Natalee Holloway 16 years later: Could her killer finally be charged?

It has been 16 years since Natalee Holloway disappeared while on a trip to Aruba. The case was one that shocked the nation and the world. In the decade and a half since her disappearance, we’re still left with little answers as to what happened to Natalee Holloway when she disappeared, never to be seen again. With it, one of the most famous unsolved cases of our time emerged.

But can the Natalee Holloway case be solved? After all, Kristin Smart’s case, which has been investigated since 1996, recently arrested Paul Flores, the main suspect. Could Natalee Holloway’s killer ever be found? Ever since her disappearance in 2005, Holloway’s case isn’t even officially listed as “missing”, but “seeking information”. So could the case ever be solved? 

Natalee Holloway’s potential killer

16 years later, if you ask people interested in the case, then they’ll tell you that they believe Joran van der Sloot was the one who killed Holloway. Currently, he’s serving a 28-year sentence in Peru for the murder of Stephany Flores, who was killed five years to the day that Holloway disappeared. With him were brothers Deepak & Satish Kalpoe, who maintain their innocence. 

In 2008, on the Dutch television show RTL Boulevard, there’s footage of Joran telling a man named Patrick, associated with the show, that he & Natalee had sex on the beach, she started convulsing & died. After which? He and an unnamed friend disposed of her body by tossing her into the ocean. Joran, however, retracted the statement on another show, Pauw & Witteman. 

Later that same year, Joran told Greta Van Susteren that he sold Natalee into sexual slavery—the statement was also retracted. A couple years after that, he was arrested for the murder of Stephany Flores. To this day, the Holloway family remain convinced that he’s Natalee’s killer. Nothing, however, has ever come from this certainty though. 

In the Oxygen series on the case, a friend of Joran’s named John told his roommate that Natalee died after a bad drug reaction from something Joran slipped her. Joran had John help him destroy what was left of Natalee’s bones. Bones were recovered, but the bones were not a match for Natalee’s.  It’s believed that Joran’s father, Paul, helped his son cover up the crime.

Remembering

Speaking with E! News, Natalee Holloway’s father, Dave, said about Joran, “I just can’t believe I went through all that and stood strong with it. For five years it basically consumed me, until [Joran] was convicted and put in jail. Then we started moving away from it . . . thinking, if there’s something else we can do [then we’ll do it].” Sometimes, that’s all the families can do, accept that the killer was convicted of “a” crime. 

Dave has accepted that Joran may never reveal what happened to Natalee or give them the answers that they seek. While Beth, Natalee’s mother & Dave’s ex-wife, has been to see Joran in hopes of getting answers, Dave does not feel the need. He told E! News, “All it did was turn into a bunch of lies, just upped his status as a sociopathic, narcissistic . . . whatever they thrive on.”

At this point in his life, however, Dave has decided to live, “[Y]ou’ve got to decide for yourself, I’ve exhausted what I could do and everything I could do within my means. I have a son and two daughters, and a wife, and our family needs to enjoy life as God planned us to, you know, and we do. You still think about it a lot, what could I have done differently and all this kind of stuff, but I certainly don’t want to put any ammunition or anything in the hands of Joran van der Sloot.”

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Do you think that Natalee Holloway’s killer will ever be brought to justice? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.