18 October 2023
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — Natalee Holloway died on a beach in Aruba after being hit in the head with a cinderblock by Joran van der Sloot, the suspect in her killing detailed in new court documents.
On Wednesday, van der Sloot pleaded guilty to wire fraud and extortion in a case involving Holloway’s family. The 36-year-old Dutch man is not charged in Holloway’s death, but admitted to killing her as part of the plea deal for those other crimes.
Holloway went missing during a high school graduation trip with classmates. She was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot. He was questioned in the disappearance but was never prosecuted. A judge declared Holloway dead, but her body has never been found.
As part of his plea, van der Sloot took part in a polygraph test where he discussed what happened to Holloway in the early morning hours of May 30, 2005.
In the testimony, a transcript of which was released Wednesday, van der Sloot said he and Holloway were walking along the beach near their respective hotels when they started kissing.
“I start–I get her to kiss me again and we start kissing each other. And uh, I starting feeling her up again and she tells me no,” van der Sloot said. “She tells me she doesn’t want me to–feel her up. Uh, I insist. I keep feeling her up either way.”
Van der Sloot then testified that Holloway struck his crotch area with her knee, to which he responded by kicking her in the face. She then fell unconscious to the ground, he said.
“I see a–a huge cinderblock laying on the –on the beach. Uh, I take this and uh, yeah, I-I-I smash her head in with it completely,” he said. “Uh, yeah, her face basically, you know, uh collapses in.”
According to the transcript, a panicked van der Sloot then decided to get rid of Holloway’s body by dragging her into the ocean.
“Uh, I walk up uh, up to about my knees into the ocean and I push her off into–into the–into the sea,” he said. “Uhm, and uhm, yeah, after that I–I get out. I–I walk home.”
Over the years, however, van der Sloot has told several different stories about what happened to Holloway. In a Fox News interview he gave in 2008, he told Greta van Susteren that he had sold Holloway into sexual slavery. In 2010, German news company RTL released a report that van der Sloot had dumped Holloway’s body in a marsh, although prosecutors at the time did not consider the claims credible.
In 2008, Dutch journalist Peter R. de Vries published a story about how he had gotten van der Sloot to confess–albeit by hidden camera–that he killed Holloway when she rebuffed his advances and dumped her in the ocean. Van der Sloot later denied this, claiming he was lying to de Vries.
Despite this confession, it is unlikely that van der Sloot will be charged with Holloway’s murder. In Aruba, the statute of limitations for homicide is 12 years.
Van der Sloot is also serving a prison sentence for the murder of Stephany Flores, whom he killed in 2010 in Peru on the fifth anniversary of Holloway’s death.
Van der Sloot will be eligible for release in Peru in June 2043.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.