I have been interested in True Crime ever since I was 12 years old and I used to read True Crime magazine. I have followed the Natalee Holloway case closely for years. I have often wondered what REALLY happened to her.
Natalee Holloway was an 18-year-old girl from Mountain Brook, Alabama, who vanished on May 30, 2005 on a High School graduation trip to Aruba, a Caribbean country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Natalee had been scheduled to fly home to Alabama on May 30th, but failed to appear for her flight. She was last seen by her classmates outside Carlos’n Charlie’s, a Caribbean chain restaurant and nightclub in Oranjestad, riding in a car with Joran van der Sloot and brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe. When questioned, the three men said they dropped her off at her hotel and denied knowing what had happened to her.
Joran van der Sloot was arrested twice on suspicion of involvement in her disappearance and the Kalpoe brothers were each arrested three times. Due to lack of evidence, the three men were released without charges each time.
The first nationwide news report said that Natalee Holloway was missing, and it was mentioned that this was not the first time that she had missed her plane, coming home from a trip. According to a Fox News report, Natalee had missed her plane twice in the past. The reason that this story made the nationwide news only a day after Natalee vanished is because it happened right after the Runaway Bride was found. The news media obviously thought that this was a copycat case of another runaway. That’s why it was mentioned that she had apparently tried to run away in the past.
Natalee Holloway’s mother, Beth Holloway Twitty, said on the Dr. Phil TV show that, within six hours of hearing of Natalee’s disappearance, she was on a plane to Aruba.
We know, from her statements on other TV shows, that Beth was in a car on the highway, on her way home, when she got a call on her cell phone from a chaperone on the trip. The chaperone had not called the police in Aruba when she learned that Natalee was missing. No, she called Beth Holloway Twitty to report that her daughter was missing. Why did the chaperone call Natalee’s mother, rather than the police? Did the chaperone have reason to suspect that Natalee was a runaway? If she thought that Natalee had been kidnapped, wouldn’t the chaperone have called the Aruban police so that they could get on the case right away?
When Beth got the call, she started driving home at 120 miles per hour and while she was driving, she called the local police to ask for a police escort.
Why was Beth Holloway Twitty so hell-bent on getting to Aruba? Did she think that she could find the kidnapper herself? Or did she think that she could find Natalee and bring her home before she did something foolish — like getting married? Natalee was supposedly planning to attend college and then medical school. Did Natalee really want to spend years learning to be a doctor? Or was this her mother’s idea? Natalee’s behavior in Aruba did not appear to be that of a girl planning to be a doctor.
Beth used her cell phone to call her husband, Jug Twitty, while she was driving down the highway at 120 miles per hour. Jug immediately arranged for a private jet, owned by one of his friends, to get Beth to Aruba as soon as possible.
Two of the friends of Beth and Jug accompanied them on the trip. Why did they need to take two friends with them? Were the friends brought along so they could find the kidnapper before he killed Natalee? Or were the friends brought along so that they could storm the crack house where Natalee was probably hiding and drag her out?
Jug mentioned on a TV show that he had spent $38,000 to have a medical helicopter standing by, ready to take Natalee home for treatment as soon as she could be rescued from the crack house, where they suspected that she was in hiding.
As soon as Beth and Jug arrived in Aruba, they contacted people that they knew on the island and began trying to solve the case themselves. Only after they learned the name of the boy, with whom Natalee was last seen, did they contact the police and ask for their assistance. They wanted the police to go with them into Joran’s house, so they could look for Natalee, but the police refused to go inside because there was no probable cause.
Beth and Jug then contacted an acquaintance of theirs in Aruba, who owned a cell phone rental store. Natalee had rented a cell phone and according to the rental store owner, she had made a call to someone in the USA in the early hours of the morning that she went missing. The store owner told this on one of the many TV shows that were covering the case, but nothing more about this phone call was ever reported in the news.
Whom did Natalee call on the night that she disappeared, and why? What was the exact time of the call? We don’t know because this was never mentioned again in all of the TV coverage. I learned later that the store owner is no longer speaking to Beth and Jug; he got disgusted with their behavior and would not have anything more to do with them.
Allegedly, Natalee made a call to her mother while she was in Aruba and told her that she was in love with a tall, blue-eyed Dutch boy. (Joran van der Sloot has brown eyes so maybe there was another Dutch boy involved.) Is this why Beth hopped on a private jet, six hours after she heard that Natalee was missing? Was there another Dutch boy that Natalee was seeing on the island? We don’t know because Beth has never been confronted with these questions, as far as I know.
Male DNA was found on Natalee’s toothbrush in her hotel room. It was tested and it turned out to be the DNA of someone other than Joran or the Kalpoe brothers. Whose DNA was it? We don’t know because the DNA was never mentioned again. Obviously, Natalee either had another boy in her room, or she had oral sex with a boy and then brushed her teeth. Were any of the male students on the trip tested for a DNA match? I don’t know because this subject was totally dropped.
While she was in Aruba, Beth supposedly received a message that Natalee was being held at a crack house and the kidnappers were demanding $4000 for her release. Jug quickly raised $4000 from 8 of his friends who were on the island by this time. Beth and Jug and their friends then went to the crack house, but when they saw how seedy it looked, they called the police. The police came in and the kidnappers were scared off.
Two witnesses allegedly reported that they saw Natalee making a copy of her passport in a local store in Aruba. As every veteran traveler knows, a person should always make a copy of his or her passport, so that in case the passport is lost or stolen, he or she can get back into the USA, using the copy.
There were plenty of witnesses who saw what happened in the days before Natalee disappeared. But the students on the trip were instructed by Beth Holloway Twitty not to talk. The students were never questioned by the Aruban police. When the police asked to talk to the students, Beth would not allow this. She wanted the FBI to question the students. Of course, the Aruban police could not accept this because they must follow Dutch laws and Dutch law does not allow for a foreign country to take over a police case. Why didn’t Beth want the students to talk?
The students did a little bit of talking on their own, and their comments were reported on various Internet blogs. The students say that Natalee was drinking every day, from morning til night, starting with her first drink at breakfast. The students say that Joran was playing in a poker tournament, along with his father, and minding his own business when Natalee approached him and introduced herself.
Natalee was caught on a surveillance video as she walked into a casino in Aruba one night. She was all alone as she walked in to join the other Mountain Brook girls who were sitting at a bar with Joran. I thought that this was very strange. What teen-age girl goes out on her own on a High School graduation trip? Where had she been while the other girls were hanging out together? The video also showed that Joran paid no attention to her. He was talking to the other girls. It is very clear that Natalee approached Joran, not the other way around. Was she looking for someone to help her escape?
The students say that Natalee invited Joran to come to Carlos’n Charlie’s that night. They say that Natalee approached Deepak Kalpoe, when the bar was closing that night and asked if she could DRIVE his car. Where did she want to go? Did she have an arrangement to meet her lover, the guy whose DNA was on her toothbrush? Or was she going to meet someone who would help her escape from her controlling mother?
Natalee had a ground-floor hotel room that overlooked the beach. When Joran allegedly left her on the beach, she could have easily walked down the beach to her room. There were three other girls staying in the room with her. When she didn’t come back to the hotel room, the other girls packed up her suitcase and took it down to the lobby where the luggage was put in a van and taken to the airport. Why didn’t the roommates report to the chaperone that Natalee was missing? Did they know that she had planned to stay behind to get away from her mother?
One student said that a group of the students saw Natalee in Deepak’s car when they were stopped at a traffic light. They tried to persuade her to get out of the car, but Natalee ripped off her halter top, leaned out of the car window, and flashed her breasts. Apparently she wasn’t wearing a bra, which might be why Deepak said that she dressed like a slut and acted like a slut.
Witnesses who were at Carlos’n Charlie’s that night said that Natalee approached Joran and asked him to dance; they said that Natalee was dancing “provocatively.” Witnesses also said that Natalee was lying on the bar so that customers could take “jelly shots” from her navel. She invited Joran to take a “jelly shot” off her body. Witnesses also said that Natalee knew the bartender by his first name and that she was drinking rum straight out of the bottle that night.
All of this points to the fact that Natalee was wild and crazy. She was not an innocent little girl who was kidnapped, raped and killed by Joran and the Kalpoe brothers. Joran told a reporter from the National Enquirer that Natalee told him that she hated her mother and that her mother was like Hitler. Joran didn’t know that he was talking to a reporter at the time. Did Natalee want to get away from her mother so badly that she arranged to disappear while on her senior trip? That is apparently what the police in Aruba thought and that is why they were reluctant to arrest Joran and the Kalpoe brothers.
Allegedly, Paulus van der Sloot received a letter from someone purporting to be Natalee in September 2004. The writer asked that he hold the letter until a certain time. In the letter, Natalee or someone claiming to be Natalee said that she was pregnant and that she was hiding in Arkansas until the baby was born. Allegedly, she sent a copy of this letter to Beth Holloway Twitty and to the FBI. She said that the letter could be tested for her DNA on the envelope and the stamp, and for her fingerprints on the letter to prove that it was sent by Natalee Holloway.
Paulus turned the letter over to the Aruban police in early December 2004, and the letter was allegedly sent to Holland for testing.
If the letter was a fake, wouldn’t this hoax have been all over the TV? Why have we heard nothing about the letter? Is it because the letter was real? She sent the letter to Paulus because she felt sorry for how his family had suffered because of her. Is this why Paulus van der Sloot was cleared in the case?
If the letter was sent to the FBI, did they test it and find out that it was real? We don’t know because Beth Holloway controlled all of the news coverage of the case and we were only allowed to hear her chanting over and over again that her daughter was raped and killed; we were not allowed to hear any exculpatory evidence that would show that Natalee might still be alive.
On a Dr. Phil show about the case, several years ago, I was appalled to hear attorney John Q. Kelly say, regarding Joran and the Kalpoe brothers: “put them in jail and let them rot” until they tell what happened to Natalee.
Aruba does not have the Fourth Amendment rights that we have in America; according to their laws, a “person of interest” can be arrested and held in prison without charges for several months. After a certain time has elapsed, they must be let go unless charges are filed against them. Joran and the Kalpoe brothers were held in prison for the maximum time and after that, they could not be put in prison again unless there was enough evidence to charge them. John Q. Kelly should have known this.
Kelly also stated, on the TV show, that the three boys should be charged with “obstruction of justice.” There is no such crime in Aruba and he should have known this. Under Aruban law, a “person of interest” is allowed to lie because that is the only recourse they have when they are questioned by the police for 16 hours a day without access to a lawyer.
On January 12, 2012, at the request of the Holloway family, an Alabama judge declared Natalee legally dead.
Joran van der Sloot is currently serving a 28-year prison sentence for another murder, to which he confessed. You can read the latest news about him here.
