From Aruba to Lima: How Joran van der Sloot Got Caught

An honor student from Mountain Brook, Alabama goes to Aruba for a post graduation trip and never makes her flight home. The guy last seen with her spends 5 years changing his story, then emails her mom's lawyer with a price. Down in Lima, a college student with a list of 23 business ideas sits down at a poker table. What ties those 2 nights together?

Natalee Holloway: An Alabama Honor Student Bound for Bama

Natalee Holloway grew up between 2 states. Her early years were in Clinton, Mississippi, and then her parents split and she ended up living with her mom, Beth, in Mountain Brook, Alabama, while she still had this whole other home base with her dad, Dave, back in Mississippi, where her little half-sisters called her Sissy.

Dave wrote a book about her, and if you read it, my favorite story in there is about her graduation. Tickets were limited. Dave says Natalee just kept calling classmates until she'd scraped together enough tickets for her little sisters to get in.

She graduated with honors, Dave says, and she was on the Dorians dance team, and her senior year got so busy that Dave and his wife Robin would drive over just to catch her dancing at football games. She'd picked the University of Alabama for the fall. Dave says she got a full scholarship and she was thinking premed.

Then the trip comes up. Dave did not want her going at first, he wrote, over the money and because he wasn't sold on how the kids would be supervised, and then he turns around and hands her about half the cost anyway.

The Night Natalee Holloway Vanished in Aruba

A big group of Mountain Brook seniors lands in Aruba in May 2005, and Joran van der Sloot already lives on the island. His family moved there from the Netherlands when he was little, and his dad, Paulus, is a lawyer.

Joran is a casino guy. He's around the island's casino hotels all the time, and he told Fox News in 2006 that he met Natalee playing poker at one of them.

On her last night, Natalee leaves a nightclub in Oranjestad in a car with Joran and 2 brothers, Deepak and Satish Kalpoe. Her friend Madison Greer says in the new Netflix doc that classmates saw her get in that car and nobody caught the danger at the time, and that's her looking back on it about 20 years later.

Natalee's supposed to fly home that day. She never makes the plane. That's May 30.

Beth gets to Aruba fast. She says Joran told her he and Natalee fooled around that night and then he dropped her back at her hotel, the Holiday Inn. Police pick Joran up in 2005. They pick him up again in 2007, and both times he walks, and the Kalpoe brothers get let go too, and nobody ever gets prosecuted. Meanwhile Beth's search is all over cable news, and she accuses Aruban officials of a cover-up that nobody ever proved.

Joran van der Sloot Keeps Changing His Story

Then you've got Peter R. de Vries, this Dutch crime reporter, and in 2008 he gets Joran on hidden camera, and Joran tells a guy he trusts that Natalee started shaking on the beach and stopped talking, and that a friend of his took her body out to sea. "The ocean is big," he says.

De Vries gets on him about his credibility on TV, and Joran's big answer is to throw wine at him. Then Joran says everything on the tape was a lie. A few months after that, he tells Fox's Greta Van Susteren he sold Natalee to traffickers, and then he calls her back to say that one was a lie too.

He ends up running a café in Thailand, and online he's calling himself a professional poker player. His ex-girlfriend, Melody Granadillo, said she thought he had a gambling problem.

His dad, Paulus, dies of a heart attack in February 2010. Joran heads back to Aruba.

The $250,000 Natalee Holloway Extortion Sting

A few weeks after Paulus dies, John Q. Kelly, Beth's lawyer, gets an email from somebody using a fake name. It's Joran. He wants $250,000 to tell them where Natalee is. He wants $25,000 of it up front.

Kelly goes to the FBI, and the FBI sets up a sting with Aruban authorities, and in May Kelly's sitting across from Joran in a hotel room in Aruba with the whole thing getting recorded, and you can hear some of it now in the Netflix doc. Kelly asks him if he's ready to get really specific about where Natalee is. And Joran says, "I can't believe I'm doing it, but I'm ready."

Kelly counts out $10,000 in cash. Beth wires $15,000 from Birmingham. The FBI said that was private money.

After that, Joran drives Kelly to a house and says his late dad buried Natalee under the foundation. And out of every house on Aruba, he picks one that wasn't even built yet in 2005.

About a week later he emails Kelly from Peru to say he lied. People asked why nobody arrested him right then, and the feds said they hadn't built the case far enough before he got off the island.

Stephany Flores Ramírez Meets Joran at a Lima Casino

Beth's wire hits Joran's Dutch bank account on May 10. 4 days later, he's in Lima. He checks into the Hotel TAC in Miraflores, and police said he was in town for a poker tournament, and the tournament people said he never even signed up.

Meanwhile, Stephany Flores Ramírez is less than a year from finishing her business degree at the University of Lima. She's 21. Her friends said she'd written out this list of 23 businesses she might start, and she was going down it figuring out which ones she wanted, and her brother said she was already running merchandising for the family's event business while she was in school. Her dad, Ricardo, is a big deal in Lima entertainment. Her friends said she'd just told them she was happier than she'd ever been. Her brother Enrique remembered her always smiling.

Ricardo told the AP that Stephany and Joran met playing poker at a casino in Miraflores, and cameras caught them walking to his hotel before dawn. They go into his room around 5 in the morning. About 4 hours later, Joran checks out.

That's May 30, 2010. It's 5 years to the day after Natalee vanished.

How Stephany Flores' Family Tracked Down Joran van der Sloot

Stephany doesn't come home, and her family goes looking, and they happen to know the casino's owner, which gets them in front of the surveillance footage fast, and the place Joran went to play cards is the place that's got his face on tape. That footage gets them a name. And then you've got Carolina, Enrique's wife, sitting in Stephany's room typing that name into a search bar. What comes back is Natalee Holloway.

Then the family gets the news. Stephany was in Joran's hotel room. She'd been killed there. He was already gone.

He crossed into Chile by land the next day. Chilean police grabbed him on June 3, and Peru had him back a day later. Police in Lima said he confessed.

Now, what set things off in that room, there are 2 versions. Early police accounts said Stephany found stuff about Natalee on his laptop. A confession the AP reviewed has a message coming in and then a confrontation. I don't have the computer exam that would settle it.

Ricardo told reporters, "This isn't a coincidence, this murder." He wondered if the anniversary meant something, and nobody's ever shown Joran picked that date on purpose. Beth reached out to comfort the Flores family. And when reporters floated the idea that Beth's money paid for Joran's trip to Lima, Ricardo said he didn't blame her, and that punishing Joran was the justice system's job.

Joran van der Sloot’s Guilty Plea and Natalee Confession

Joran pleads guilty to Stephany’s murder in January 2012. The next day, back in Alabama, a judge declares Natalee legally dead. The day after that, Joran gets 28 years.

Then Peru loans him to the U.S. for the extortion case. He ends up in a courtroom in Birmingham pleading guilty, and he gets 20 years that run at the same time as his Peru sentence, and the deal has a catch, because he has to give a full, truthful account of what happened to Natalee.

And he gives it. He says he arranged to get dropped off with Natalee so they could walk on the beach. He says she turned him down. He says he kicked her and hit her with a cinder block. He says he pushed her body into the ocean. That’s his account, and Natalee can’t answer it. Beth says she finally has answers.

Where the Natalee Holloway Case Stands in 2026

Natalee’s remains have never been found. Joran’s still in a prison in Peru, where he also picked up an 18-year sentence for smuggling cocaine inside prison. If Peru ever lets him out early, he owes the U.S. the rest of his American sentence. Beth filed a criminal complaint against him in the Netherlands this year, and one of her lawyers is Royce de Vries, whose dad Peter was the reporter with the hidden camera. Aruba says it doesn’t have enough for murder and its clock ran out on manslaughter, but that clock’s still running in the Netherlands since Joran’s Dutch, so Aruba shipped its whole file over to Amsterdam to take a look. Nobody’s been charged yet.