Beth Holloway can still recall the moment she understood that her daughter, Natalee Holloway, was probably gone forever.
Beth, who recounts her story in the Netflix docuseries Taken: Natalee Holloway, was in Aruba in the days following Natalee’s disappearance. As she desperately searched the island for clues, she passed a church lined with white crosses.
In that instant, Beth told People, she knew her daughter “was with God.”
That realization also inspired a promise to Natalee—one that launched Beth’s decades-long search for the truth.
“That was my first pledge,” she said, “to find out what happened to her.”
Nearly 20 years would pass before she received answers.
“It gives insight into what the human spirit can accomplish,” Beth said. “I never laid my sword down. Never.”
What Happened to Natalee Holloway?
Natalee disappeared on the final night of a senior trip to Aruba celebrating her high school graduation.
When Beth learned that her daughter was missing from her home in Mountain Brook, Alabama, she immediately boarded a flight to Aruba.
After arriving, she learned from Natalee’s friends that the 18-year-old had last been seen leaving a nightclub in a car with Joran van der Sloot and two of his friends.
Beth eventually confronted Joran outside a hotel and demanded that he “give her back now.” The teenager responded dismissively, “What do you want me to do?”
“He had no sympathy, no empathy,” Beth told People. “I mean, he’s just driven by his own bodily needs—food, sex, drugs—and that’s it. It’s repulsive.”
She told NBC News that she knew immediately Joran “knows what happened to her.”
Although Joran was arrested only days after Natalee vanished, he was later released because of a lack of evidence.
Beth, however, continued pressing for justice.
“I was determined by hope, and I was driven by love, and the love for my daughter, and to find out the answers to what happened to her, and I was acting on faith,” she told the outlet. “And when you do those three things, you can accomplish a lot.”
Joran van der Sloot Confessed to Killing Natalee Holloway
Beth’s search for answers reached a turning point in 2023, when Joran confessed to killing Natalee as part of a guilty plea to federal extortion and wire fraud charges.
According to court documents obtained by Oxygen, Joran had previously attempted to extort $250,000 from Beth in exchange for information about her daughter’s whereabouts. He ultimately gave her false information, leading to the federal charges.
In exchange for a 20-year sentence to be served concurrently with an existing murder sentence in Peru for killing Stephany Flores Ramirez, Joran agreed to explain how Natalee died. According to the docuseries, he told authorities that Natalee resisted when he tried to take their romantic encounter further. He said he kicked her in the head and then killed her with a cement block on the beach.
After learning what had happened, Beth told NBC News that it felt as if “the world has been lifted off me.”
“I spent 18 years in the dark. I just couldn’t see it. I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t hear it, and so I’d waited 18 years, and it’s horrible that that’s the news I get,” she said. “Families need to know the answers, no matter how brutal they are.”
Where is Beth Holloway Now?
After taking nine years away from work to focus on her daughter’s case, Beth returned to her job as a school speech pathologist in 2014.
She continues to work and also serves as director of the Safe Travels Foundation.
Beth is now a grandmother who enjoys spending time with her son and two grandchildren. Natalee, however, remains a constant presence in her thoughts.
For the past two years, Beth has worked with Netherlands-based attorneys Royce de Vries and Annemiek van Spanje in hopes that Joran, a Dutch native, could eventually face prosecution for Natalee’s murder in the Netherlands.
“I’ve been working busy behind the scenes, got the murder complaint,” she told Netflix’s Tudum. “And now we’re working on, hopefully, murder charges. So I’ve been busy, but one step at a time.”
Evert Boerstra, a press officer for the Public Prosecution Office Amsterdam, told Oxygen that the case file is “currently being reviewed” in the Netherlands.
Beth still kisses Natalee’s senior portrait each day. The photograph hangs in her bedroom.
“Sometimes I tell her, ‘We’re keeping up the fight,’ or ‘Doing good work today, girl,’” she told People. “I’d like that to be her legacy. We all travel so differently now because Natalee taught us how.”