Disclaimer: This article contains mentions of murder and assault. Reader discretion is advised.
Natalee Holloway was reported missing on May 30, 2005, after she didn’t return to her Aruba hotel on the last day of her graduation trip to the Caribbean Island. She was 17 and was last seen with a group of local men, one of whom was Joran van der Sloot, who became a primary suspect in Holloway’s disappearance in the decades of investigation that followed. Natalee was a resident of Mountain Brook, Alabama, and was graduating from Mountain Brook High School when she went on the trip to Aruba.
Joran van der Sloot, Satish Kalpoe, and Deepak Kalpoe were arrested the following month. They were suspected of kidnapping and murder in June 2005, ABC News reported. However, three of them were released later that year before another arrest in November 2007. They were released again and acquitted of all charges. Subsequently, Natalee Holloway’s missing case was declared closed. In 2012, Holloway was declared legally dead after her father, Dave Holloway, requested it. Her mother, Beth, was against the declaration.
The case was reopened in February 2008. However, none of the leads led to a definite conclusion to the case until 2010. Five years after Natalee Holloway reportedly disappeared, Joran van der Sloot killed a 21-year-old Peruvian student, Stephany Flores, in Lima. He pleaded guilty to the killing in 2012 and has been serving a 28-year prison sentence in Peru ever since. He was convicted in a case of cocaine smuggling and was sentenced to another 18 years in 2023. Joran van der Sloot was 17 when Natalee Holloway disappeared.
Did Joran van der Sloot confess to killing Natalee Holloway?
The 36-year-old convict confessed to killing Natalee Holloway and disposing of her remains in 2023, nearly two decades after her disappearance. He admitted to killing Natalee Holloway with a cinder when she resisted his sexual advances on the night when she disappeared. According to The Guardian, Joran van der Sloot’s confession was reportedly verified by a polygraph test.
However, he has only been charged with financial crimes for extorting Holloway’s family and not with her murder. CNN reported that he pleaded guilty to extortion after he attempted to sell information about the location of Natalee’s remains to her mother, Beth Holloway, in exchange for $250,000.
Joran van der Sloot allegedly asked for $25,000 to reveal the location of the remains and asked Beth Holloway to promise another $250,000 once the remains were recovered. According to The Guardian, he claimed that Natalee Holloway was buried in gravel under the foundation of a house. He later admitted that this claim was false. The trial unfolded after the Peruvian government agreed to extradite Joran van der Sloot to the US temporarily.
He clarified in an email that the information he gave Beth Holloway was “worthless,” according to CBS News. The US government does not have jurisdiction over the crime committed in Aruba. Joran van der Sloot was sentenced to 20 more years in prison for extortion. He will be serving the sentence in concurrence with his sentence in Peru.
The Disappearance of Natalee Holloway is a 2017 documentary that follows Holloway’s missing case and the most prominent leads in the case. It features Natalee’s father, Dave Holloway, and his private investigator. They follow up on the accounts of Joran van der Sloot who claims to know the whereabouts of Natalee Holloway’s remains. The documentary was released before Joran van der Sloot’s 2023 conviction of extorting the victim’s family.
