Excitedly planning a career move to Beijing with her boyfriend after they had fallen “outrageously in love”, freelance journalist Kim Wall had one last job to do.

Kim, 30, had finally secured an interview with the eccentric inventor Peter Madsen on board his home-made submarine UC3 Nautilus, after months of trying to speak to him.

She boarded the sub off the harbour in Copenhagen that evening, on August 10 last year, after assuring her boyfriend Ole Stobbe she would be back in time for the farewell party they were hosting in the city later that night.

She never made it.

The next day, after a distraught Ole had failed to get hold of his girlfriend, Madsen was arrested and found to have flecks of Kim’s blood on his nostrils, scratches on his forearms, and traces of semen in his underpants.

Journalist Kim Wall was murdered in Denmark last summer (
Image:
Getty)

Just hours earlier, Kim had texted Ole, joking: “I’m still alive btw.”

She added: “But I’m going down
now. I love you! He brought coffee and cookies tho.” It was her last message.

Her headless torso was found on a nearby beach almost two weeks later. Madsen, 47, a minor celebrity in his native Denmark, was yesterday sentenced to life without parole after being found guilty of premeditated murder and sexual assault.

He had previously admitted dismembering Kim’s body on the submarine and throwing her remains overboard, but said she died accidentally.

Danish submarine owner and inventor Peter Madsen (right) (
Image:
Reuters)

When Kim’s remains were found washed up on Amager island, her head and legs were weighed down with metal, buried at sea alongside a saw.

She had 15 stab wounds on her body, 14 of them around the genital area.

More than 140 “snuff videos” were found on Madsen’s computer and iPhone, showing women being murdered, tortured, beheaded and impaled. The court saw a video of a woman having her throat slit, which Madsen watched the night before Kim’s death after he had Googled the words “beheading” and “girl”.

Madsen had also joked about “a murder plan”, involving tying up a woman on his sub and slitting her throat with a knife, in messages sent to a friend, which he later tried and failed to delete.

Danish authorities still don’t know for sure what happened in the period between Kim’s last texts and Madsen’s deliberate sinking of his 40-tonne submarine. But they have a pretty good idea.

Prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen said Madsen was motivated by his violent sexual fantasies, in a case “so terrible and disgusting you, as a prosecutor, have no words to describe it”. Several witnesses said Madsen had tried to persuade them to board the sub, and Mr Buch-Jepsen said the assault “was not premeditated against Kim Wall, but against the next woma n who wanted to go along with him on the submarine”.

Kim boarded Madsen's sub to get a story (
Image:
Getty)

Prosecutors said he ruthlessly planned the crime, either suffocating Kim or cutting her throat. Her remains were so badly decomposed from the water, it was impossible to tell.

A forensic examiner told the court her head may have been restrained or she may have been gagged, and her hands and feet could have been tied. Her torso showed evidence of blunt force being inflicted while she was still alive.

Madsen initially claimed Kim, from Trelleborg in southern Sweden, just across the strait from Denmark, died accidentally after hitting her head on the submarine’s hatch.

When her head was found with no signs of injury consistent with a blow to the skull, he said she died of exhaust fume poisoning while he was outside on deck. The claims were dismissed by Judge Anette Burkoe, who said: “We are talking about a cynical and planned sexual assault and brutal murder of a random woman.”

Kim's parents Ingrid Wall and Joachim Wall (
Image:
Getty)

Peter Madsen had become a minor celebrity after building three submarines and rocket launchers for his Copenhagen-based businesses.

Raised in a village near the city, his parents had split when he was six, and he lived with his father, whom Madsen compared to a Nazi concentration camp commander. Madsen moved to Refshaleøen in Copenhagen in 2004 when he was 33 and got involved in group sex and swingers’ events, with fellow artists describing him as a sadist.

He became well-known in the city in 2011 when he and NASA architect Kristian von Bengston launched Suborbitals’ HEAT-1X rocket, which was covered by news organisations across the world.

Back then, Kim was starting out on her career. Friends and family describe her as a “formidable character”, an “extraordinary” woman who loved to travel outside of her comfort zone.

She studied international relations at the London School of Economics and went to the US to join a masters programme at Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

She secured a fellowship with the International Women’s Media Foundation to travel to Uganda, reporting on Idi Amin’s torture chambers. She filed from the earthquake in Haiti, minefields in Sri Lanka and once even “slipped” into North Korea.

Peter Madsen (
Image:
Getty)

Her mum Ingrid said: “She has found stories from different parts of the world, stories that have to be written. She gave voice to the weak, the vulnerable and marginalised people.”

The Kim Wall Memorial Fund set up by her parents Ingrid and Joachim to support other women in journalism has already raised £160,000.

Grieving Ole told the court Kim was an “incredibly ambitious journalist and an amazingly curious person, who found beauty in all places and couldn’t stop herself from travelling, experiencing, discovering and sharing with others”. That curiosity led her to board Madsen’s sub.

Ole said Kim “was afraid to go on the trip in a submarine”, but was “fascinated by people dedicated to something”.

Kim’s friend and fellow journalist, Caterina Clerici, said: “What saddens me the most is that Kim would have written a fair and beautiful portrait of an unusual character. It would have been a perfect Kim story.”

Tragically, Kim became the story.