The Investigation: How the new drama about Kim Wall’s murder presents a new approach to true crime on screen

True crime stories are flooding the TV schedules – but our ongoing obsession with this grisly genre inevitably prompts some uncomfortable questions. Why is so much screen time devoted to probing into the mind of the killer? And where does the victim and their family figure in the story?

The Investigation presents a different way of doing things. The six-part series, which became Denmark’s biggest crime drama launch on its debut last year and is now set to air on BBC Two, is based upon Copenhagen police’s investigation into the 2017 murder of Swedish journalist Kim Wall.

Made in close collaboration with Wall’s parents, the show never mentions the killer by name, instead focusing on the painstaking efforts of the team that helped bring him to justice. There’s no air time devoted to his account of events – and rightly so, as the incredible work of the police officers, divers, prosecutors and police dogs is far more deserving of our attention.

The submarine case

A graduate of Columbia University’s prestigious journalism school, 30-year-old freelance writer Wall’s reporting, which focused on social justice issues, had taken her around the world, and was published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic and Time magazine. She had been preparing to move to Beijing with her boyfriend in the summer of 2017; before flying out to China, though, she had tried to secure an interview with Danish inventor Peter Madsen, who had built the world’s largest homemade submarine, the UC3 Nautilus.

When he invited her to take a trip in the submarine off the coast of Copenhagen, she agreed, but her boyfriend became concerned after she did not contact him after 8.30pm that evening, and alerted the Danish police in the early hours of the morning of August 11, 2017, prompting the authorities to search the Oresund, the strait between Denmark and Sweden. The submarine was eventually spotted and pulled from the water, but Wall was not on board.

The inventor claimed that he had dropped her off in Refshaleøen, Copenhagen, the previous evening, but was immediately arrested and charged with negligent manslaughter, with the Danish police suspecting that he had tried to sink the submarine before he was discovered; weeks later, Wall’s torso was discovered by a cyclist on a beach south of Copenhagen.

The investigation

Copenhagen police’s homicide team, lead by Jens Møller, worked tirelessly to establish a cause of death, so that they could change the charge from manslaughter to murder, and to disprove the accused’s account of events, which kept changing. He claimed that Wall had been hit on the head by the submarine’s hatch, then later alleged that she had died of carbon monoxide poisoning after being in the engine room, and that he had dismembered her body as he could not otherwise lift it from the vessel.

The team were able to use radar records to plot the submarine’s path; a fleet of divers was then dispatched to the vicinity, painstakingly, methodically combing a huge area of water for any evidence. Forensic investigation helped disprove the suspect’s story: the eventual post-mortem on Wall’s skull contradicted his initial statement, as there was no sign of trauma to the head; no trace of carbon monoxide was found in her lungs, either. Madsen was eventually convicted of murder and sexual assault in April 2018 and given a life sentence.

Before attempting to bring this case to the small screen, director and screenwriter Tobias Lindholm, who received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film for A War in 2015, decided that his focus would be on the dogged investigative work of Møller (played in the series by Borgen star Søren Malling) and the homicide squad, rather than the murderer.

“I started to think there was a different kind of story here, not just another tale of a ‘fascinating’ man who killed a woman,” he explained in an article for The Guardian. “We could talk about society and a justice system that actually works, rather than humanising the perpetrator.” As such, we never see the murderer on screen (indeed, the real life Møller never actually interviewed him) and he is only referred to as “the suspect” or “the accused” – placing the emphasis on the determination and skill of those who eventually brought him to justice.

Factual accuracy

Verisimilitude was of the utmost importance to Lindholm and to Wall’s parents Ingrid and Joachim, who worked closely with him on the project, and the series adheres closely to the facts – to the extent that “the real divers [involved in the search] volunteered to play themselves [...] and the Swedish dog who helps solve the case is the same dog,” the director explained to Nordisk Film & TV Fond. The Walls’ dog Iso also plays itself.

Moller, along with the Walls and prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen (played by Game of Thrones star Pilou Asbaek) read his script in order to check the facts, too. By grounding the series in reality, Lindholm hoped to distance it from the more sensationalist tabloid reporting that had sprung up around the case at the time of the investigation. “If I had started to pretend, to use my own imagination, I would have been the same as the journalists who covered it,” he told The Guardian.

It was also important to pay tribute to Wall’s journalistic career. Scenes set in the Walls’ family home show a map of the world, with coloured pins marking the places that she visited on assignments; in one episode, her father is shown to be wary about handing over her laptop to the authorities, knowing that his daughter would have wanted to protect her sources and contacts, many of whom had shared their stories with her in confidence.

After the investigation

Wall’s parents shared their memories of their daughter and her work, as well as their reckoning with her loss, in a book published in Sweden in 2018 and later translated into English as A Silenced Voice in 2020. Along with their son Tom and Kim’s friends, they established the Kim Wall Memorial Fund shortly after her death, in collaboration with the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Each year, the foundation awards a grant of $5,000 to a female journalist whose work spotlights overlooked, important stories around the world. “Kim wanted more women to be out in the world, brushing up against life, and we would like to help bend the world in her vision,” the fund’s mission statement reads.

The Investigation airs on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer at 9pm on January 22