How the Long Search for Natalee Holloway Finally Led to Joran van der Sloot's Murder Confession

Natalee Holloway's family had learned to live with only sort of knowing why she never came home from her graduation trip to Aruba in 2005.

Both of her parents, Beth Holloway and Dave Holloway, at least had the small comfort of knowing Joran van der Sloot—the man they blamed for that fact that they never saw their daughter again—was behind bars.

"For five years it basically consumed me, until he was convicted and put in jail," Dave told E! News in 2021. "Then we started moving away from it."

But Joran, now 36, has been in prison in Peru since 2010 for killing Stephany Flores. And he had only dangled the promise of information about Natalee, never coming through.

"Is it the justice I wanted?" Beth told 20/20 in 2019 of Joran's 28-year prison sentence for another girl's murder. "No, but it's the justice I'll take."

Beth also said that she just knew Joran could answer the question of what happened to Natalee the second she laid eyes on him in Aruba, having flown there immediately after getting word that her 18-year-old daughter was missing.

"Did I know what was to come? No," she recalled. "But I knew that I was gonna hang onto him 'til my last breath."

Natalee's mother no longer has to contemplate that possibility.

In a shocking—if ultimately suspicion-affirming—turn of events, Joran confessed to killing Natalee while pleading guilty to extortion charges for offering Beth information about her daughter's fate in exchange for $250,000 in 2010. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, to run concurrently with his ongoing prison term in Peru.

His plea deal in the extortion case was "conditioned upon Mr. van der Sloot revealing details of how Natalee died," Holloway family attorney John Q. Kelly told NBC News on Oct. 16.

Outside the federal courthouse in Birmingham, Ala., where Joran entered his plea and extended an apology to the Holloways, Beth told reporters, "As far as I'm concerned, it's over. Joran van der Sloot is no longer the suspect in my daughter's murder. He is the killer."

Though he was arrested a couple of times in Aruba in connection with the investigation into Natalee's disappearance, Joran was never charged in the case. The statute of limitations to bring murder charges on the Caribbean island is 12 years.

"I don't think any victim's family is going to think ever an amount of time is enough," Beth told NBC News a few hours after leaving court on Oct. 18. "So here's what I have to take comfort in...I needed the answers as to what happened to Natalee."

Dave, who's been divorced from Beth since 1993, called Joran "evil personified" in a statement to the Associated Press.

After listening to the confession, he said he accepted that Joran killed Natalee on his own, though he still harbors suspicion that others may have helped dispose of her body.

"While it may not be in a court of law, I believe their judgment is still to come," Dave said. "We are living every parent's nightmare. Today and every day, please hug your children in honor and loving memory of our daughter, Natalee Ann Holloway."

Now, Beth hopes knowing the truth will help make it easier to honor Natalee's life through time spent with her son and grandchildren. "I've been a little distracted," she told NBC News. "Now I can focus on that."

But it has been nothing if not a hard-fought battle to get to that truth. Read on for all the twists and turns in the Natalee Holloway investigation that finally led to a murder confession after 18 years:

When Aruban authorities first questioned Joran van der Sloot and brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, they said they took Natalee Holloway to California Lighthouse, near Arashi Beach on the northwest tip of the island, to shark-watch, then dropped her off at her hotel at around 2 a.m., the morning of May 30, 2005.

Two former hotel security guards were arrested on June 5 after Joran and the Kalpoes claimed they saw a guard approaching Natalee outside her hotel before they drove off. The young men were arrested on June 9 and held on possible charges of first- or second-degree murder and kidnapping resulting in death. Aruban Attorney General Caren Janssen explained that they had been hoping that one of them would lead police to definitive evidence and that's why they weren't taken into custody right away. 

The beach was searched on June 14, and Joran's house was searched the next day, where investigators seized two vehicles, computers and cameras. "You have to build up an investigation. You can't just go in there like a cowboy," Janssen told reporters in explaining the perceived delay.

The guards were released June 18, and one told police that a Kalpoe brother had told him while they were both locked up that they hadn't taken Natalee to the hotel, but rather he and his brother had left her with Joran at a beach near the hotel. 

Police also questioned Paulus van der Sloot, Joran's father, and arrested him on June 22. Multiple reports also noted the arrest of Steve Gregory Croes, a party boat DJ, in connection with the case; both Croes and the elder van der Sloot were released on June 26.

Satish Kalpoe admitted to lying to police at first; he changed his story to say he and Deepak dropped both Joran and Natalee off at the hotel and that was the last they saw of them. Meanwhile, a gardener at the Aruba Racquet Club gave police a sworn statement that he saw all three men in a car near the club at around 2:30 a.m., when the Kalpoes claimed they were already home.

Aruban police, Dutch marines, FBI agents and thousands of locals combed the area, but that was on land. Ultimately a volunteer group dispatched divers and sonar equipment on June 25.

Six weeks after she vanished, the family's offered reward for Natalee's safe return was $200,000, and the reward for information that could help lead to the truth was $100,000. By the end of July, the reward was up to $1 million if Natalee came home alive.

Upon arrival on Aruba, Beth Holloway went to the Holiday Inn to ask questions about a guy named Joran van der Sloot, who some of Natalee's friends had met. When the night manager knew right away who that was, Beth asked to see casino security footage and then called police. Everyone went to Joran's house, where his dad Paul kept close watch as authorities questioned his son.

With Beth and a growing number of interested parties along, Joran guided authorities back to the hotel to illustrate where he dropped Natalee off, and claimed that she fell and hit her head getting out of the car.

Dave Holloway remembered to Dateline being assured by a cop that sometimes tourists just missed their flights, and his daughter would probably turn up in a few days.

When Joran and the Kalpoes were arrested, Dave and Beth felt that had to be case closed, but that obviously turned out not to be true. Furthermore, as days and then weeks went by, it stated to sink in that Natalee in all likelihood wasn't coming home.

Beth stayed in Aruba for two months, leaving a few weeks before the Kalpoes, who had been released on July 4, were arrested again on Aug. 26. The brothers and Joran were all released Sept. 3.

Divers from the Aruba Search and Rescue Foundation searched again in late August after getting a tip that a radar machine had detected human bones about a mile off the coast, but they came up empty.

In 2008, Beth told Dateline, "I mean, I've had calls since, you know, I couldn't even— just—you know? I'm... from 'Natalee's in a freezer at the van der Sloot house' to 'Natalee's in a boat in Venezuela or Colombia.' It was hell at first."

In March 2006, 10 months after Natalee disappeared, Aruban authorities said witnesses had told them the teen was drinking heavily that night and had drugs in her possession, though no one said they saw her taking any of them.

"We feel strongly that she probably went into shock or something happened to her system with all the alcohol—maybe on top of that, other drugs, which either she took or they gave her— and that she... just collapsed," Gerald Dompig, deputy chief of police for Aruba, told 48 Hours Mystery.

Believing her to be dead, they were searching the beach where Joran claimed he last saw her, as well as a salt pond near her hotel, for forensic evidence.

All the while, Joran's story kept changing.

Joran, born in the Netherlands, was an honors student and athlete at the International School of Aruba. His attorney father was in the process of becoming a judge on the island when Natalee disappeared. According to her friends, she first met Joran at the Excelsior Casino in their hotel.

"He just looks like an average, normal high school guy," Natalee's friend and classmate Laraine Watson told Dateline in 2008. "I mean, I remember he's really tall. I remember looking at him thinking, 'Oh, who's that guy?' You know, he's hanging out with my friends." She added, "I wasn't really suspicious. I mean, he's going to come out with us later." Watson said she didn't remember seeing him have any interaction with Natalee that night.

Laraine didn't see them leave together, but other classmates did. "They didn't think anything of it at the time, but she had gone off with Joran and some of his friends," she recalled. 

Right away, Joran was readily identified by a Holiday Inn staffer as a regular known for going after young female tourists. He spent three months in jail and was released without any charges being filed, a judge having ruled there wasn't enough evidence to hold him any longer.

Toward the end of 2007, he and the Kalpoe brothers were re-arrested, but again, nothing came of it and they were all released. 

Joran proceeded to freely travel the world, living in Thailand for a few months, acting suspicious. He reportedly talked about the case all the time, seemingly pleased that it had made him famous, but his temper was easily triggered. Sitting for an interview with Dutch crime reporter Peter de Vries in January 2008, he threw a glass of wine in Peter's face when the reporter questioned why people should believe anything he said. 

Even more dramatically, however, the journalist engineered a hidden-camera sting that captured Joran telling Patrick van der Eem—who said he was paid $35,000 for his role in the operation—that he'd been on the beach with Natalee, they'd had sex, and then right after she suddenly started shaking and lost consciousness.

"All of a sudden, what she did was like in a movie," he said in the clip, which aired on RTL Boulevard in February 2008. "She was shaking, it was awful... I prodded her, there was nothing." So, he claimed, he had a friend take her out on a boat to dispose of her body. "He went out to sea and then he threw her out, like an old rag."

In a tease for the episode, Peter promised, "The mystery of Natalee Holloway will be solved Sunday." 

However, Joran's attorney objected: "They act quite frankly like clowns. If they have a resolution, they should bring a case and stop talking about cryptic information."

Joran, then living in the Netherlands again, phoned into another Dutch program, Pauw & Witteman, to say that what he told Patrick wasn't true. "That is what he wanted to hear, so I told him what he wanted to hear."

In November 2008, CNN reported that Aruban authorities had two new leads to follow. First, a witness had come forward who could place Paul van der Sloot—who had told police he was home asleep until 7 a.m. on the night in question—and his son near a pond on the island at 4 a.m. on May 30, 2005. The witness said a young man, wet from the waist down and wearing only one shoe, was running from the pond toward a fast-food restaurant. Then the witness said the young man and an older one drove by in a red Jeep about 10 minutes later.

The other tip came from Joran's former girlfriend, who told police Joran had said to her one night, "'Who knows? You may now be on the beach with someone who is able to get rid of a corpse?'"

Aruba's chief prosecutor, Hans Mos, told CNN he considered what Joran said on the hidden camera to be a confession, and they were taking all of the new evidence into consideration as they determined their next step. 

The family hired a private investigator, Tim Miller, who spent almost a year knocking on doors and searching for Natalee in Aruba, sometimes with Dave Holloway. On Oct. 21, 2005, Natalee's birthday, they had been in Aruba literally digging in a garbage dump when the deputy police chief told them he had a hunch that they needed to take their search to the sea. A fisherman's hut had been broken into and among the items missing were a fish trap and tools that could have been used to weigh a body down.

Entrepreneur Louis Schaefer, who had been following the case, volunteered to finance an expedition to search the ocean floor within a certain radius. A boat named Persistence set off for Aruba in November 2007. On Dec. 24, they came across what appeared to be a fishing trap about 90 feet below the surface, and on Dec. 29 sent a remote-operated vehicle down to investigate. They spied what looked, to them, like a skull.

On Dec. 30, a diver from the boat joined two Aruban police divers. They did not find anything having to do with Natalee. "That's probably about the time that—the chest pains intensified to an extreme. I mean, how many times can I take this?" Dave recalled.

Then, in early 2008, a person who identified himself as Marcos sent Dave a message, claiming he knew that drug runners had been paid to get rid of Natalee's body at sea and instead took the remains with them to Nicaragua and hid them on land.

Miller went to Nicaragua and met with Marcos, who offered to go to the hiding place with a GPS tracker and look for the remains. As reported on Dateline, Marcos called Miller, claiming to have found her. 

"He says that she was wrapped in a blanket and her body fell apart," Miller told NBC News. "He said, 'but we had to put her in two ice chests.' And he actually said, 'call Mr. Holloway right now and tell him I've got Natalee.'" Miller did not call, not wanting to instill Dave with more false hope.

Marcos subsequently disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Paul van der Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack in February 2010, leaving his son adrift. According to Holloway family attorney John Kelly, a desperate Joran emailed him that March, writing, as Kelly told Dateline, "'I want to come clean. My father's dead now. I have nothing to hide. I want to help Natalee's family, but at a price, you know, for a quarter million dollars...I will tell you what happened to Natalee, where she is now so you can help Beth bring her home.'"

With Beth's permission, John Kelly met with Joran in Aruba, promising to start with $25,000. The young man said he knew where the body was; John asked what would happen if they didn't pay him. Joran allegedly replied, "'Beth can wait another five years.'" The family then turned to the FBI, which helped orchestrate a plan to make Joran think he'd be getting paid in order to catch him committing wire fraud, which would at least be something to hold him on.

John and Joran met again, and this time John wired him a total of $25,000. In turn, Joran led John to a house near the Aruba Racquet Club, where he claimed he had stashed Natalee's remains in what was then a freshly poured foundation, before the house was built. John said on Dateline that Joran claimed he had been on the beach with Natalee, he wanted to go, she resisted, and then he "got angry and actually threw her. He actually made the gesture in the car, on video, showing me how he threw her in anger, because she wouldn't leave at that point. And according to him, she hit the back of her head, lots of blood and she was dead."

John said he was skeptical of Joran's overall story, which was that he first hid Natalee's body at the beach with his father's help, and then the next day they buried her. But he still hoped they had shaken something loose.

"When I got on the plane May 11 [2010], I thought it was a done deal," John said. "And he was going to be arrested at some point. That he'd be talking at some point, and we'd get some closure at some point."

But the house Joran pointed to hadn't been under construction in 2010, according to the authorities who said they didn't find his story credible enough to make an arrest.

John said that Joran remained in touch with him up until May 25, claiming he would turn himself in. Instead, he flew to Peru.

A federal grand jury indicted him on charges of wire fraud and extortion on June 30, 2010.

Joran approached 21-year-old college student Stephany Flores at the Atlantic City casino in Lima, Peru. As seen on security footage from various locations, they played poker for about two hours, then Stephany cashed in some chips and went with Joran to Hotel Tac, where he picked up his key from the desk. At 5:33 a.m. they went upstairs and disappeared together into room 309.

At 8:36 a.m. on May 30, 2010, five years after Natalee disappeared, Joran, apparently locked out, called the front desk to be let into his room. He left by himself 20 minutes later, carrying a backpack. The TV in his room was turned up and, according to Dateline, he told the clerk at the desk, "Don't disturb my girl," before he went out.

Two days later, Stephany's badly beaten body was found in room 309. Her neck was broken.

Her parents had reported her missing. Ricardo Flores, Stephany's father, was a prominent businessman and former race car driver, so the case was doubly sensational to the local media.

Joran fled south and was ultimately arrested in Chile. He at first insisted he was innocent, but then confessed to Stephany's murder four days after his arrest, Lima police told the press. In fact, police said, he told them that he left Stephany briefly alone in the room and, when he returned, she was looking at his laptop and had found information linking him to Natalee's disappearance, after which he killed her in a rage. Police also stated he told them he knew where Natalee's remains were, but he would only tell Aruban authorities. "How could this happen?" Beth Holloway reportedly said when informed of Stephany's death.

In addition to being charged with first-degree murder and robbery in Peru, the U.S. Attorney's office in Birmingham, Ala., charged Joran with wire fraud and extortion.

His attorney argued the crime was manslaughter, but Joran ultimately pleaded guilty to murder, claiming he was suffering from "extreme psychological trauma" from the Natalee investigation, and was sentenced in 2012 to 28 1/2 years in prison. 

Beth Holloway went to Peru to visit Joran in prison in September 2010 with a Dutch documentary crew in tow, five years after seeing him the first night after Natalee had gone missing. "Leading up to May of 2010, that's when all the extortion was going on with Joran," she recalled to B-Metro magazine in 2015. "So at that point, I was not in a good place, so to speak."

She recalled, "I think once I visited Castro Castro, Joran in prison, and was able to walk away from there, it was almost a freeing experience for me to know that it was time now. Joran was in prison, and this is what I had worked so hard for, for five years. This was what I had wanted in '05."

He didn't provide answers, but Beth considered that moment a turning point all the same.

"It allowed me then to move onward…." she said. "I hadn't found peace and joy and happiness yet—but I began to recognize it and learned how to embrace it, and then I think it just led to place where I am now, which is a good place."

Further looking back on the prison visit, Beth said on Dr. Oz in 2017 that she didn't expect "the empowerment that I would feel when I stood up from him and left him in prison... I almost saw him as this pathetic person, so I didn't feel any hate. I saw him as so pathetic."

Dave Holloway told AL.com in 2015 that he might go to Peru one day to talk to Joran. "I still hold out hope that with hard prison life, maybe he'll change,'' he said. "I don't think at this point and time he's ready to do anything, but we'll probably one day make a trip to Peru."

Before agreeing to plead guilty, Joran said he was intimidated into confessing to killing Stephany, and that Peruvian authorities promised him he'd be extradited to the Netherlands if he cooperated.

In September 2010, Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf quoted Joran saying (per CBS News) about the extortion allegations, "I wanted to get back at Natalee's family—her parents have been making my life tough for five years. When they offered to pay for the girl's location, I thought: 'Why not?'"

In July 2014, Joran was set to marry his pregnant Peruvian girlfriend, Leidy Figueroa, who told CBS News' Crimesider that she met him in 2010 when she went with her cousin to visit another inmate. Conjugal visits were allowed at Piedras Gordas, the maximum-security prison north of Lima where he spent the first few years of his sentence after being transferred from Miguel Castro Castro.

According to Leidy, her future husband had transformed "into a new person."

That August, however, Joran was transferred to the more remote Challapalca in the Andes mountains, where conditions are reputedly rougher, after allegedly threatening to kill the warden at Piedras Gordas. Leidy, who gave birth to a daughter in September, told Dutch newsgroup RTL that November that Joran had been stabbed by a fellow inmate at Challapalca—but the director of Peru's National Penitentiary Institute denied it, calling her a compulsive liar in an interview with Peru news network Channel N.

In 2015, Leidy gave Fox News Latino a letter Joran wrote her from prison, in which he alleged that Stephany's father had put a $10,000 bounty on his head. "I don't want to die," he wrote, entreating authorities to take action to secure his safety behind bars.

"Joran is a pathological liar who will say anything to better his condition and get what he wants," Ricardo Flores said in a statement to Fox News Latino, per People. "Now that he can't get his way, he will say or do anything to get attention and get transferred to an easier location." 

Upon being extradited to Birmingham in June 2023 to face extortion charges in federal court, Joran pleaded not guilty.

But on Oct. 18, he changed his plea to guilty—and confessed to killing Natalee as part of the terms of his deal, which resulted in a 20-year-prison sentence for extortion and wire fraud to be served concurrently with his ongoing term in Peru.

In his chilling account of events, Joran said that he and Natalee kissed on the beach but she fought off his further sexual advances and kneed him in the crotch. He angrily kicked her in the head, Joran continued, and then picked up a cinderblock and "yeah, I smash her head in with it completely." Then he dragged her to the ocean and let her go into the water, he said.

The statute of limitations to bring murder charges in Aruba is 12 years, but a spokeswoman for prosecutors on the island told AL.com that their office would like to see the U.S. Justice Department's files on Joran "before deciding on the procedural steps to be taken."

In Aruba, she said, the Natalee Holloway investigation remains open.

Beth, who said she considers her daughter's case solved, told the site she wouldn't count on Joran facing murder charges.

"Hopefully, maybe, they will look into that," she said. "I have what I need...I'm just sticking with victorious right now."