Inventor convicted of murdering a Swedish reporter admits the crime for the first time

Peter Madsen was well-known in Denmark before his arrest as an inventor who dreamt of exploring worlds beyond.

The 47-year-old grew up in the small town of Saeby, 60 miles west of Copenhagen.

His parents divorced when he was six and Madsen went to live with his father, whom he has described as authoritarian and violent.

‘When I think about my father, I think how children in Germany must have felt if their dad was a commandant in a concentration camp,’ Madsen said in a 2014 biography.

At 15, he started his first company, Danish Space Academy, to buy spare parts to build a rocket.

He studied engineering, but quit once he thought he knew enough to build submarines and rockets.

‘My passion is finding ways to travel to worlds beyond the well-known,’ Madsen wrote on the website of his now-defunct Rocket Madsen Space Lab.

In 2008, he launched the Nautilus, the biggest privately made submarine whose ownership was later transferred to him after a row with former colleagues.

Around the same time, he developed his idea for private space travel.

In June 2011, he successfully launched a rocket from a floating platform on the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm.

Madsen reportedly had an open marriage. Some of his ex-girlfriends have told the media he was into sado-masochism and erotic asphyxiation. 

His half-brother Benny Langkjaer Egeso told AFP in August that Madsen is ‘very strange’, but also ‘very open and likeable’.

But others describe him as an erratic person who had spats with former colleagues and an interest in violent pornography.

‘His sexual fantasies slowly got out of hand,’ an associate, who had worked in Madsen’s laboratory, told the Copenhagen court, adding that the inventor called himself a ‘psychopath, but a loving one.’

The associate said Madsen toyed with the idea of making a pornographic film showing acts of torture and was ‘interested in snuff films,’ or movies where a person is really killed or kills themself.

Madsen has denied searching for or downloading such films but admitted to watching them ‘to be able to feel emotions and to cry’ about the women’s suffering.

But another apprentice engineer who had worked with him told the court the inventor was a ‘kind, empathic, passionate man who was ready to listen’.