The Dane convicted of torturing and murdering a Swedish journalist on his home submarine was sentenced to 21 months in prison on Tuesday for his attempt to escape a Copenhagen suburban prison last year, during which he threatened officials and police with a gun and fake explosives.
Peter Madsen was quickly arrested on October 20 near the Herstedvester prison in the Copenhagen suburb, where he is serving a life sentence for the murder of Kim Wall.
Conviction does not really matter, as it will not be added to life imprisonment. However, it may have a role if Madsen ever makes a parole request. Madsen, 50, accepted the decision.
This 2008 archive photo shows Peter Madsen and his submarine. Madsen was sentenced to 21 months on Tuesday for his attempt to escape a suburban Copenhagen prison last year, during which he threatened officials and police with a gun and fake explosives. (AP)
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Before the verdict was announced, Madsen told the City Court in Glostrup, a suburb of Copenhagen, that he wanted to escape because he considered prison conditions to be bad, according to the tabloid Ekstra Bladet.
Madsen, one of Denmark’s most famous criminals, was captured about five minutes after the escape and less than eight hundred meters from the facility. The prison staff who followed him saw that he had jumped in a passing white van and informed the police.
He used a fake handgun and simulated explosives that he had made in prison while threatening to get out of prison. Madsen told the court that his plan was to hijack cars, take the cell phones of the owners and go south and finally reach Germany.
In 2018, Madsen was sentenced in the Copenhagen City Court to life in prison for killing Wall, a 30-year-old Swedish reporter whom he lured aboard his homemade submarine the year before with the promise of an interview. He dismembered her body and threw it into the sea.
Madsen subsequently lost his appeal, shortly after apologizing to the victim’s family who was present at the appeals court. The sensational case grabbed Scandinavia.
Madsen denies murdering Wall. He claims that she died accidentally inside the submarine, but confessed to having thrown parts of her body into the Baltic Sea.
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Life sentences in Denmark usually mean 16 years in prison, but convicts are re-evaluated to determine whether they would be a danger to society if they were released and whether they could be kept longer.
Wall planned to interview Madsen – a self-taught engineer – for a story about a rocket program he founded in 2014, with the goal of building a crowdfunding rocket to launch into space. But when he finally answered her, his cash flow had dried up and he canceled the planned test launch.