Everything You Need To Know About The Disappearance Of Natalee Holloway, The Gorgeous American Teen Last Seen On Vacation In Aruba
16 years ago, Natalee Holloway went missing while on vacation in the Caribbean. Back in May of 2005, Natalee had just graduated from high school. She was 18-years-old. She was an excellent student: part of the National Honor Society and she also was very involved in the school’s dance team.
Natalee dreamed of being a doctor and had been accepted into the University of Alabama to study pre-med on a full-ride scholarship. However, her dreams were tragically cut short before she could make it there. She would never return home from her vacation celebration.
Natalee’s strange disappearance made international headlines. There was even a movie made about her in 2009. We’re all still left with more questions than answers about what really happened to this beautiful American teenager who vanished while on vacation, but here is everything you need to know, below.
Facebook; pictured above Natalee smiles big while wearing a sequined outfit
Natalee was born in Clinton, Mississippi, along with her younger brother Matthew. After their parents divorced, their mom Beth raised them alone before remarrying a well-known businessman from Alabama. Beth moved her children to Mountain Brook, Alabama to live with her and her new husband, George Twitty.
Mountain Brook is located just outside Birmingham and is well known for being an affluent and safe area to live. Natalee attended the local school district, where Beth worked and graduated with honors from Mountain Brook High School.
Wikipedia; pictured above is Natalee’s senior photo from her yearbook
Natalee and 124 of her fellow classmates decided to take a trip to celebrate their graduation from high school. So, they took a trip to Aruba for a five-day vacation and left on Thursday, May 26th, 2005.
If true crime defines your free time, this is for you: join Chip Chick’s True Crime Tribe.
They had seven adult chaperones with them on the trip, and nobody suspected anything would go wrong with several reliable adults to help supervise so many 18-year-olds (and a handful of 17-year-olds).
Bob Plummer, a teacher at the high school, went on the trip as a chaperone and he later told the media that all of the chaperones met with every single student every single day to check-in and make sure they were all ok.
The organizer of the trip, Jodi Bearman, later stated that the job of the chaperones though was not to keep up with every single move each student made. How could 7 adults stay on top of nearly 130 students at all times? It simply wasn’t possible. Given that pretty much all of the students were legally adults, it was up to them to make their own choices.
Gerold Dompig, the Police Commissioner who was in charge of the investigation from 2005 to 2006, said in a statement that the students on the trip spent their time engaging in:
Facebook; Natalee is pictured above in a candid moment smiling wide
“Wild partying, a lot of drinking, lots of room switching every night. We know the Holiday Inn told them they weren’t welcome next year. Natalee, we know, she drank all day every day. We have statements she started every morning with cocktails—so much drinking that Natalee didn’t show up for breakfast two mornings.”
Two of Natalee’s friends and classmates on the trip, Claire Fierman and Liz Cain, said that Natalee really did drink excessively every day. On the last day of the trip, Monday, May 30th, around 1:30 in the morning was the last time anyone saw Natalee again.
Classmates of Natalee’s say that they saw her leave a local bar and get into a silver car with several young men, but these men were not people they knew. They were not people they had gone to school with.
Facebook; in the photo above Natalee smiles next to her mom while wearing her cap and gown from graduation
Later that day, Natalee was supposed to be on a flight back home to Alabama. She never showed up at the airport, though. She never checked into her flight.
She never got onto the bus that was scheduled to take her and her classmates back to the airport. And that was when the chaperones knew something was wrong. She was the only student to not be there ready for the trip home.
Natalee’s luggage was fully packed back in her room at the Holiday Inn and her cellphone and passport were found along with her belongings. The chaperones talked to Natalee’s roommates and brought her stuff to the hotel lobby, still hoping she would just show up late.
Pixel-Shot – stock.adobe.com
Nobody could find Natalee, but they did find her things packed and ready in her hotel room…
Natalee never showed up. As soon as Natalee’s mom Beth was alerted to the fact that nobody had seen Natalee and she missed her flight home, she flew down to Aruba with Natalee’s stepdad on a private jet.
tonktiti – stock.adobe.com
Beth, Natalee’s mom, immediately flew down to Aruba with Natalee’s stepdad as soon as she got the news that her daughter had disappeared on her trip
Beth proceeded to stay at the Holiday Inn, in the very same room Natalee had stayed in that week. 4 hours after Beth arrived in Aruba, she met with the Aruban police. And she had the name of the last person Natalee was seen with: 17-year-old Joran van der Sloot.
Joran was Dutch, and an honors student himself. He was going to school at the International School of Aruba and also living on the island. How did Beth have his name?
The Holiday Inn’s night manager had recognized Joran on the hotel’s surveillance camera footage. Apparently, Joran was well known to hang out near the hotel picking up tourists. Beth and her husband proceeded to go to Joran’s home with two police officers. And when they knocked on the door, Joran was home. He also had a friend over, Deepak Kalpoe, who was in the car with him the night he was seen with Natalee.
When he was asked about Natalee and where she was, Joran immediately denied knowing her. He then decided to change his story.
Facebook; Natalee beams in the photo above
Joran said that he and Deepak took Natalee in the car to Arashi Beach to an area known as California Lighthouse. They claimed that Natalee wanted to see some sharks, which is why they brought her there.
Joran then said that he and Deepak dropped Natalee back off at the Holiday Inn at 2 in the morning. As she got out of the car, she fell to the ground, and he saw a man dressed as a security guard come over to her. Joran admitted he isn’t sure what happened next because he drove off.
Pictured above is a poster giving information on Natalee in the hopes of locating her
Aruban authorities wasted no time beginning to look for Natalee. There were even hundreds of volunteers from Aruba and America that helped locate her, and Dutch marines joined in as well. They combed the shorelines. They searched the hotel, and the room Natalee stayed in.
They looked through Deepak’s car, and even found something they thought was blood…but after they tested it but it came back as another substance.
They checked security cameras in the Holiday Inn’s lobby, but Natalee was not on any of them. It turned out she was able to get to her room through another entrance and didn’t have to go that way.
Over $3 million dollars ended up being spent on the hunt for Natalee, or her body, but nothing turned up. She had truly vanished into thin air. Without a trace.
In a later interview with Dateline, Beth said that as soon as she got the phone call saying Natalee wasn’t on her flight, “I knew instantly when I received that call that just from Natalee’s history and character and just her record, I knew instantly that she’d either been kidnapped or murdered. There was no hesitation. Absolutely none. Absolutely none.”
And then on June 5th, it looked like the police had found several suspects. They arrested Abraham Jones and Nick John. The two men both worked as security guards at a nearby hotel that had been closed for renovations at the time Natalee disappeared.
Wikimedia Commons; pictured above is a search party for Natalee in front of the California Lighthouse in Aruba
Abraham and Nick were arrested on the suspicion of kidnapping and murder. Given that Joran and Deepak both said they saw a security guard approach Natalee, the police figured they were onto something making the arrests. They were likely suspects.
Unlike in America, in Aruba, the police are able to arrest someone if they seriously suspect they are involved in a crime. Several days later, on June 9th, they made several more arrests.
Aruba Police Force; pictured above is Joran van der Sloot’s mugshot from when he was first arrested by the police
This time, the police arrested Joran and his friend Deepak, along with Deepak’s brother, who was also there the last night Natalee was seen. The police had been monitoring the emails, phone calls, and texts messages of the three young men, and they had been keeping close tabs on their whereabouts too. Natalee’s family thought the case was now closed.
Both of the security guards were then released on June 18th. One of the men said that Deepak’s brother had told him they dropped Joran and Natalee off at a beach. They never took her back to the Holiday Inn. That beach was searched, but Natalee wasn’t found there.
The police then arrested Joran’s father and a local DJ, but later released the two of them. Now, Natalee’s family was offering a million-dollar reward for any information leading to her discovery.
Facebook; Natalee is pictured above on the far left with some of her friends while at the beach
Weeks started to fly by, and it seemed like Natalee would never be found. It now seemed like this case was not really closed after all…
And then, the months started to fly by. 10 months after Natalee went missing, in March of 2006, witnesses came forward to Aruba police saying they saw Natalee drinking wildly. They also said she had drugs on her.
Wikimedia Commons; pictured above is Carlos’n Charlie’s, the place Natalee was last seen before getting into a car with Joran and his friends
Aruba’s Deputy Chief of Police, Gerald Dompig, said to 48 Hours Mystery that “We feel strongly that she probably went into shock or something happened to her system with all the alcohol—maybe on top of that, other drugs, which either she took or they gave her— and that she… just collapsed.”
The police sincerely believed Natalee was no longer alive at this point in time. They still never gave up looking for her though. While the search continued for Natalee, Joran changed his story to the police several times. He was also arrested and then released by the police several times, as they didn’t have enough evidence to hold him.
Joran decided to travel the world. He was happy to have been made famous by all the attention Natalee’s case was getting, and he openly talked to the media.
He even did an interview with Peter de Vries, a crime reporter, in 2008, which ended with Joran throwing wine on him when asked why the public should believe anything that came out of his mouth.
Peter managed to get Joran on a hidden camera admitting to a friend that slept with Natalee and she became unconscious. “All of a sudden, what she did was like in a movie,” Joran said in the video.
FBI; pictured above is a photo of Natalee the FBI circulated to the public in hopes of finding her
“She was shaking, it was awful… I prodded her, there was nothing.” He then went on to say on camera that he had a friend of his take out his boat and dump Natalee’s body in the water. After this video was made public, Joran phoned up another media outlet saying that he only told Peter what he thought he wanted him to say.
Regardless, Joran was definitely looking like the one who had everything to do with Natalee’s disappearance. In early 2010, Joran’s dad suddenly died of a heart attack, and he then reached out to Natalee’s family.
He sent an email to her family’s attorney saying, “I want to come clean. My father’s dead now. I have nothing to hide. I want to help Natalee’s family, but at a price, you know, for a quarter-million dollars…I will tell you what happened to Natalee, where she is now so you can help Beth bring her home.”
vrstudio – stock.adobe.com
Natalee’s family attorney flew back to Aruba after Joran reached out to him saying he will give him information in exchange for money
John Kelly, the attorney for Natalee’s family, flew to Aruba to meet with Joran. He agreed to give him $25,000 in exchange for the information he had, but not before alerting the FBI that Joran was trying to extort them.
The FBI worked with John to get Joran the money, so that way they could catch him committing wire fraud and arrest him for something. After John gave Joran the $25,000, Joran told him to go to a house located near the Aruba Racquet Club.
Joran told him that Natalee’s remains were inside the foundation of the house, which had been poured pretty recently.
Joran also told John that he had gotten mad at Natalee and hit her in the back of the head, and she ended up bleeding to death. He said he then asked his dad to help hide her body on the beach, but they later moved her to the foundation of the home.
Unfortunately, Joran was not arrested for wire fraud. Authorities also said Joran’s story about hiding Natalee’s body wasn’t credible, so they couldn’t arrest him for that. To top it all off, the house he claimed he hid her in was not under construction in recent years, so there was no way she was inside the foundation.
Facebook; Natalee is pictured above sitting down on a chair with a big smile on her face
John tried to keep in touch with Joran despite all of this, and he eventually convinced him to turn himself in. Instead, Joran took a flight to Peru and ended up murdering a young college student…
shipwell – stock.adobe.com
Joran and Stephany played poker together at a casino in Peru, which is where they met
21-year-old Stephany Flores met Joran at a local casino, and they played poker with one another for a few hours. She then cashed in a few of her chips before she followed Joran back to his room at the hotel he was staying at.
The next morning around 9 a.m. Joran left and was seen alone on security footage. Stephany was found in his room. She was dead. Stephany had been beaten so badly her neck had snapped in the process.
That’s what Joran was capable of doing. When the police finally caught up with him, he claimed Stephany was online looking up information on Natalee’s disappearance, so he killed her in a fit of rage. A psychological evaluation performed on Joran states that “He reflects a certain dominance over the opposite sex. He doesn’t value the female role.”
Joran surprisingly pleaded guilty to murdering Stephany and claimed he did it because he was undergoing “extreme psychological trauma” after the investigation into Natalee’s disappearance. He is currently serving a 28 1/2 year sentence in jail down in Peru.
As for Natalee? She has yet to get the kind of justice Stephany did, and Joran has yet to be charged with her disappearance due to lack of evidence. He also has not told the police where she really is.
More About:True Crime
Read This Next
