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Joran van der Sloot, the prime suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway, is expected to plead guilty to federal charges connected to an alleged extortion plot against Holloway’s mother.
According to court documents obtained by Birmingham station WVTM 13, van der Sloot, 36, plans to plead guilty to one count of extortion and one count of wire fraud in an Alabama federal court Wednesday, after previously pleading not guilty.
In June, the Dutch national was extradited to Alabama from Peru, where he was serving a 28-year sentence for the murder of 21-year-old Stephany Flores, according to the Associated Press. Flores, a college student, was strangled to death in a Peruvian hotel room five years after Holloway went missing
What happened to Natalee Holloway?
Holloway vanished on May 30, 2005 while on a high school graduation trip with her classmates to the island of Aruba. The 18-year-old never showed up for her flight home. Her peers said she was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot. She was declared legally dead in 2012. Her body has never been found.
In 2010, five years after the Alabama student’s disappearance, van der Sloot sent a series of emails seeking $250,000 from Beth Holloway, the missing woman’s mother, telling her lawyer that, in return, he would disclose the location of her daughter’s body, according to an affidavit.
Beth sent an initial $10,000 in cash to van der Sloot through her lawyer and had another $15,000 wired to van der Sloot’s bank account. According to the book Portrait of a Monster: Joran van der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery, van der Sloot took the lawyer to a house in Aruba, saying Holloway’s body was buried under it, WIAT reported.
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In a later email to the lawyer, van der Sloot said that he fabricated the story about the burial location.
Joran van der Sloot Has Never Been Charged in Natalee Holloway’s Disappearance
A grand jury indicted him in the extortion case in 2010, the New York Post reported. He has not been charged in connection to Holloway’s disappearance.
The Alabama court in which van der Sloot is set to appear in Wednesday is now considering a plea deal that is contingent on the disclosure of details in Holloway’s disappearance.
“It [the plea agreement] was conditioned upon Mr. van der Sloot revealing details of how Natalee died and how her body was disposed of,” Holloway family attorney John Q. Kelly told NBC’s TODAY.
Van der Sloot has been the prime suspect in the Holloway case since her disappearance. Authorities in Aruba arrested and released van der Sloot, and brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, numerous times in 2005 and 2007 in connection to the case, according to CNN.
In Oxygen’s The Disappearance of Natalee Holloway, John Christopher Ludwick claimed he assisted van der Sloot in disposing of Holloway’s body in Aruba. He said that they got rid of Holloway’s remains in a cave in 2010.
Ludwick was stabbed to death in 2018 when he attempted to kidnap a woman in South Florida, Oxygen previously reported.
