
While the search for Kim Wall is extended to Swedish water and airspace her friends and colleagues gather in groups on Facebook, trying to calm each other. Maybe she just found a really intriguing story in the bay, something that is worth not charging her phone in days for?
As Peter Madsen is arrested he changes his story.
Now he says an accident happened on-board the boat. Kim Wall is dead and he buried her at sea. Buried is the word that Peter Madsen uses himself.
On the Refs peninsula silence spreads.
On the gravel, where there was febrile activity a few weeks earlier because of the planned rocket launches, it’s now quiet and still.
Outside the entrance to Rocket-Madsen’s space laboratory an orange sign is put up.
”Entry prohibited – risk of spontaneous combustion.”
A man with a white beard and a pink shirt under his overall opens the rusty steel door.
”We know nothing,” he says instantly.
A young man appears behind him in the entrance.
”No, we know nothing,” he says. ”Peter is in custody so we can’t reach him. We will see when he can talk to us. The rocket is here on the floor, but now nothing is happening. We are just finishing up some smaller projects, before the workshop closes. Or maybe we will close it. We don’t know.”
Peter Madsen’s support group, a friend society that has been helping the inventor for years, decides to stop their operations all together. ”The project is shaded by the light of this pointless loss of human life,” they write in a statement. ”The trust is gone.”
It has become Monday, August 21, when a cyclist spots a body part in the water off Svenskeholm, a recreational area facing the Köge bay where Peter Madsen sunk his submarine.
It turns out it’s a female torso. The police conclude that the head, as well as arms and legs, have been consciously separated from the torso. Also metal seems to have been attached to the body part to make it sink.
One day later the police can match DNA that they have taken earlier from a hairbrush and a toothbrush at Kim Wall’s family home. The same genetic material is found in UC3 Nautilus, police director Jens Moller Jensen says at a press conference outside the police office in Copenhagen on Wednesday morning.
Now there is no longer any hope nor doubt.
A 30-year-old woman, a sister, daughter and girlfriend, a talented reporter on her way forward, has been dismembered.
Dumped in the sea.
A TV-reporter turns her head away from the podium, staring out into the traffic, trying to pretend she is not crying.
Kim Wall’s mother Ingrid updates her Facebook. She wants everyone to remember her daughter’s legacy. ”She let us follow her into earthquake stricken Haiti, to the torture chambers of Idi Amin in Uganda and the minefields in Sri Lanka,” she writes. ”She gave a voice to the weak, the vulnerable and the marginalised people. That voice would have been needed for a long, long time still. Now that won’t happen.”
The suspicions against Peter Madsen get stronger. He is charged with murder and crime against the peace of the grave
Along the fishing nets in the bay of Köge the army’s divers continue their search for more body parts.
The National guard walk along the stones by the steep beach, searching all the way to Dragör, sixteen kilometres away.
Through the roars of the waves and wind Caterina Clerici’s voice is heard over the phone.
”This is just the kind of story that interested Kim,” she says. ”What makes me mad is that I know that Kim would have written about this man with warmth. She would have found the sides of him that made him understandable. It’s really painful.”
When they left each other in the summer Kim Wall stayed on by herself in Caterina Clerici’s apartment in Brooklyn for a few days.
”She told me afterwards that she had left a small gift as a thank you. I haven’t been in New York since then and now I’m dreading coming back. I think that’s when I will finally understand that this is real. When I hold Kim’s present in my hand.”
Translation: Evelyn Jones