Eighteen-year-old Natalee Ann Holloway disappeared on the island of Aruba on May 30, 2005, and was declared dead on January 12, 2012.
A plea deal reached with Dutch national Joran van der Sloot, 36, on Wednesday brings some justice to the family of young Natalee Holloway.
As part of the plea deal, van der Sloot admitted to brutally killing Holloway because she refused his sexual advances and agreed to provide information about Holloway’s disappearance and killing.
While not charged in Holloway’s death (Aruba’s statute of limitations for homicide is 12 years), van der Sloot was sentenced to 20 years in prison for extortion and wire fraud. The sentence will run concurrently with a 28-year sentence he received in Peru for the murder of another woman, Stephany Flores, in 2010.
For several years, the investigations into Natalee’s disappearance by Aruban law enforcement, Dutch and American investigative agencies, the Dutch military, and others, continued. They included the questioning, arrest, release, rearrest and re-release of several suspects, including van der Sloot himself. In 2007, Aruban prosecutors closed the case due to a “lack of evidence,” only to reopen it the next year.
During those years, van der Sloot made several self-serving appearances on Dutch and American TV programs, provided multiple changing and conflicting stories, statements, even “confessions” and retractions. He also despicably extorted Natalee’s mother for money in exchange for information on her daughter.
In May and June 2010, the murder of a 21-year-old student in Peru, Stephany Flores Ramirez, for which van der Sloot was arrested, charged, tried, and eventually convicted and imprisoned, brought the Natalee Holloway story back into the headlines.
Several Moderate Voice contributors wrote about that development 13 years ago. Here are just a few of them:
The late Jerry K. Remmers was the first one to report in his “Dutchman In Natalee Halloway Case Sought For Murder, This Time In Peru.”
Joe Gandelman followed up with his “Video and News Roundup: Van der Sloot Confesses To Murder of Peruvian Woman After She Discovered Halloway Case On His Laptop,” “Interrogation of Captured Joran van der Sloot Begins in Peru (UPDATED),” and “Van der Sloot Tells Police He Knows Holloway Body Location.”
This author wrote, “Peruvian Reports on the van der Sloot Case,” and “New Report on Possible van der Sloot Link to Missing Colombian Women.”
Finally, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés viewed van der Sloot from a psychopathy perspective in “How To Catch A Psychopath: Joran van der Sloot?”
On June 8, 2023, after serving almost 11 years of his 28-year sentence in Peru for the murder of Flores, van der Sloot was extradited to the United States, to Natalee’s home state of Alabama.
At the time, Beth Holloway – Natalee’s mother – said, “The wheels of justice have finally begun to turn for our family…It has been a very long and painful journey.”
Hopefully, last Wednesday, some closure came to Natalee’s family in a federal courtroom in Birmingham, Alabama, just a few miles from the suburb where Natalee used to live.
