Natalee Holloway

Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old from Mountain Brook, Alabama, disappeared in the early hours of May 30, 2005, while on an unofficial high-school graduation trip to the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba. According to Aruban authorities and contemporaneous reporting, she had traveled with roughly 100 classmates and several chaperones, arriving on May 26. She was last seen leaving the Carlos'n Charlie's nightclub in Oranjestad and getting into a car with a young Dutch resident of Aruba, Joran van der Sloot, and two brothers, Deepak and Satish Kalpoe. When Holloway did not appear for her return flight home, an extensive land, air and sea search of the island began. Her body has never been found.

Van der Sloot became the chief suspect almost immediately. He and the Kalpoe brothers were arrested on June 9, 2005, on suspicion of involvement in her disappearance, and van der Sloot was held for further questioning after the brothers were released. Over the following years he was arrested and released in Aruba more than once as his accounts of that night repeatedly changed, but Aruban prosecutors never charged him with a crime in connection with Holloway. On December 18, 2007, the Aruban prosecutor's office announced it was closing the case, citing insufficient evidence to charge anyone. Holloway was declared legally dead by an Alabama court in January 2012 at the request of her father.

Five years to the day after Holloway vanished, on May 30, 2010, van der Sloot killed 21-year-old business student Stephany Flores Ramírez in a hotel room in Lima, Peru. He was convicted of that murder: on January 11, 2012 he pleaded guilty in a Peruvian court, and on January 13, 2012 he was sentenced to 28 years in prison. Separately, U.S. federal prosecutors in Alabama had indicted van der Sloot in 2010 on charges of extortion and wire fraud, alleging that he tried to extort roughly $250,000 from Holloway's mother, Beth Holloway, in exchange for revealing the location of Natalee's remains and the circumstances of her death. Prosecutors said he was paid about $25,000 before providing information he himself later described as worthless.

In June 2023, van der Sloot was temporarily extradited from Peru to the United States to face the extortion case. On October 18, 2023, he pleaded guilty in federal court in Birmingham, Alabama to extortion and wire fraud and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, to run concurrently with his Peruvian sentence. As part of the plea agreement, he gave a proffer statement in which he admitted, for the first time in a legal setting, that he killed Natalee Holloway — stating that after she rejected his advances on a beach he attacked her, bludgeoned her with a cinder block and pushed her body into the ocean.

It is important to state the legal distinctions precisely. Van der Sloot has been convicted of two offenses: the 2012 murder of Stephany Flores in Peru, and the 2023 U.S. extortion and wire fraud involving Beth Holloway. He admitted killing Natalee Holloway as part of the 2023 U.S. plea allocution and proffer, but he was never tried for or convicted of her death, and prosecutors and reporting have noted that Aruba's statute of limitations on the case had expired. As of 2026, van der Sloot remains imprisoned in Peru serving his sentence for the Flores murder, and no one has been criminally convicted of killing Natalee Holloway.