Some true crime stories center on inexplicable disappearances of people living otherwise normal lives. These are the kinds of stories that tend to fascinate the public, and stick with the amateur sleuths who try to figure out what really happened. Other missing-person stories are captivating for another reason.
Sometimes, a mystery goes unsolved because the investigators tasked with solving it simply fail to do their jobs properly. That might have been the case in the baffling and unsettling disappearance of Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old native of Mississippi who went missing in Aruba in 2005. The sudden vanishing of a pretty, young, blonde American girl in a Caribbean country stirred up immediate controversy and led to a massive amount of interest in the case.
How did Holloway go missing, and what could have happened to her? Why did the authorities fail to charge anyone with a crime after she disappeared? These questions have continued to haunt investigators, and Holloway’s family, for nearly two decades. Let’s take a closer look at the case and figure out where things went wrong.
Natalee Holloway
Natalee Holloway was born in Mississippi in 1986 to Dave and Beth Holloway. After her parents divorced in 1993, she and her younger brother Matthew went to live with their mother and moved to Alabama in 2000. Their mother married an Alabama-based businessman named George Twitty, relocating the family to the region and sending Natalee to Mountain Brook High School.
Natalee was described as an outgoing, popular, and cheerful high school student. She was on the dance team and was a member of the honors society, indicating a high level of engagement with her school’s activities. She planned to attend the University of Alabama after high school, and secured a full-ride scholarship to pay for her tuition.
After graduating from Mountain Brook, Natalee and over 100 of her classmates took an unofficial trip to Aruba to celebrate their graduation from high school. Seven adult chaperones accompanied the teenagers, and the teens were expected to check in with the adults at least once daily to ensure nothing bad happened while they were on vacation. However, the graduates were left largely unsupervised throughout their five-day vacation. Reports from the teenagers and the people who saw them on the trip indicate they spent most of their time in Aruba partying. This element of the case became a major scandal after Natalee’s disappearance.
Disappearing in the Caribbean
On the day the group was supposed to fly home, Natalee missed her flight. She was last seen by her classmates on May 30 around 1:30 a.m. The graduates who last saw her say she was in a car with some locals – men later identified as Joran van der Sloot, Deepak Kalpoe, and his brother, Satish Kalpoe.
The three men picked Natalee up from in front of the nightclub Carlos’n Charlie’s in Oranjestad. Van der Sloot was 17 at the time and was attending the international school of Aruba. Originally from the Netherlands, he was living abroad to complete an honors program at the prestigious international school.
His friends, the Kalpoe brothers, were often seen around him when the group was around Oranjestad. The elder Kalpoe, Deepak, was 21 at the time and owned the car in which Natalee was last seen alive. The younger Kalpoe, Satish, was 18 in 2005 and reportedly would often give Van der Sloot rides around town, as the Dutch transfer student didn’t have his own car.
Investigation Begins
The authorities in Aruba immediately commenced a search for Natalee when she failed to arrive for her plane trip home. Her mother and stepfather immediately booked a flight on a private jet to Aruba when they heard their daughter had gone missing. The family quickly gathered that Van der Sloot was with Natalee when she was last seen and got Aruban authorities to take them to his home.
Van der Sloot initially denied knowing who Natalee was but, after being pressured, told her family that she had last seen her when the group dropped her off at her hotel around 2:00 a.m. According to both Van der Sloot and Deepak Kalpoe, Natalee had asked them to take her to Arashi Beach to look at sharks. The two men insisted that Holloway fell after exiting the car but refused their help and was approached by a “dark man” in an outfit that resembled a security guard.
The next day, Aruban authorities initiated a massive search-and-rescue operation to find Natalee. Thousands of civil servants were given the day off to allow them to join in the search, but nobody could find any trace of the missing teenager. Strangely, the investigation turned up very little in physical evidence, and numerous false leads wasted investigators’ time.
Multiple Arrests
The police initially acted on the suspicion that a security guard may have had something to do with Holloway’s disappearance. They arrested both Nick John and Abraham Jones, former security guards who worked in Oranjestad. The two were never charged with any crimes and were released without incident.
Unsurprisingly, Van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers were all arrested in June of 2005 in connection to the disappearance. The men changed their stories throughout their interviews with police, insisting now that they dropped Holloway off at the Marriott Hotel near the beach, leaving her nowhere near the hotel she was actually staying at.
Without much physical evidence to go on, the authorities released Van der Sloot and the Kalpoes without ever charging them with any crimes. This immensely frustrated Natalee’s family, but the case’s lead investigator countered that the country had already spent $3 million on the investigation without finding a shred of evidence pointing to what happened to Natalee. That investigator, Police Commissioner Gerold Dompig, would later give an interview claiming that he believed Natalee may have died from alcohol poisoning, as several witnesses claimed she’d been heavily drinking throughout her vacation.
Van der Sloot Reemerges as Suspect
After his release, Van der Sloot spent years profiting from the case by appearing on TV, and he even wrote a book about the incident. In 2010, he offered to show the Holloway family where Natalee’s remains were located in exchange for $250,000. The family immediately contacted the FBI to assist them in the case, and they completed an advance of the money to see what kind of information he would exchange.
Van der Sloot indicated that Natalee’s body could be found in a residence in Aruba, but must not have realized it wasn’t constructed until after she went missing. The FBI charged him with extortion and wire fraud over the incident, reigniting interest in Van der Sloot as a suspect.
Later that year, in May 2010, a 21-year-old named Stephany Flores Ramírez went missing in Lima, Peru. Authorities found her body three days later in a hotel room. Tellingly, the room was registered under Van der Sloot’s name. The investigation was open-and-shut. Peruvian authorities charged the 22-year-old with first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to 28 years in prison after pleading guilty.
Circumstantially Solved
While the authorities can’t formally charge Van der Sloot in Natalee’s case after all these years, the circumstantial evidence around him is strong enough for amateur sleuths to draw some serious conclusions. He allegedly murdered Stephany Ramírez after she logged into his laptop and found information linking him to the Holloway case. This, coupled with his extortion of the Holloway family and Van der Sloot’s own admission of guilt in another murder, leads many to believe he was responsible for Natalee’s disappearance.
Some have criticized the investigators in the initial case for not doing enough to find physical evidence immediately after Natalee’s disappearance. With the mountain of circumstantial evidence against Joran van der Sloot, it seems baffling that the authorities could not find anything compelling enough to definitively link him to the case.
Still, the case remains unsolved. Even among those who agree that Van der Sloot was responsible for Holloway’s disappearance, there are disagreements about what might have happened to her. In some interviews, he’s alleged that he sold her into slavery after abducting her. He’s recanted these statements, but it’s left an impression on amateur investigators that he was simply trying to profit from the confusion surrounding the case.
Declaration of Death
Getting someone declared dead is tricky when they simply vanish without a trace. Without any physical remains or evidence that they’re no longer living, courts can presume that the person is missing and not accounted for. However, Holloway’s father Dave petitioned in 2011 for an Alabama court to declare his daughter legally deceased.
After a series of hearings, and against the wishes of her mother, Beth, Natalee was declared legally dead on January 12, 2012. Between this legal action and the official closure of the case in Aruba, it seems that’s the last word on the strange, sad tale of Natalee Holloway’s disappearance. And while some amateurs firmly believe that Joran van der Sloot is responsible for the incident, the only evidence against him is circumstantial. Tragically, the Holloway family may never receive justice.
