On a soft May evening in 2005, 18-year-old Natalee Holloway agreed to go walking on the beach in Aruba with a nice-looking young man named Joran van der Sloot. Holloway went to Aruba with her classmates to celebrate her graduation from high school in Mountain Brook, Alabama.
Holloway had been out at a bar and met Van der Sloot, a native of Aruba. The two apparently hit it off and went for a walk on the beach. Natalee Holloway was never seen again.
Van der Sloot was a prime suspect from the beginning. In the intervening years, he had been arrested twice. However, the lack of physical evidence hindered the prosecution and made bringing the case to trial impossible.
Finally, after Van der Sloot had been convicted of an unrelated murder of another young girl in Peru and was serving a 28-year sentence, the suspect, now 36, confessed to murdering Holloway on that soft May evening in 2005. Van der Sloot agreed to confess to the murder in exchange for sentencing considerations in an extortion case where he told Holloway’s mother in 2010 that he would tell her where her body was if he was paid $250,000.
Mrs. Holloway paid him just $25,000, and the information Van der Sloot gave her was bogus. Now, facing the prospect of spending another 40 years behind bars, Van der Sloot agreed to give a confession about Holloway’s murder.
He described wanting to be dropped off with Ms. Holloway a distance from the hotel where she was staying with more than 100 recent graduates of Mountain Brook High School in Alabama so he “might still get a chance to, to be with her.” He said they began kissing while lying on the beach, but she refused further sexual advances.
When he persisted, he said, she kneed him in the crotch, and he kicked her “extremely hard” in the face. At that point, he said, she was “possibly even, uh, even dead but definitely unconscious.”
Then, he said, he picked up a large cinder block and used it to “smash her head in with it completely.”
Van der Sloot then carried Holloway’s body into the ocean and left her to be taken out with the tide.
Is this really what happened? Van der Sloot is a scumbag of the first order — a predator, a liar, and a con man. He may have embellished some of the story to build himself up as some kind of Caribbean Lothario, but the details about being rejected and then murdering Holloway ring true.
From the start, the frenzy of media coverage around this case was obscene. A young blonde girl — a vision of innocence — disappears under suspicious circumstances on her trip of a lifetime. The media couldn’t get enough of the story. The parents were hounded wherever they went. The story was told, retold, regurgitated, and memorialized in “countless hours of cable TV programming, more than half a dozen nonfiction books, multiple episodes in the ‘Law & Order’ franchise, and at least one stage production,” according to the Times.
As you might have expected, the race hustlers had to piggyback their causes onto the case, trying to make this a black/white issue.
When the news of Ms. Holloway’s disappearance first broke in 2005, cable news networks were criticized for devoting hours of airtime to the case of an attractive young white woman from an affluent suburb of Birmingham, while other cases involving women from other ethnic groups and backgrounds went uncovered.
One critic, Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, said at the time that the Holloway coverage amounted to “emotional pornography.”
But the public fascination continued. A Lifetime movie, titled simply “Natalee Holloway,” set a ratings record for the network in 2009. Other television movies and true-crime productions followed, including one, “Vanished with Beth Holloway,” hosted by Ms. Holloway’s mother.
Holloway couldn’t help that she was white. She couldn’t help that she had blonde hair, a pretty face, or had rich parents. The media feeding frenzy had more to do with the supposed innocence of Holloway — a teenage girl with her whole life ahead of her, the world at her feet, disappears after a night of partying with friends.
Holloway was never an “everywoman.” And that’s why there was such a fascination with her fate. She was special. And because she stood out from the crowd, the media had little trouble elevating the story to international prominence.
Van der Sloot’s confession was anticlimactic. But may have given Natalee’s family comfort or closure,
“As far as I am concerned, it’s over. It’s over,” Mrs. Holloway said at a press conference, adding, “I’m satisfied knowing that he did it, he did it alone and he disposed of her alone.”
“He is the killer,” she said, adding, “He described when and how he killed her.”
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