Netflix series about a Danish guy who goes from nerd to murderer

After getting a dental 'transformation'. Coincidence?

There’s a Netflix series that dropped in March 2026 called A Friend, A Murderer.

And as I’m a fan of true crime… i watched it last week.

It’s a three-part Danish true crime documentary about Philip Patrick Westh — a quiet, unremarkable guy from the small town of Korsør who turned out to be one of Denmark’s most disturbing predators in recent memory.

The acts he committed took place between 2016 and 2023 and involved attacks against teenage girls. For nearly a decade, residents lived with the terrifying belief that the perpetrator was still at large.

When they finally caught him, the relief swept through the country — but the most interesting part was who the murderer was.

It wasn’t some menacing looking criminal with a history of crimes.

Rather it was an ordinary looking young guy who was frequently hanging out with normal friends.

The crimes and the investigation

On July 10, 2016, 17-year-old Emilie Meng was last seen at Korsør railway station in the early morning hours after a night out with friends.

Her body was discovered six months later, on Christmas Eve, in a lake near Borup — about 40 kilometers from where she vanished. A post-mortem examination determined she had been strangled.

The unsolved case haunted Denmark for seven years, involving massive searches, 650 interrogations, and over 400,000 vehicle checks.

Philip had actually submitted his DNA voluntarily during the initial investigation in 2016 — one of 1,450 locals tested — and nothing flagged. Degraded evidence meant the match didn’t come through.

The case sat cold until 2023.

In November 2022, a 15-year-old girl in Sorø was walking when a man approached her, threatened her with a knife, punched her, and attempted to drag her toward a vehicle. She screamed and escaped.

Then in April 2023, it unraveled fast. Philip tracked down a 13-year-old girl while she was on her newspaper delivery route, rammed his car into the back of her bicycle, and abducted her.

He took her to his house, where he kept her hostage and assaulted her. Police found her alive after approximately 27 hours and immediately arrested Philip. DNA from packaging tape connected him directly to the Emilie Meng murder from 2016.

In June 2024, Philip was found guilty on multiple charges and sentenced to life in prison — Denmark’s most severe punishment.

Philip was your average nerd

Philip Patrick Westh was born in the early 1990s and raised in coastal Danish towns.

By every account of people who knew him, he was the definition of a nerd. Introverted. Awkward. Got made fun of. Kept to himself. His closest friends describe a socially invisible guy — the type that fades into the background.

In his social life, Philip never dated and showed zero interest in pursuing a romantic life. His friends genuinely believed him to be asexual. Nobody suspected anything.

There was nothing to suspect. Just a quiet, forgettable nerd from a quiet, forgettable town.

And also take note of his long, healthy neck as it will be relevant later.

Philip’s smile transformation

Then something changed.

One of his best friends — Nichlas, who had known Philip for 15 years — makes an offhand comment in the documentary that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

He mentions that at some point, the city paid for Philip’s teeth to get done. A dental intervention, covered by public funds. And he described it as a complete dental transformation

.

And then, almost immediately after, Philip’s personality underwent a massive shift.

Philip describes that he became more confident. More assertive. Like a switch had flipped. The friends describe a different version of Philip emerging — bolder, more engaged, operating with an energy he’d never had before.

The obvious surface-level read is: teeth got fixed, confidence went up, guy came out of his shell. Maybe. But I think something else was happening underneath

Did the smile transformation make him a murderer?

I’m not saying the dental work directly caused him to kill. That’s not the argument.

But here’s what I notice.

By the time Philip appeared in court, his physical deterioration was stark.

His neck was gone. Remember his long neck from the photo above? Now compare that to this courtroom drawing where his neck is non-existent.

The kind of structural decline usually takes decades… but with Philip it seems to have happened very quickly. In less than a decade.

I’ve written about this many times. When artificial dental work is done — crowns, veneers, orthodontic intervention — it often doesn’t respect the fact that the jaw is supposed to be supported by the teeth in several positions. As I wrote here:

Indexed splints and the magical "perfect jaw position"

And so it begins collapsing the skull. The soft tissue deflates inward. The brain gets compressed.

I played around with these mechanics for years between 2015-2021 and I can tell you that they screw with your brain and how you think MASSIVELY.

Luckily i had a wife and a kid to keep me grounded when I was doing bad…. but I can tell you from experience that it gave me some very negative thoughts sometimes. And aggression.

So my read on Philip: the dental work almost definitely impacted the way he was thinking. It would have literally been impossible not to based on my experience.

You don’t ‘disappear’ your neck and not have it massively change how you think. The two are tightly intertwined based on my 6-year roller coaster experience.

Closing thoughts

How did what seemed like your average nerdy guy convert into a sexual predator and murderer in such a short span of time?

If you look at most killers and sexual predators they demonstrate some clear signs of it from the time they were young.

And it becomes an evolution of progressively worse acts.

With Philip this doesn’t seem to have been the case. He was your average wimpy nerd in school who then out of nowhere became this vicious murderer.

And right before he started killing people he just happened to have a massive dental transformation that coincided with a major change in his personality.

That just all seems a bit too coincidental to me.

Especially having experienced the things I did in the years when I was collapsing.