For the many who’ve long believed that Dutch teen Joran van der Sloot was responsible for the death of Natalee Holloway, it seems as if the fates have in a tragic way begun the process of perhaps real justice: as the AP reports, he was “paraded — moist-eyed and looking stunned — before reporters as Peruvians denounced him and detectives began interrogating him about the killing of a Lima student.”
(UPDATED: June 8: van der Sloot has reportedly confessed to killing the Lima student. For details go HERE and HERE.)
Here’s an ABC News report which shows some potential damning video: van der Sloot in the hotel with the soon-to-be-dead girl, van der Sloot going into the room with the soon-to-be-dead girl, van der Sloot emerging from the room with a different shirt on, and holding a backpack and a bag — the room where the girl was found dead three days later:
UPDATE: There is huge interest in this story all over the world — shown by news organizations and blogs. Here’s a taste of it:
—CNN has an interesting twist:
What do Joran van der Sloot and BP have in common? They’re both legal cases of interest this week. Van der Sloot is looking at possible jail time, and so are top officials at BP.
—Newsoxy:
“He speaks Spanish fluently and we took a statement from him in Spanish, where he denies any involvement and the charges brought against him,” Chilean Investigative Police Officer Fernando Ovalle Gatica said in a statement. “Naturally, he needs to face the murder that took place here and if the courts find him responsible for that murder, he will have to fulfill his sentence here,” President Alan Garcia said in a statement. “Don’t worry, this murderer will pay. He will pay for what he’s done,” Stephany’s father Ricardo Flores said.
What makes this murder investigation sealed tight is that the video evidence shows Joran van der Sloot entering and leaving the scene. More compelling, is that it just happened to be the fifth anniversary Natalie Holloway’s disappearance, to the day. This is why investigators believe the suspect is a serial killer, and if so, there could be more cases involved.
Joran Van der Sloot, the 22-year-old Dutch playboy who has twice confessed to involvement in the death of Natalee Holloway may in fact be a serial killer, according to Peruvian Interior Minister Octavio Salazar.
….On May 30, 2010, Flores was found dead in a Lima hotel room registered to Van der Sloot, her neck broken with a baseball bat. Witnesses report seeing Flores and Van der Sloot entering the room together the night before, and video footage shows them at a casino together earlier that evening.
Salazar and others close to the investigation do not believe Van der Sloot’s alleged involvement in both cases is a coincidence. “We are probably talking about a serial killer,” the Interior Minister told the press following Van der Sloot’s extradition.
—ABC News has a piece asking whether the US Feds could have arrested him earlier on an extortion charge. Here’s the beginning of the story:
Weeks after the FBI monitored the payment of $15,000 to Joran van der Sloot by an alleged extortion victim, the Dutch playboy took a seat at a poker table in a Peruvian casino where he would meet the woman whose battered body would later be found in his blood smeared hotel room.
Weeks after the FBI monitored the payment of $15,000 to Joran van der Sloot by an alleged extortion victim, the Dutch playboy took a seat at a poker table in a Peruvian casino where he would meet the woman whose battered body would later be found in his blood smeared hotel room.
And further down:
For several weeks van der Sloot had been on the radar of American officials who, in a criminal complaint released Thursday, said he planned to extort $250,000 from the unidentified victim.
When asked why van der Sloot was not arrested following the initial alleged payment, authorities told ABC News.com there was not “sufficient evidence to support the charge.”
A criminal complaint alleging the extortion was, however, filed Thursday, just days after Flores was found dead and van der Sloot had fled to Chile.
Authorities said their charges were not the result of the Peru death.
Go to the link and read it in its entirety.
—His mother says she’s shocked:
Anita van der Sloot is “shocked” by the latest allegations against her son, Joran van der Sloot, in connection with yet another young woman’s death, according to the family’s lawyer Bert de Rooij.
De Rooij says that Anita van der Sloot spoke to her son via telephone Thursday but would not give details about the conversation except to say that Joran “certainly did not” confess to killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores, according to the Dutch News.
The young woman’s body was found in a Lima hotel room in a pool of blood. The room was registered to Joran van der Sloot, according to Peruvian newspaper El Comercio.
“I am advising him to find a lawyer who knows something about laws affecting foreigners in South American,” de Rooij told Dutch radio station Radio I.
—Newsweek suggests that the influence of reality TV have made young killers behave incredibly arrogant:
If there are rules of behavior for people suspected of heinous crimes, no one told Joran van der Sloot. The 22-year-old Dutchman was arrested Thursday in Chile in connection with the murder of a girl in Peru. But he’d been drawing plenty of attention to himself even before that: he was arrested and released twice in connection with the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway while she was on a school trip to Aruba. A failure by authorities to find the body may have kept him from being convicted, but it didn’t keep his mouth shut: van der Sloot, the last person to be seen with Holloway, has told various stories about that night, and he was even caught by hidden camera confessing to having dumped her at sea. So the last thing van der Sloot should have had in his Peru hotel is the corpse of another young woman. But that is exactly what police in Lima, Peru, say they found on June 1—the bloodied body of 22-year-old Stephany Flores Ramirez, the daughter of a former race-car driver and local businessman. Afterward, van der Sloot slipped into Chile, which is where he was busted.
The mystery, though, isn’t about whether he committed these crimes—circumstantial evidence notwithstanding, it’s conceivable he could be innocent, and a jury never found him guilty. The mystery is why kids like van der Sloot act like a perp at every turn, despite being tracked by the limelight everywhere they go. During the five years since Holloway’s disappearance—eerily on the same date of Ramirez’s murder—van der Sloot has reveled in sick infamy as the prime suspect in an unsolved mystery. Shouldn’t he have kept his head down?
He’s not alone. Stories like van der Sloot’s are increasingly common among the current post-teen generation that grew up on reality television and virtual realism….
—The Washington Post’s Jo-Ann Armeo:
Hours after his arrest, law enforcement authorities in Alabama announced extortion and fraud charges against him, alleging he demanded payment in exchange for revealing information about the death of 18-year-old Holloway and the location of her body. Sloot must be presumed innocent until the charges are proven, but his behavior — refusing to cooperate and changing his story about Holloway — is as appalling as was the ineptitude of Aruba authorities in investigating the case, as well as the prurient tone of much of the news coverage.
Holloway’s mother, Beth Twitty, is said to be “overwhelmed” at the news of Flores’s death. To be sure, she must be thinking “if only” — maybe if Aruba police weren’t so slow off the mark, if more people had cared or if even more attention had been paid. Too often, violence against women is, if not condoned, accepted. I still recall — with shame — the days when as an editor I would consign the murder of a woman to a few short paragraphs deep inside the paper because it was “just a domestic.” Never mind that if you tally up all the women who have been victim of domestic abuse, you would have a near epidemic. Sadly, it is too late for Holloway and Flores, but that shows why it is never wrong to make a big deal out of every instance in which a woman is brutalized.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.