Natalee Holloway

Case background and investigation

Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old from Alabama, travelled to Aruba in late May 2005 on a trip marking her high-school graduation. According to Wikipedia's account of the case, which draws on court records and news agency reports, the group arrived on May 26 and she was last seen at about 1:30 a.m. on May 30 outside the Carlos'n Charlie's nightclub in Oranjestad, leaving with Joran van der Sloot, a Dutch national living on the island, and brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe. She did not appear for her flight home. Her remains have never been found.

Several people were detained in the first weeks and released without charge. Van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers were arrested on June 9, 2005; all were released by early September 2005. The three were arrested again in November 2007 and again released, and on December 18, 2007, Aruban prosecutors closed the case without charging anyone. An Alabama court declared Holloway legally dead on January 12, 2012.

In 2010, according to CBS News, van der Sloot sought $250,000 from Holloway's mother, Beth Holloway, in return for information about the location of her daughter's remains, with $25,000 to be paid first. U.S. prosecutors in the Northern District of Alabama charged him with extortion and wire fraud in June 2010. On May 30, 2010, he killed Stephany Flores, 21, in a hotel in Lima, Peru. He pleaded guilty to that murder on January 11, 2012, and was sentenced two days later to 28 years in prison, according to History.com.

Peru transferred van der Sloot to the United States temporarily in June 2023 to face the Alabama charges. On October 18, 2023, he pleaded guilty in federal court in Birmingham to extortion and wire fraud and was sentenced to 20 years, to run at the same time as his Peruvian sentence. As a condition of the plea agreement he gave an account of what happened to Holloway. CBS News and NBC News reported that he said he attacked her on a beach after she refused his advances, struck her with a cinder block and put her body in the sea. NBC News reported that U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco said she had taken the confession into account in sentencing.

The admission is not a conviction for the killing. Van der Sloot has never been charged with or tried for Holloway's death, and his account has not been tested at trial. NBC News reported that Aruba's 12-year limitation period for homicide had expired, so he cannot be prosecuted there, and that Beth Holloway said after the hearing that she considered the case solved. According to Wikipedia, she filed a complaint with the Dutch Public Prosecutor's Office on March 17, 2026; this could not be confirmed in a second source.