A Danish inventor who is serving a life sentence in the murder of a Swedish journalist aboard his homemade submarine has admitted to the crime for the first time in a new documentary, saying, “I committed the crime,” according to reports.
Peter Madsen, 49, answered “yes” during a phone conversation with a reporter who asked him whether he had killed Kim Wall in August 2017 after he invited her on board his 60-foot UC3 Nautilus for an interview, Agence France-Presse reported.
The inventor delivered his mea culpa in the first episode of the series “The Secret Recordings With Peter Madsen,” which Discovery Networks Denmark aired Wednesday, the Danish news outlet jyllands-posten.dk reported.
“There is only one who is guilty, and that is me,” Madsen added in the documentary.
In April 2018, Judge Anette Burkoe and two jurors also found him guilty of sexual assault and defilement of a corpse.
Kim Wall, a journalist who was killed in 2017 aboard a submarine by Peter MadsenFacebookWall was last seen waving to her boyfriend after boarding the vessel to report on a story about Madsen, well known in Denmark for raising money to build rockets and subs.
Her dismembered torso was found days later at sea off Copenhagen and other body parts were found in weighted bags in October.
Madsen had admitted to dismembering Wall but his story flip-flopped as to how she died. On the stand, he claimed the journalist died from breathing toxic fumes that had built up in the sub.
During the trial, prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen accused Madsen of torturing Wall as part of his violent sexual fantasies.
In the new documentary, Madsen does not elaborate on how Wall was killed — but offers his first clear admission of guilt.
“It was nobody else’s fault. It’s my fault she died. And it’s my fault because I committed the crime. It’s all my fault,” Madsen tells interviewer Kristian Linnemann during one of their phone conversations, the Copenhagen Post reported.
But he offers a puzzling explanation of what transpired in the submersible, saying only that Wall “hits some things.”
“So this is what triggered you, and this is the moment when everything goes wrong?”Linnemann asks, the CPH Post reported. “Instead of hitting yourself, you end up killing her.”
Madsen then answers in the affirmative.
