Court documents reveal that the man long suspected of killing Alabama young Natalee Holloway has confessed to her murder in graphic detail, nearly two decades after she disappeared in Aruba.
Shortly after entering a guilty plea to extortion and deceiving Holloway’s family on Wednesday in federal court, Joran van der Sloot made his confession public.
He was charged with attempting to offer her mother, Beth Holloway, information regarding the whereabouts of her remains in return for $250,000.
It’s ended. My daughter’s murder is no longer being investigated against Joran van der Sloot. On Wednesday, Beth Holloway declared, “He is the killer.”
She declared, “Natalee’s case is solved after 18 years.” “He eventually confessed to killing Natalee in a proffer.”
A defendant may disclose information concerning a crime they are aware of as part of a plea bargain.
According to an interview transcript with his attorney, Van der Sloot, 36, acknowledged that he killed the teenager on an Aruban beach with a cinder block after she turned down his advances for sex.
Van der Sloot claimed that after he tried “feeling her up,” Holloway kneed him in the groyne, and in retaliation, he kicked her in the face and used the cinder block to smash her.
The transcript of the interview states that he subsequently made the decision to “push her off” into the ocean.
Holloway’s remains are still missing. Her official death was declared by an Alabama judge in 2012.
Van der Sloot was sentenced to 20 years on the federal counts by Judge Anna Manasco in response to the killings of Holloway in 2005 and the Peruvian lady Stephany Flores in 2010—both of whom van der Sloot had previously acknowledged to killing.
Manasco stated on Wednesday, “I have taken into consideration your confession to the brutal murder of Natalee Holloway.”
“You have brutally murdered two beautiful women who refused your advances for sex in separate incidents that happened years apart.”
Having perused van der Sloot’s proposal, the judge declared that Holloway’s remains would never be discovered.
Van der Sloot has been taken into custody several times in relation to Holloway’s demise. Authorities in Aruba later freed him, citing a lack of concrete proof.
He was convicted in 2010 of killing Flores and is presently serving a 28-year prison term in Peru.
According to a sentencing memorandum, van der Sloot was found guilty in 2021 of smuggling cocaine into his jail and was given an extra 18 years in Peru.
The court record adds, “The Defendant is currently scheduled for release from prison in Peru on or about June 10, 2045 (35 years after his original arrest in Peru), because Peruvian law prohibits prison sentences from exceeding a total of 35 years (unless given a life sentence).”
However, in June, Peruvian authorities approved his short-term release to the US so he could answer to allegations of wire fraud and extortion.
Before coming back to the US to serve time for the federal counts, Van der Sloot was supposed to return to Peru to complete his murder term in the Flores case.
However, the plea deal he signed on Wednesday states that his 20-year federal term in the US will run concurrently with his sentence in Peru. Put another way, it doesn’t seem likely that van der Sloot will come back to the US to finish his sentence.
In the US, van der Sloot was charged
Despite the fact that US authorities lack jurisdiction over the criminal inquiry in Aruba, van der Sloot was charged by a federal grand jury in Alabama for allegedly conspiring to sell Holloway’s family information about her remains.
The indictment states that van der Sloot’s strategy was implemented in March through May of 2010.
In June 2010, he was charged with wire fraud and extortion.
On May 30, 2010, in his Peruvian hotel room, van der Sloot murdered Flores, age 21, in the weeks that followed the extortion and indictment.
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