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

0:00 [MUSIC] 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 five years changing his story constantly. 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 these two nights together? [MUSIC] Natalie Holloway grew up between two states.

1:05 Her early years were Clinton, Mississippi, and then her parents split and she ended up living with her mom Beth in Mountain Brook, Alabama, where she still had this whole other home base with her dad, Dave, back in Mississippi. And there, her little half-sister is called her Sissy. Dave wrote a book about her, and if you've read it, one of the best stories in there is about her graduation. The tickets for Natalie's graduation were limited. Dave says that Natalie just kept calling classmates until she scraped together enough tickets for her little sisters to be able to get in. She graduated high school with honors, Dave said, and she was on the dance team. Her senior year got so busy that Dave and his wife, Robin, would drive over from Mississippi just to catch her dancing at football games.

1:51 She chosen to go to school at the University of Alabama for the fall. Dave says that she got a full scholarship and she wanted to enroll in pre-med. Then the whole Aruba trip comes up. Dave did not want her going in first. He wrote that it was over the money and because he wasn't sold on how the kids would be supervised over there. And then it turns out he hands her about half of the cost of the trip anyway. A big group of mountainbrook seniors lands in Aruba in May of 2005. Yoran van der Sloot already lives there on the island. His family moved there from the Netherlands when he was little and his dad, Paulus, is a lawyer. Yoran is a casino guy.

2:31 He's around the island hotel casinos all the time. And he told Fox News in 2006 that he met Natalie playing poker at one of them. On her last night, Natalie leaves a nightclub in a car with Yoran and two brothers. The brothers are Deepak and Satish Kalpo. Natalie's friend Madison says in the new Netflix documentary that the classmates saw her get into that car and nobody quite caught the danger that was at play at the time. And that's her looking back on it 20 years later. Nobody really knew that that was a dangerous situation for her to be in. Natalie supposed to fly home that day. She never makes it onto the plane. That's May 30.

3:12 Her mom Beth gets to Aruba fast when she finds out that Natalie is missing. She says Yoran told her that he and Natalie fold around that night and that he dropped her back at the hotel the holiday in. Police pick up Yoran in 2005. They pick him up again in 2007 and both times he walks. And the Kalpo brothers they get let go too and nobody ever gets prosecuted. Meanwhile, Beth searches all over the news. And she accuses the Aruba officials of a cover up that nobody ever proved. Then you've got Peter R. Devries, this Dutch crime reporter. And in 2008 he gets Yoran on a hidden camera. And Yoran tells a guy that he trusts that Natalie started shaking on the beach and stop talking.

3:56 And that a friend of his took her body out to see. The ocean is big, he says. Devries gets on him about his credibility on TV. And Yoran's big answer is to throw wine at him. Then Yoran says everything on the tape was a lie. A few months after that he tells Fox's Gretivine Sustrin he sold Natalie to traffickers. That he knew some people that were looking for a blonde American and he captured her in solder for $10,000. And then he calls her back to say that was a lie he made up to. Yoran ends up running a cafe in Thailand and online he's calling himself a professional poker player. His ex-girlfriend Melody said that she thought he had a gambling problem.

4:37 His dad Paulus dies of a heart attack in February 2010. Yoran heads back to Aruba. A few weeks after his dad Paulus dies John Cue Kelly, Beth's lawyer, gets an email from somebody using a fake name. It's Yoran. He wants $250,000 to tell them where Natalie is. He wants $25,000 of it up front. Kelly goes to the FBI and the FBI sets up a sting with Aruba authorities. And in May Kelly's sitting across from Yoran in a hotel room in Aruba with the whole thing getting recorded. Kelly asks him if he's ready to get specific about where Natalie is. And Yoran says, "I can't believe I'm doing it, but I'm ready."

5:20 Kelly counts out $10,000 in cash. Beth wires $15,000 from Birmingham. After that Yoran drives Kelly to a house and says that his late dad buried Natalie under the foundation. Out of every house on Aruba, he picks the one that wasn't even built yet in 2005. About a week later, he emails Kelly from Peru to tell him that he lied. People ask why nobody arrested him right then and the Fed said that they hadn't built their case far enough before he got off the island. Beth's wire hits Yoran's Dutch bank account on May 10. Four days later, he's in Lima. He checks into the hotel tack and police said that he was in town for a poker tournament.

6:02 The tournament people said he'd never even signed up for. Meanwhile, Stephanie Flores Ramirez is less than a year from finishing her business degree at the University of Lima. She's 21. Her friend said that she'd written out this list of 23 businesses that she might start. And her brother said that 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 told them that she was happier than she had ever been. Her brother Enrique remembered she was always smiling. Ricardo told the AP that Stephanie and Yoran met, playing poker at a casino, and cameras caught them walking to his hotel before dawn.

6:43 They go into his room around 5 in the morning. About 4 hours later, Yoran checks out. That's May 30, 2010. It's 5 years to the exact day after Natalie vanished. Stephanie doesn't come home and the family goes looking and they just happen to know the casino's owner, which gets them in front of the surveillance footage very fast. And the place Yoran 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 Stephanie's room typing that name into a search bar. What comes back is Natalie Holloway. And the family gets the news.

7:23 Stephanie is in Yoran's hotel room. She'd been killed in there. He was already gone. He crossed into Chile by land the next day. Chilean police grabbed him on June 3rd and Peru had him back a day later. Police in Lima said that he confessed to the murder. Now, what set things off in that room? There are two different versions. Early police accounts said that Stephanie found stuff about Natalie on his laptop. A confession, the AP reviewed, has a message coming in and then a confrontation. Ricardo told the reporters, "This isn't a coincidence, this murder." He wondered if the anniversary meant something. Maybe he was on edge that day because of the five-year anniversary.

8:05 Natalie's mom Beth reached out to comfort the Flores family. And when reporters floated the idea that Beth's money paid for Yoran's trip to Lima, Ricardo said that he didn't blame her and that punishing Yoran was the job of the justice system. Yoran pleads guilty to Stephanie's murder in January 2012. The next day, back in Alabama, a judge declares Natalie legally dead. And day after that, Yoran gets 28 years in prison. Then Peru loans him to the US for the extortion case. He ends up in a Birmingham courtroom pleading guilty. He gets 20 years that run at the same time as his Peru sentence. And with this deal comes a catch because he has to give a full, truthful account of what happened to Natalie and he gives it.

8:51 She asked to go back to her hotel but I was just trying to get dropped off a little bit further away from her hotel so we could walk back to her hotel and I might still get a chance to be with her. That's what I was hoping for. So what happened? Yeah, Deepak drops me off at a place a little right of the area at hotel known as the Fisherman's Huts. This place is not so far from the next hotel is the Marriott and the next hotel after that is another Marriott which is a time sharing and then it's the hall de en.

9:34 While we walk along the beach. Yeah, do Deepak and the Teeche get out? Come with what house? Deepak and the Teeche leave. They go back to their home. I assume they go back to their home. They get in their car and they leave. I'm actually with Natalie walking along the beach. I find the space before we get to the Marriott hotel where I lay her down. We lay down together in the sand and we start kissing each other.

10:18 I get it to kiss me again. We start kissing each other and I start feeling her up again and she tells me no. It tells me she doesn't want me to feel her up. I insist I keep feeling her up either way and she needs me. She ends up kneeling me in the crotch. I get up on the beach and I kick her extremely hard in the face. She's laying down unconscious possibly even dead but definitely unconscious.

11:00 I see right next to her there's a huge center block laying on the beach. When you say center block looking at the walls of the place isn't like those. Exactly same center blocks. I see a huge center block laying on the beach. I take this and I smash her head in with it completely. Her face basically collapses in. And though it's dark I can see her face is collapsed in.

11:43 Afterwards I don't exactly know what I'm scared. I don't know what to do. I decide to take her and put her into the ocean. I grab her and I have pool and walk with her into the ocean. I push her off. I walk up my knees into the ocean and I push her off into the sea.

12:26 Natalie's remains have never been found. Iran is still in prison in Peru where he also picked up an additional 18 year sentence for smuggling cocaine inside prison. If Peru ever were to let him out early he would still owe the US 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 DeVries whose dad Peter was the reporter with the hidden camera. Aruba says it didn't have enough for murder and its clock ran out on manslaughter. But that clock is still running in the Netherlands since Iran's Dutch so Aruba shipped its whole file over to Amsterdam to take a look.

13:06 But to this day nobody has been charged. Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, Bingeable True Crime. Hi I'm Joe, I'm the host and here's an email. I can't read the subject because I scroll too far here it is. Subject, how do you pick? Joe, out of everything there, how do you decide what makes it on to the show? I'd guess some of it is what you can actually find good information on. But there's got to be more to it than that because I've noticed that you'll skip some of the big famous ones everybody else does. Is that on purpose?

13:47 Are you avoiding the ones that are already covered to death or does it just work out that way? Been listening about 8 months found you through a friend at work. Thanks, Jeanette in St. Joseph, Missouri. Hi Jeanette, thank you so much for taking the time to send the email and thank you for listening. And also, for me, would you thank your co-worker for letting you know about the podcast? That means a lot. I really do appreciate that. And to answer your question, I think this episode should kind of let you know that no, I don't just focus on lesser known cases. There are just fewer widely known cases like the one you're hearing about today. It seems like there are dime a dozen. These big, huge cases that everyone knows about, but when you do as many episodes as I do, you have to do cases that are lesser known.

14:32 And I'm, it truth be told, not the one picking these stories. You all listening to the podcast or the one picking them. So when this documentary about Natalie Holloway was announced before it ever even came out, I was getting emails, "Hey, will you do an update on the Natalie Holloway case once the documentary does come out?" And so that's what I'm doing now. But yeah, I do all of the stories. So I do, if it's a big case, if it's a, if it makes the news and everyone is talking about it, there's a 100% chance I will cover the case. But that's only a fraction of the stories that we talk about here in the podcast, the more known cases. That's a, the smaller percentage. And in my personal opinion, I think it's more interesting to hear about a case that you don't really know about.

15:13 There are stories that I could talk about and have tons of details and theories on them, like John Bene Ramsey, the Westman Fist 3, Ted Bundy, etc. But many of you listening to this podcast right now know about as much of those cases as I do. But I do cover them because those are the stories that most people know about. And it's kind of like this is going to be a weird analogy. If you turn the radio on and you hear a song that you're not familiar with, you're probably going to turn the channel. But if it's a song that you know and that you like, you're going to stick with it. So it's kind of the same way with True Crime. You turn on the podcast and it's a story that you kind of know already. You're more than likely going to stick with it and hear my take on it. Hear what I have to say about it.

15:54 But if it's a story that is completely foreign to you and you know nothing about it, the chances of you sticking around are a little bit less. So it would make more sense for me to cover the bigger cases and to just really focus on those. But to me, that's not as interesting. So that's why I don't do that. Alright, if you're a new listener to this podcast, please do me a huge favor and subscribe right now. You can go to 10minuteMurder.com also. There's a blog there, links to where you can follow the show on social media, as well as links to other places that you can listen to the podcast, other podcast platforms. If you're already subscribed and you do want to do me a huge favor, you can let your friends and family know about this podcast.

16:34 And that's it. That's your episode for today. Thank you for listening to 10 Minute Murder. See you next time. [Music]