Natalee Holloway’s getaway to paradise was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime.
Instead, the May 2005 vacation became a nightmare when the recent Mountain Brook, Alabama, high school graduate disappeared in Aruba and was never seen again.
For almost 20 years, her devastated mother, Beth Holloway, searched for answers. She returned to the island, went door to door, pressed the case in the media and continued to focus attention on Joran van der Sloot—the last person known to have seen Natalee alive.
Beth’s determination ultimately led to a measure of closure. In October 2023, Joran confessed to killing Natalee as part of a federal plea agreement on extortion and fraud charges.
“Sitting there watching Joran deliver his proffer or watching him, hearing him, in real time, I remember thinking my nightmare is over,” Beth said in the Netflix documentary Taken: Natalee Holloway. “Hard to hear, horrible to hear, but had to hear it. The not knowing is the most torturous part.”
Here’s what to know about Natalee Holloway’s final hours and Joran van der Sloot’s chilling confession:
Natalee Holloway Disappeared After Night Out With Friends
Natalee was preparing to begin a new chapter after earning a full academic scholarship to the University of Alabama. To mark her high school graduation, she joined classmates for one final senior trip to Aruba.
The vacation was not sponsored by the school, although several teachers accompanied the students as chaperones. According to the documentary, the group of nearly 100 teenagers largely spent their days on the beach and their nights enjoying Aruba’s nightlife.
On May 30, 2005—the final night of the trip—Natalee and her friends went to a casino, where they first encountered Joran. The group later went to Carlos’n Charlie’s nightclub, where Natalee and Joran began talking.
“When they said the bar’s closing everyone kind of shuffled outside at the same time,” Natalee’s friend Madison Greer recalled in the documentary. “In Aruba, taxi drivers weren’t like yellow taxis. It was just somebody that you could go and say ‘are you a taxi driver?’”
Natalee’s friends watched her get into a gray Honda Civic with Joran and two other men, whom they mistakenly believed were taxi drivers. The men were later identified as brothers Deepak Kalpoe and Satish Kalpoe.
“We were not really worried,” Madison said. “She was hanging out of the car and saying like ‘Aruba!’ People said ‘Aruba’ back and then she drove off.”
Joran van der Sloot Gives Varying Accounts of What Happened to Natalee Holloway
When Natalee did not show up at the airport for her flight home later that morning, her mother and stepfather, George “Jug” Twitty, flew to Aruba, according to an affidavit obtained by Oxygen.
After speaking with Natalee’s friends, who had met Joran, Beth and Jug quickly located him at his family’s home and confronted him. They later gave his name to police.
“On June 2, 2005, van der Sloot told authorities that he and Holloway had driven to the California Lighthouse area of Arashi Beach because Holloway wanted to see sharks,” authorities wrote in the affidavit. “He said that he dropped Holloway off at her hotel, the Holiday Inn around 2:00 a.m.”
However, investigators reviewed surveillance footage and found no evidence that Natalee ever returned to the Holiday Inn.
Over the years, Joran gave investigators and the public several conflicting accounts. In one interview with Fox News’ Greta van Susteren, he even claimed that he had sold Natalee to a man in Venezuela.
Joran van der Sloot Accused of Extortion, Murder
In 2010, Joran offered to lead Beth’s attorney, John Q. Kelly, to Natalee’s remains in exchange for $250,000, with $25,000 to be paid in advance, according to the affidavit.
Joran claimed Natalee died after hitting her head on a rock and said his father, wealthy Dutch lawyer Paul van der Sloot, had concealed her body beneath the foundation of a one-story home on the island. But aerial photographs and a conversation with a building inspector showed that the house was not under construction at the time. Authorities determined that Joran had lied and described the information as “worthless,” according to a later binding plea agreement obtained by Oxygen.
Before he could be arrested for extortion, van der Sloot—who was in Peru—beat and strangled Stephany Flores Ramirez to death in a hotel room, ABC News reported. He told authorities that he killed Stephany after she saw a message appear on his computer about Natalee’s disappearance.
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He was later sentenced in Peru to 28 years in prison for the murder, according to The Associated Press.
Joran van der Sloot Offers Chilling Confession in Natalee Holloway Murder
The murder conviction may have stalled Beth’s dreams of seeing Joran stand trial on American soil—but it didn’t extinguish them completely.
In 2023, the Peruvian government agreed to loan Joran to the United States so that he could stand trial on the extortion charges.
That same year, he pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, to be served concurrently with his sentence in Peru, as part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors.
As part of the terms of the agreement, Joran agreed to reveal what happened to Natalee, according to ABC News.
He told authorities, while hooked up a lie detector test, that after leaving the nightclub that night he had requested that the Kalpoe brothers drop them off “a little bit further away from the hotel so we could walk back…and I might still get a chance to be with her,” according to a transcript of a meeting with prosecutors obtained by the outlet.
The pair laid down on the beach and began kissing, but then Natalee told him to stop. When he continued, Joran said she “knees me in the crotch,” causing him to get up and “kick her extremely hard in the face.”
While she was “laying down unconscious, possibly even dead,” he picked up a nearby cement cinderblock.
“I smash her head in with it completely,” he said, according to the Netflix doc. “I decide to…put her in the ocean.”
Joran said he walked about knee-deep into the water while carrying the body and then let it go into the ocean in an area known to have strong winds out to sea.
Beth Holloway Describes “Indescribable Pain” in Victim Impact Statement
While entering the guilty plea, Joran offered an apology to Natalee’s family.
“I would like to say that I’m no longer that person I was back then,” he said, according to a court transcript obtained by Oxygen. “Today, I have given my heart over to Jesus Christ and he strengthens me through all these proceedings now.”
For Beth, the hearing also gave her an opportunity to finally confront her daughter’s attacker.
“Joran, for 18 years you denied killing my daughter Natalee,” she said in court. “Your lies, your manipulation, your taunting us with fake news interviews and wild stories of what happened to her have cost indescribable pain to my family and to me, and the grief extends deep into my soul.”
“Natalee would be 36 years old now. And I think about what kind of doctor she would have become,” she continued. “She would be married; have children, my grandchildren. But Joran destroyed all of this, destroyed all of this for my family. You terminated her potential. You terminated her potential, her dreams, and her possibilities when you bludgeoned her to death in 2005.”
Where is Joran van der Sloot Today?
Still, Beth considers her daughter’s case closed.
“We had accomplished the unimaginable feat of having Joran face a U.S. court,” Beth said through tears in the Netflix documentary. “I never could have imagined that that would really happen. Huge day…It’s hard to believe it happened.”