New Information Surfaces About The Natalee Holloway Case

Natalee Holloway disappeared in the spring of 2005. At the time, Natalee was, according to those who knew her, a friendly and outgoing honors student. She enjoyed performing on her school's dance team and attended church regularly. She was, then, just like any other teenage girl about to graduate And she had no way of knowing that she would soon make international headlines.

To celebrate her impending graduation from Mountain Brook High School in Birmingham, Alabama, Natalee and a hundred of her classmates signed up for a special trip to Aruba, located in the Caribbean Sea. It was naturally all the students could think about as the school year wound down. However, the trip would end up being memorable for truly dark reasons.

Claire Fierman had known Natalee since junior high and described the daily routine on the Aruba trip. "We were on the beach," she told NBC News in 2008. "We stayed outside all day. You'd usually take a nap, get dressed, go eat dinner, and then go to one of the bars. Come home whenever you wanted to." It was, in short, exactly the kind of trip a hard-working student deserved.

Yet even though Natalee had already traveled to Europe and Canada, her father, Dave, confessed that he had reservations about Aruba. "I told her flat out she was not going to Aruba if I had anything to do with it," he told NBC News. Her uncle Paul Reynolds said, "Natalee's naive. She hasn't dated a lot. She doesn’t party a lot." Even Natalee apparently worried about a nightspot in Aruba called Carlos 'n Charlie's.

Beth, Natalee's mom, told NBC News, "My stepson had had an encounter at Carlos 'n Charlie's during 2003." She described how her stepson had intervened when he saw some locals coax "young females into leaving the establishment with them." But despite this, Beth still felt it was an exciting opportunity for Natalee, and Natalee even convinced her father it was a good idea. "There's safety in numbers," Beth said.

On the last night of her stay, Natalee met a young man named Joran van der Sloot in Carlos 'n Charlie's. According to one hotel worker, as reported in Vanity Fair, van der Sloot was notorious for hitting on young female tourists. It later became clear that the last time anybody had seen Natalee alive was when she left Carlos 'n Charlie's with van der Sloot and the brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe.

The first time anybody realized that Natalee was missing was the next morning, May 30, 2005. Natalee had failed to show up in the lobby of the Holiday Inn ready to return home. Natalee's belongings, including her packed bags and her passport, were later recovered in her hotel room. A chaperone then informed Natalee's mother. "I knew immediately that my daughter had been kidnapped in Aruba," Beth told Vanity Fair in 2006. "Natalee has never been late in her life."

Dave Holloway was equally struck by the news. "Grown men don't usually cry," he told NBC News in 2008. "But I knew this was bad. I knew then that I was going to have to go to Aruba to find her." Natalee's parents landed in Aruba half a day after learning about their daughter's disappearance. They kick-started the investigation — and almost immediately pinpointed van der Sloot as the prime suspect.

According to Vanity Fair, van der Sloot was questioned at his home a day or two after Natalee's disappearance. "We took her back to the Holiday Inn, to the front door," he reportedly said. "When she got out of the car, she stumbled and fell. I went to help her, but she got up and walked on through the lobby." He apparently insisted that he never saw her again.

Van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers were arrested on June 9, 2005 — ten days after Natalee disappeared. Their stories changed: the brothers now claimed they dropped van der Sloot and Natalee off at a local beach. Van der Sloot also said he left Natalee to walk home alone. They were further detained on suspicion of having knowledge of the case.

The Kalpoe brothers were released a month later — before being arrested again in August 2005. Eventually, all three of them were released in September 2005, although they were told to stay in the Netherlands and remain available to police. The news was devastating to Natalee's parents, but it wouldn't be the last time they'd suffer feelings of frustration and anger during the many twists and turns of the investigation.

The very first suspects to be taken into custody were two security guards from a nearby hotel. They were only detained for eight days, though, before they were ordered to be released. It was the same story for DJ Steve Croes and van der Sloot's father, Paulus. Both were detained briefly in connection with the case before swiftly securing a release through lack of evidence.

Beth and Dave, Natalee's parents, also both reported receiving an onslaught of phone calls from people pretending to know where Natalee was. One person apparently claimed the girl's remains were hidden in a freezer at Joran's house. Another supposedly claimed she had been stashed in a boat in Venezuela. All of the so-called tips turned out to lead nowhere. "It was hell," Beth told Dateline in 2008.

In 2007 the police even re-arrested Joran van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers. According to CNN, the authorities said they had "new and incriminating evidence against" the suspects — but the authorities never said what the evidence was. In the end, van der Sloot and the Kalpoes were released after only being detained for a couple of weeks. One Arubian official also espoused a baffling theory.

In 2006 Police Commissioner Gerold Dompig told CBS News that that the police didn't think Natalee had been murdered. "This was a highly intoxicated body of a very small person," he said, adding, "We feel strongly that she probably went into shock or something happened to her system with all this alcohol maybe on top of that other drugs which either she took or they gave her and that she just collapsed." Time would prove him very wrong.

Meanwhile, Joran van der Sloot — always a prime suspect in the case — was a free man. Yet he would spend much of the years after Natalee's disappearance... talking about Natalee's disappearance. His most notorious interview came in 2006 when he spoke to CBS News. In it, he freely admitted his intention to "take [Natalee] to the house to have sex with her."

Van der Sloot said the last time he saw Natalee was on a beach. "We cuddled awhile on the beach just laying there... until I said, about time to walk her back to her hotel," he said. "At that moment, she said she didn't want to go back to her hotel and she wanted me to stay with her, because it was her last night. I tried to convince her to go back to the hotel and she said just put me down."

Van der Sloot also appeared on Dutch television in 2008. On the show, crime reporter Peter de Vries questioned van der Sloot's story — and after the show ended, van der Sloot threw a glass of red wine in the journalist's face. "This says something about Joran, of course," de Vries said later. "He doesn't have complete control over his behavior." De Vries and van der Sloot would have another — darker — encounter, too.

De Vries organized an undercover sting operation and ended up catching van der Sloot making a highly inflammatory statement on camera. In hidden-camera footage, van der Sloot was heard telling Patrick van der Eem—who'd supposedly gained van der Sloot's trust — that he'd had sex with Natalee on the beach before she started convulsing and passed out. His actual words were disturbing.

"All of a sudden, what she did was like in a movie," he said in the footage. "She was shaking, it was awful... I prodded her, [but] there was nothing." He then said he asked someone he knew to get rid of her body. "He went out to sea and then he threw her out, like an old rag," he claimed.

Although de Vries — when broadcasting the footage — claimed "the mystery of Natalee Holloway will be solved" thanks to the clip, this did not come to pass. A judge later reviewed the clip and said that it wasn't enough to meet the demands to arrest van der Sloot. For his part, van der Sloot said, "That is what he wanted to hear, so I told him what he wanted to hear." The case was reopened — but nothing happened.

In 2010, five years after Natalee's disappearance, van der Sloot seemingly came undone. He allegedly contacted the Holloway family attorney, John Kelly, with an offer. Kelly told Dateline that van der Sloot said, "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." Kelly said van der Sloot wanted 250,000 to "tell you what happened to Natalee." In June 2010 van der Sloot was indicted on charges of wire fraud and extortion — but they would have to wait a long time for a trial.

On May 30, 2010, exactly five years after Natalee missed her flight home, van der Sloot met a young woman named Stephany Flores. Security camera footage showed the pair playing poker together before Flores went with van der Sloot to his room at the Hotel Tac Lima, Peru. Flores would be found dead — with a broken neck — in the room two days later.

Van der Sloot was captured after he had already fled to Chile. He was in prison for four days until he confessed to committing the murder. According to Lima police, he killed Flores after she discovered incriminating evidence of his connection to the Natalee Holloway case on his laptop. When Beth Holloway learned of the crime, she reportedly asked, "How could this happen?"

"I want to plead guilty," van der Sloot said at his trial in 2012. "I wanted from the first moment to confess sincerely. I truly am sorry for this act. I feel very bad." He was sentenced to 28 years in prison and ordered to pay thousands of dollars in reparations. He was still serving out his sentence when an agreement between Peru and the U.S. led to his extradition to America on May 11, 2023, on the charges of fraud and extortion. This development would eventually lead to the closing of Natalee's case, too.

In October 2023 van der Sloot pleaded guilty in federal court to the extortion and wire fraud charges. In the process of this, he also confessed — in shocking detail — to the murder of Natalee Holloway. "It's over. Joran van der Sloot is no longer the suspect in my daughter’s murder. He is the killer,” Beth Holloway said afterward. "After 18 years, Natalee’s case is solved."

"He gave a proffer in which he finally confessed to killing Natalee," Beth explained. A proffer is where a defendant tells the authorities what they know about a certain crime, usually when they're looking to secure a plea deal. Court documents later revealed a transcript of a portion of a recorded interview between van der Sloot and his attorney, Kevin Butler, on October 3, 2023.

"[Natalee] asked to go back to her hotel," van der Sloot says at the start of the transcript, "but I was just trying to get dropped off a little bit further away from her hotel so we could, uh, walk back to her hotel and I might still get a chance to — to be with her... That's what I was hoping for."

"Deepak drops me off at another place," van der Sloot continued, "a little to the right of the Marriott Hotel, known as 'The Fisherman's Huts.' This place is not far from — you know — the next place is the Marriott Hotel. And the next place after that is another Marriott Hotel, which is a timeshare. And then it's the Holiday Inn [where Natalee stayed]. We walk along the beach."

The next part of van der Sloot's confession saw him letting the brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe off the hook. He confessed that the Kalpoes "get in their car and they leave" after dropping him off. He then stated that he "lay [Natalee] down" on the beach and that they "start kissing each other." "I start feeling her up … and she tells me no," he said.

"She tells me she doesn’t want me to feel her up," van der Sloot confessed. "I insist. I keep feeling her up either way." He then admitted that Natalee tried to fight him back by kneeing him in the crotch. But, van der Sloot said, he retaliated by getting back up and kicking Natalee. She was seemingly knocked unconscious by the blow.

"She's laying down, unconscious, possibly even dead, but definitely unconscious," said van der Sloot. "I see right next to her there's a huge cinderblock laying on the beach." The next part of the confession was brutal. Suffice it to say that the cinderblock was the murder weapon. "Afterwards, I don’t exactly know what, you know — I'm scared. I don't know what to do," van der Sloot continued.

"I decide to take her and put her into the ocean," van der Sloot continued. "So I grab her and I half pull, half walk with her into the ocean. I push her off. I walk up to about my knees into the ocean and I push her off into the sea. After that, I get out. I walk home."

Judge Anna Manasco sentenced van der Sloot to 20 years on the federal charges of extortion and fraud. "You have brutally murdered, in separate incidents years apart, two beautiful women who refused your sexual advances," the judge said at sentencing. In line with van der Sloot's plea agreement, he will serve the 20-year sentence together with his sentence in Peru — meaning he will not be jailed in the U.S.

The parents tried to take whatever solace they could from the confession. "I was blessed to have had Natalee in my life for 18 years," Beth said. "She would be 36 years old now and I still miss her every single day. It has been a very long and painful journey, but we finally got the answers we’ve been searching for all these years. We finally got justice for Natalee."

Years after her daughter's disappearance, Natalee's mother, Beth, reportedly started dating John Ramsey. Ramsey said that they "developed a friendship of respect and admiration" based on similar experiences. If John's name doesn't sound familiar, maybe you'll remember him from his late daughter's name: JonBenet Ramsey. And looking back at John's family history only makes the whole affair that much more devastating.

See Patricia Paugh was only 23 years old when she married 36-year-old divorcé John Ramsey on November 5, 1980. Then seven years later, she gave birth to a son named Burke. John, meanwhile, was busy building a successful career, launching his own – ultimately lucrative – company in 1989.

Then on August 6, 1990, the couple’s daughter, JonBenet, arrived. The year after the girl was born, the family subsequently relocated to Boulder, Colorado. There, John’s career went from strength to strength, while Patsy stayed at home and focused on raising the children.

In her own youth, Patsy had been a fan of beauty pageants, and she herself won the crown of Miss West Virginia in 1977. What’s more, as JonBenet grew older, her mother took delight in introducing her daughter to the same world. Before she’d even reached her seventh birthday, in fact, JonBenet had won several titles despite her young age. Yet tragedy was soon to follow.

On December 22, 1996, six-year-old JonBenet performed a festive routine at a Boulder mall. As she sung the hit “Rocking Around The Christmas Tree,” she seemed just like any other young girl excited to see what presents Santa Claus might bring. But days later, she would have her life wrenched from her in terrible and mysterious circumstances that have haunted America ever since.

At 5:52 a.m. on December 26, Patsy placed a phone call to 911. Apparently, JonBenet had disappeared, and a lengthy ransom note had been left behind. Addressed to John, the note detailed a demand for $118,000 in cash – threatening JonBenet’s life should the Ramseys decide to go to the police.

Nevertheless, John and Patsy opted to contact the authorities, and at about 6:00 a.m. two police officers arrived on the scene. But although they searched the house, the officers couldn’t find any indication of a break-in. Meanwhile, John, by then CEO of a billion-dollar company, began attempting to raise the cash.

At first, police focused on JonBenet’s bedroom as the scene of the crime, believing as they did that the young girl had been kidnapped from her bed. Then, however, at 1:00 p.m. a detective instructed John to take a look around the house while keeping an eye out for anything unusual.

So it was that down in the basement John opened a latched door and stumbled upon a terrible sight. There was JonBenet’s body, covered in a white blanket. A piece of duct tape had been placed over her mouth, and her neck and wrists were wrapped in cord. Bizarrely, she was also wearing different clothes to those that she’d had on the previous night.

Soon it was revealed that JonBenet had died by being strangled and having her skull fractured. So what exactly had happened to this innocent young girl after she’d gone to sleep on Christmas night? As the only people known to have been in the house at the time, John, Patsy and Burke presently found themselves under suspicion.

And as the media circus descended on Boulder, theories began flying thick and fast. Had Patsy herself killed her daughter in a fit of anger? Or had Burke, just nine at the time, accidentally taken the life of JonBenet, with his parents then faking the ransom note in an effort to conceal his guilt?

At the same time, as the Ramseys fought accusations from the press, the police were having difficulties of their own. Indeed, although they had identified more than 1,600 persons of interest by October 1997, mistakes that had been made by officers meant it was proving difficult to narrow the number down.

Apparently, for instance, the Ramseys’ friends and family had descended on the scene of events soon after Patsy’s 911 call. Unfortunately, though, this meant that vital clues and evidence had been disturbed. And by removing his daughter’s body from where he’d come across it, John had himself managed to change the state of the crime scene.

Despite these issues, however, several suspects emerged over the years. Yet even though DNA was successfully recovered from JonBenet’s clothing, a match for it has never been found. Meanwhile, investigators have continued to argue over whether a family member or an unknown intruder was responsible for the girl’s death.

Ten years after her daughter’s murder, Patsy herself died, succumbing to ovarian cancer. And, sadly, it would be two more years before the police finally cleared the Ramseys of involvement in their daughter’s death. However, that was far from the end of the mystery, and JonBenet’s case has remained a subject of debate ever since.

Then in 2016 private detective Ollie Gray announced that he had made a major breakthrough in the investigation. Having initially been hired by John and Patsy themselves to track down JonBenet’s killer, Gray continued to work on the case even after his arrangement with the Ramseys had come to an end.

According to Gray, a Boulder man named Michael Helgoth, who was 26 at the time, was responsible for JonBenet’s death. Key to this theory is the testimony of John Kenady, a man who worked at the Helgoth family’s junkyard. Apparently, Kenady had heard Helgoth discussing a great financial deal – as well as pondering what it would “be like to crack a human skull” – in the lead-up to the murder.

And although Kenady claims to have attempted to relay his suspicions to the police, Gray believes that they did not listen to what he had to say. “I got the distinct feeling that the Boulder police had absolutely no interest in anything that took away from their theory that John and Patsy Ramsey killed their daughter,” Gray told InTouch in 2016.

Additionally, Kenady claims that somewhere a tape exists which contains Helgoth’s confession. But sadly the full truth may never be known. In February 1997 Helgoth was found dead in his home. And although it appeared to have been a suicide, Gray believes Helgoth was murdered by accomplices who were afraid that he would talk.

At any rate, Gray is still holding out hope that one day the crime will finally be solved. “If they could find out who killed Helgoth,” he continued, “it could lead police to his accomplices in her murder.” So, will justice ever catch up with whoever so cold-bloodedly ended the life of JonBenet Ramsey? In such a high-profile case, we can only speculate as to what twists and turns might still be in store.