COPENHAGEN: Danish inventor/submarine-builder Peter Madsen was well-known at home for his eccentric ambitions to develop rockets and space travel, but few knew about his macabre fantasies involving violent sex, beheaded women and snuff films.
Today, the 47-year-old self-taught engineer was sentenced to life in prison after a Copenhagen court found him guilty of the premeditated murder and sexual assault of Swedish journalist Kim Wall onboard his homemade submarine last year.
Nicknamed “Rocket Madsen”, he has described himself to friends as a “psychopath, but a loving one”. But a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation found him to be “dangerous”, a “perverse polymorph” with “psychopathic traits” and at “high risk” of recidivism.
Madsen insisted Wall’s death was accidental, but he confessed to chopping up her body and stuffing her head, arms and legs into plastic bags, weighing them down with metal pipes before tossing them into the sea. The high-profile trial unveiled his interest in violent sex and snuff films of women being beheaded, skinned, tortured and impaled.