The Dutch national who confessed to killing Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway back in 2005 likely won’t face charges for her murder.
Joran van der Sloot, 36, admitted to authorities that he killed Holloway and dumped her body in the ocean after she refused his sexual advances. He made the admission as part of a plea agreement relating to his extortion of Holloway’s mother, Beth, back in 2010.
Aruba, where the crime occurred, has a 12-year statute of limitations on murder, which ran out in 2017. The U.S. doesn’t have the jurisdiction to try van der Sloot, CNN reported.
The Aruba public prosecutor’s office told the Associated Press that it was not immediately clear whether van der Sloot would face charges and that the case is still open.
Ben Grunwald, a professor at the Duke University School of Law, told CNN that it is likely van der Sloot agreed to confess to Holloway’s murder to get the 20-year sentence for extortion to run concurrently with his murder conviction in Peru for killing Stephany Flores in 2010.
“I imagine he didn’t give up the confession for free,” Grunwald told the outlet. “I was a little surprised to see he got the concurrent, so I thought that might be what he got in exchange for the confession.”
Shortly after van der Sloot pleaded guilty on Wednesday to extorting Holloway’s mother, Beth, authorities released his taped confession on how he murdered the Alabama teenager.
WARNING: Graphic Content
In the confession, van der Sloot says that Holloway had asked to be taken back to her hotel the night she disappeared, but instead of taking her directly to the hotel, however, he arranged for the pair to get dropped off “a little bit further away from her hotel so we could walk back … and I might still get a chance to be with her.”
The two walked along the beach, van der Sloot said, and he “laid her down,” and the two began kissing. Holloway told him to stop, but he kept trying. He said she “knees me in the crotch,” he added, which enraged him.
“When she knees me in the crotch I get up on the beach and I kick her extremely hard in the face,” he continued.
Holloway was then “laying down unconscious, possibly even dead,” so he found a cinderblock on the beach and “smashed” her head with it. He said he then carried Holloway’s body into the ocean until the water was up to his knees and pushed her out into the sea.
Van der Sloot will be sent back to Peru to carry out the remainder of his 28-year sentence for Flores’ death. An additional 18 years was added to his sentence for trafficking cocaine while in prison, but Peruvian law bars prison sentences over 35 years unless a convict is sentenced to life. This means that van der Sloot will be released from prison in 2045 and will likely be deported to his country of citizenship.
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Two months before he murdered Flores, van der Sloot contacted a legal representative of Holloway’s mother, Beth. Van der Sloot said he would tell Beth where her daughter’s body was and what led to her death if she paid him $25,000 upfront and an additional $225,000 later. John Q. Kelly, a legal representative for Holloway’s family, went to Aruba to meet with van der Sloot and gave him $100, after which Kelly reported the encounter to the FBI. A sting operation was set up to catch van der Sloot, who accepted a $15,000 wire transfer to his bank account and a cash payment of $10,000, all recorded by undercover investigators.
In exchange for the money, van der Sloot told Kelly that his father – a judge – buried Holloway’s body in the foundation of a house. When authorities checked his story, they learned the house hadn’t even been built when Holloway disappeared. Van der Sloot eventually emailed Kelly to admit that he lied.
Instead of arresting van der Sloot then, the FBI allowed him to take the $25,000 and leave for Bogotá, Colombia. He wouldn’t be indicted on the charges for another month, and it wouldn’t be until 2014 that the Peruvian government announced van der Sloot would be extradited to the U.S. to face those charges – in 2023.
Holloway’s body has never been found.