Natalee Holloway’s mom, Beth Holloway, recalled confronting her daughter’s confessed killer, Joran van der Sloot, for the first time after Natalee disappeared.
“My initial interaction with Joran was another moment of, ‘He knows. He knows what happened to her,’” Beth, 65, said during a Monday, November 9, Today show appearance about coming face-to-face with van der Sloot, now 39, upon her arrival in Aruba in 2005.
Van der Sloot has never been charged in connection to Natalee’s murder because Aruba enforces a 12-year statute of limitations for homicides, meaning the window to convict him expired by the time he confessed.
While Beth felt strongly that van der Sloot was responsible for her daughter’s death, he did not admit to killing 18-year-old Natalee for nearly two decades.
Natalee went missing on May 30, 2005, while on a high school graduation trip in Oranjestad, Aruba. She was last seen leaving a nightclub and getting into a car with van der Sloot and brothers Deepak Kalpoe and Satish Kalpoe.
Van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers quickly became suspects in the case and were arrested two times amid the investigation, though they were released both times after authorities failed to find enough evidence to charge them.
Five years after Natalee disappeared, van der Sloot was arrested for killing 21-year-old college student Stephany Flores Ramírez. Additionally, he was indicted in the United States on federal wire fraud and extortion charges tied to a March 2010 meeting he had with Beth in which he demanded that she pay him money in exchange for information about her daughter’s disappearance.
Van der Sloot pleaded guilty to the federal extortion charges in 2023 and he was sentenced to serve 20 years in prison, which are running concurrently with his 28-year sentence for Ramírez’s murder. As part of his plea deal, van der Sloot admitted to killing Natalee and agreed to share information about her death.
Beth also reflected on finally learning what happened to her daughter and having the case documented in Netflix’s November docuseries Taken: Natalee Holloway.
“I finally have a conclusion,” she said on the Today Show. “There’s a finale. It took me 18 years to get the answers, but justice takes a lot of work, and I felt like now’s the time to tell, for the first time, a comprehensive and conclusive story of what happened to Natalee and her journey of 20 years.”
Regarding van der Sloot’s confession, Beth said that the “day was a long time coming.”
“The torturous part is the not knowing, and as shocking and as torturous as it is to hear this, it is finally a relief to know that’s what I had been searching for for 18 years,” she said. “I had to know, no matter how brutal it was. I needed to know what happened.”
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