Undercurrent The Disappearance of Kim Wall - First Season

A bizarre story unfolding in Denmark this evening

involves an amateur-built submarine and a journalist.

It's a case that is both deeply shocking and mysterious.

A freelance journalist whose work has been published internationally

hasn't been heard from since...

I've covered a lot of horrific, terrifying criminal cases

in my reporting.

I can't see a police car without wondering where it's going.

Some of the stories are insane.

There are brutal details

there might be something about the motive

beyond anything that we could imagine.

We have seen a lot of stuff in court cases.

We have seen dead bodies.

But still, there was something about this case that just

messed up my head.

It's been a case, which has gripped a nation

one that could have stepped from the pages

of even the most imaginative Danish crime thriller.

It's true there is a Nordic noir element to this story.

You have these very rational, soft, democratic

Scandinavian welfare countries

where the world is almost, almost perfect.

And then something terrible, horrible happens

that tells you, yeah, but it's not that perfect.

I was at the news desk

and suddenly we got this message about this submarine was missing.

A Danish inventor

he built the world's largest, privately-made submarine

disappeared after a trip on board his vessel.

For me, I didn't know we had any private owned submarines

in Denmark at that point.

So that was a story that was already big in the morning.

If you went on social media

and you could see there was all this fuss about it and where is it?

How long can you survive underwater if something was wrong down there?

Shortly after, we learned there was a second person, Kim Wall

who was missing.

And that certainly draw the attention

what?

Listener-supported WNYC Studios.

Kim Wall for The Guardian joins us now. Welcome to our show.

Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Journalism's a funny animal.

Some love the adventure of the hunt, so to speak.

Others truly see it as a calling.

You want to enlighten the public. You want to tell stories

that will make people's lives richer and better and easier

and... and bring the truth of what's going on.

And to me, that was the epitome of Kim Wall.

She knew what journalism was about.

It's not just doing good, but it's love of the words

love of the presentation of the words.

It's love of getting your facts right

so that in the end, you're telling people what stories are all about

seen through the lens of a journalist.

When you come to Runit Island, which is pretty tiny

you walk through the bushes and there it is.

And no warning signs

nothing that indicates what's inside.

And it looks so surreal.

It's like a UFO or like a buried baseball in the sand.

It was that commitment to doing journalism and doing it well

that, I said to myself, you know, wow

you know, there's something there.

Kim was naturally inclined for journalism, I think

because she is very tenacious.

She clearly has no patience for bullshit.

She is, you know, kind of has a dose of skepticism.

And I could see from the work that she had done

that she was very deeply motivated to pursue substantive stories

about people living on the front lines of different kinds of crises.

Whatever she did was different

and the stories she, you know, sought out were not mainstream.

Kim liked to travel around the world, and

I really think that it was because of the fact

that she was curious about the world.

You know, this ever-questioning, ever-curious person

and you can't be that if you're just restricted to one part of the world.

She was a student of human character.

And I think she just was motivated by the weirdness of the world.

Working in the undercurrents of rebellion

weird little corners that, you know, hopefully broaden people's minds.

And I think that she made choices in her life and career

giving herself maximum ability to pursue those stories.

Seeing Kim's approach to freelancing was very inspiring for me.

You come into freelancing.

You're having to figure everything out for yourself

from how to do the reporting, to how to place the stories

to how to actually turn this into a viable, independent business.

It's definitely a hustle

whether you're gonna be able to pay your bills

based on whether you sell this story or not.

And Kim was really diving into it, with so much confidence and tenacity.

And the fact that something catastrophic

would have happened to her on a reporting trip

it's impossible to imagine that...

that something like that could happen to someone like her.

I'm Ditte Dyreborg, and I'm a commander in the Danish Navy

and I was the submarine chief engineering officer

who was called to the assistance the day that

a submarine called Nautilus

a privately built submarine Nautilus was missing.

My commanding officer said to me

"You need to go support the search and rescue operation."

"Okay," I said. The last time I heard about

know about a privately built submarine

there was this Peter Madsen.

Peter Madsen is an inventor, an eccentric

a minor celebrity in Denmark.

I'm a maker of extreme machines, I'd say.

Peter Madsen is someone that you, at least here in Denmark

has known for several years.

He's a kind of crazy inventor that builds submarines and rockets and

was just funny to follow.

I mean, why build a submarine? Why build a rocket? But he did.

I discovered that

with the skills I had gained, I could build a submarine.

I had known him before, in 2002.

I had asked him, do you have any drawings?

Do you have any information about this submarine?

We were not, as submariners, interested

in having other people building submarines.

It was dangerous.

And to me it looked too heavy for submerged operation.

If he would be submerged to around ten meters or sink to ten meters

he wouldn't be able to get out of the boat.

So, immediately when I heard that the submarine was missing

and I said, "Now it has finally happened."

I didn't know at that time anything about Kim.

We only knew that she was a journalist, doing her job.

When Kim Wall went on the submarine with Peter Madsen

she was apparently doing it for

this article for a magazine called Wired.

Peter Madsen fit well into the type of stories she was interested in

because he was different. He was out of the norm.

He is this wacky genius, eccentric designer.

He builds rockets and submarines

and we're gonna go tour around on one and write about it.

So you can see why his story would have appealed to Kim

and this would have been something

she would see as relatively low-hanging fruit

in terms of a reporting assignment.

She had seen the submarine before and got in contact with Peter Madsen.

And on the day of the tenth, she went by his workshop

and did the pre-interview before going out on the submarine.

Later on, she was supposed to have this going away party

for her and her boyfriend with some friends

which she then

asked if she could maybe leave to go on the submarine with Peter

because he asked if she'd be able to go that same night.

And she did. And as they went out, she waved goodbye from the submarine.

She texts her boyfriend

just letting him know where she is and how she's doing.

She sounds like

she's exciting to be going down on the submarine and interview him.

We don't know exactly when, but at some point, they went under.

And this is when it all just started to get very weird.

She's supposed to be on the submarine for a couple of hours

so her boyfriend starts to worry

when she hasn't come back when it's 10:00 in the evening.

He calls the Coast Guard around 2:30

and around 3:30, police start searching for the submarine.

They send out an alert that there has been a possible accident at sea.

Sailing a submarine is a very unique experience.

It compares to nothing that I can imagine people have tried.

You are very far from home.

You are very much alone.

The technology is a bridge to other worlds; to other universes.

It's a spaceship.

Vintage announcer: 30 seconds and counting.

Astronauts report it feels good.

Two minute 25 seconds.

Ignition sequence start.

Liftoff! We have a liftoff! 32 minutes past the hour.

There is one subject that has always been very interesting to me

and that's space.

I mean, I was sitting in my room as a 8-year-old

building the Apollo aircraft with Legos.

It's a childhood fascination of space that's just kept on with me.

So now, at that time it was...

it was the space shuttle, now it's Elon Musk.

And then there was also Peter Madsen.

The most important thing to understand about Peter was

that he was a storyteller.

He was a great storyteller, and he had the ability to make people dream.

What if you got the crazy idea that

you wanted to leave planet Earth.

What if you got the idea that you wanted to go to space?

He represented a dream that I think lies deep in myself and many others.

That was that you can do anything with the two hands and your own head

and that you're not limited by the laws of the society or

any boundaries. You can do whatever you want

and the proofs are right here.

Here is my submarine, here are my rockets

and I'm going to sit inside them.

We had a great time, you know, sailing in the submarine and diving.

What hit me the most is the silence experience

as you go down.

And suddenly you'll go from having wind and waves