Natalee Holloway 10 years later: New facts, and doubts, about the case's future

Miami University senior Dani Kaufman got the "Natalee Holloway talk" when she left for Spring Break on the idyllic island of Aruba.

"We all pretty much got the similar speech," the Ohio native said. "Stick with each other, don't leave with anyone you don't know. Don't go back to anyone's room. Watch your drinks. Don't drink too much."

Ten years after Mountain Brook's Natalee Holloway vanished on a high school trip to Aruba - 10 years after news of her disappearance spread like wildfire across cable news channels and the world - Holloway has become both a point of reference and a point of contention in this island nation.

Police and politicians and government offices in Aruba simply will not talk much about Holloway these days. The topic is largely off limits, presumably because Aruban officials believe the American media and the Holloway family unfairly criticized island police and by doing so threatened Aruban tourism.

But Americans like Susan Miles - she and her family stepped off a Carnival cruise ship in Aruba in March - cannot set foot on shore without thinking about Holloway. Miles' mother, Mickey Arsenault, even asked her tour bus driver to point out the Holloway sites such as the Holiday Inn where she stayed before that fateful night.

"It's just such a huge blown up story for such a long time, even anywhere you live," Miles said. "And you just thought of the family, and the poor girl that just went on Spring Break, and you think of your own kids traveling and I think people are a little bit more nervous to send their kids on a vacation by themselves anymore."

But through it all - the tourism and the officials' denials, the family's continued search for Holloway's body and the arrest of the prime suspect on unrelated charges - the mystery of the Holloway story continues to unfold. And to confound.

"For us, the case is still open and will remain open until we find out more concretely what happened to this girl,'' said Jossy Mansur, owner and editor of the Papiamento-language newspaper Diario in Aruba. "I want some kind of definite closure in the case and that Beth would finally, finally have some peace of mind by taking whatever is left of her back to Alabama and have her buried there. It's very sad for a mother to lose a child like this."

Mansur, an Aruban native and prominent businessman who has written two dictionaries for the Papiamento language and who has written a history of Aruba, among other books, said the government doesn't share his newspaper's sentiments of solving the Holloway case and bringing charges against longtime prime suspect Joran van der Sloot.

Van der Sloot and Surinamese brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, reportedly the last people to see Natalee alive, were arrested multiple times in Natalee's disappearance, but were always released without being charged. The Kalpoes continue to live and work in Aruba. Van der Sloot is serving 28 years in prison in Peru for the murder of student Stephany Flores, who was killed in van der Sloot's Peru hotel room on the fifth anniversary of Holloway's disappearance. He also faces charges in Alabama for extorting $25,000 from Beth Holloway.

"They were let go because all of the judges are Dutch people and the Dutch stick together,'' said the 80-year-old Mansur, who graduated from Alabama's Spring Hill College in 1954. "For them, the case is closed. It will not be reopened. If you ask them officially, they say, 'Oh it's open and we're waiting for new information to come in. Nonsense. They're not even trying."

Aruban Chief Prosecutor Eric Olthof, appointed to the position in 2014, disagrees. "What is important to know is that the Holloway case has not been closed,'' Olthof told AL.com. "As I said before: If new tips and leads, that are sufficiently concrete and well-founded, surface in the near future, they will be investigated by the police and Prosecutor's Office in the hope to finally conclude this case and bring the suspect or suspects to justice."

"One Happy Island"

Aruba, a tiny Dutch Caribbean island about 15 miles off the coast of Venezuela, is 20 miles long and six miles wide. With a population of about 110,000, it is just slightly larger than Hoover or Tuscaloosa. The capital, Oranjestad, is about the size of Alabaster and is a port city that brings droves of tourists into the downtown area several days a week via the massive cruise ships docked nearby.

Passengers arrive on dry land to find blocks and blocks of brightly-colored store fronts interspersed with the city's government buildings. The high-end Louis Vuitton department store is just a stone's throw from Parlamento Di Aruba. In between the two, rows of kiosks hawk beachwear, shell jewelry and tattered Aruban license plates.

Northwest of the city's hustle and bustle is the 10-mile stretch of beaches. On one end is the low-rise hotel district, mostly one-and two- story beachfront rooms and villas. Further northwest is the high-rise district, with hotels ranging from the Holiday Inn to the Ritz-Carlton. It's one big playground - white-tablecloth cafes, casinos, parasailing, jet skiing, snorkeling and a Hooter's restaurant. With its white, sandy beaches, translucent waters and constant trade winds, Aruba boasts the slogan "One Happy Island" and is a vacation destination now for nearly 1 million visitors a year.

Among those visitors in May 2005 was 18-year-old Natalee and 130-plus of her graduated classmates from Mountain Brook High School. For several days, the teens - of legal drinking age in Aruba - sunned and snorkeled during the day, and at night donned their sundresses for dinner and partying at Carlos' N Charlie's, which at the time was located in downtown Oranjestad, a decent cab ride from the high-rise district. The group often ended up at Excelsior Casino, which was, and still is, connected to the Holiday Inn where the Mountain Brook group stayed.

On their last night, Natalee and her friends met van der Sloot, who lived with his family in the nearby Montana neighborhood and attended the Aruba International School. She was last seen about 1 a.m. getting into a gray Honda with van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers as they left Carlo 'N Charlie's.

Natalee was scheduled to fly home on May 30 but failed to show up when the group met in the lobby to leave for their flight.

"That morning I was checking roll and she wasn't there,'' said Bob Plummer, a Mountain Brook teacher, coach and trip chaperone. "I was thinking, 'She's here somewhere' and I continued thinking that, but as more days went by, it was apparent something bad had happened."

Natalee's mother, Beth Holloway, and then-stepfather, Jug Twitty, and a group of friends flew via private jet to Aruba the day Holloway missed her flight. Within four hours of landing in Aruba, the Twittys gave Aruban police van der Sloot's name. Plummer, who stayed behind in Aruba to wait for Natalee's return, recalls that the police were sure she was off having fun and would soon show up on her own. In her 2005 yearbook, Natalee used a line from Lynyrd Skynyrd's song ''Free Bird'' for her senior quote: ''If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? For I must be traveling on now, there's too many places I haven't seen.''

Plummer said he and others assured Aruban authorities that Natalee wasn't the type of person to run off and leave everyone wondering and worrying. "They pretty much dragged their feet from the beginning,'' he said, "and botched the whole thing."

The Twittys and their friends, with two Aruban policemen, went to the van der Sloot home looking for Holloway. Van der Sloot initially denied knowing Natalee Holloway, but later said they drove to the California Lighthouse area of Arashi Beach because Natalee wanted to see sharks, before dropping her off at her hotel around 2 a.m. Van der Sloot said Natalee fell down as she got out of the car but refused his help. He said she was then approached by a man in a black shirt similar to those worn by security guards as the young men drove away.

On June 1, 2005, at 9:41 p.m., a day after Natalee Holloway disappeared, Fox News Network was the first to take the story national. ''Tonight, a frantic search is under way for a missing Alabama girl,'' Greta Van Susteren said, and her less-than-one-minute report began an onslaught of national media attention. All networks joined in within a day and have persisted in coverage of every development and emerging conspiracy theory in the decade that has followed.
In Aruba, searches for Natalee began almost immediately. Hundreds of volunteers from Aruba joined in. During the first days of the search, the Aruban government gave thousands of civil servants the day off to help in the search. Dozens of Dutch marines conducted an extensive search of the shoreline.

Back in Mountain Brook, friends and family donned yarn bracelets and residents around the city tied yellow ribbons to mailboxes. ''We're hopeful that she's going to come home soon,'' Frances Ellen Byrd, one of Natalee's friends who was on the trip with her, said in the days following Natalee's disappearance. Even strangers joined in expressing their concern. The local Publix supermarket, where Natalee's younger brother, Matt, worked, donated food to the family and to one of the several prayer vigils. The municipal government tied a yellow ribbon in front of City Hall. Residents of the close-knit suburb, known for its safety, also put up yellow ribbons and said the news of Holloway's disappearance hit home.

In the weeks, months and years that followed, there would be multiple arrests, releases, twists and turns, ups and downs, confessions and recantations, but no resolution.

"Murder in Paradise"

Almost instantly, Mansur became the face of the case and of the island. Within a day of Natalee's disappearance, he was approached and made the rounds on the American media talk circuit. "It was Murder in Paradise. I was being interviewed by Larry King, Bill O'Reilly, Greta Van Susteren, Nancy Grace, all of them,'' he said. "I'm not going to hide from it or tell you things I don't know for a fact. I know for a fact this girl on the night that she disappeared, they were partying, they went to Carlos 'N Charlie's, and there came a time afterwards the she got down with a couple of boys that she met at the casino."

"And the she made a very big mistake of stepping into a car with three complete strangers she knew nothing about,'' he said. "They were supposed to go watch sharks at midnight. Can you imagine? You can't go shark seeing at night. Not even in the day. If you are near the coast, you would have to throw some kind of bait to drawn them in."

Mansur said the information he has received consistently throughout the years is that Natalee, van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers never went to the beach. "The information I have, and very few people know this, is that they did not go to the beach,'' he said. "They took Natalee to Joran's apartment. He lived on the same property as his parents, but he lived in an apartment isolated from the main house."

"They took Natalee there. And whatever happened in that apartment happened, but she did not come out of there alive,'' he said. "All this other information that has been floating around for years that she was killed or murdered or whatever on the beach is not true. As far as our information is concerned, she never got to the beach alive. She was in the trunk."

Mansur said they drove to the beach near the Aruba Racquet Club and waited for a friend of van der Sloot's , who dumped the body at sea. "They took her out to sea two or three miles,'' he said. "In Aruba, there is a peculiarity out there because in front of the beaches that run in front of the hotels, there's strong currents that can take anything in no time to the Central American coast, Costa Rica or Panama."

"So they dumped her with some of heavy thing that they pulled out of the trunk of the car, dumped her in the ocean, came back and disappeared,'' he said. "The very next day the investigation began, but it was a half-hearted investigation."
Mansur said van der Sloot's father, Paulus van der Sloot, never achieved his goal of becoming a judge despite several attempts, but he did hold a position of power in the Ministry of Justice. "It so happens that whenever anyone here in Aruba has a complaint against the police for whatever reason, they had to go before Paulus. He handled the police cases, and was very good friends with them,'' Mansur said. "When this happened, and the police knew that Paulus' son was involved, everything began to go wrong."

"There was no real investigation taking place there. They wanted to save the boy as best they could," he said. "I've never spoken about this before, but I know for a fact this is what happened. I have a very good relationship through the newspaper with the police. I had their confidence, and they would tell me things they would not tell out in the open."

Mansur said there are little-known aspects of the investigation. One is that Paulus van der Sloot insisted on surveillance cameras being installed in the interrogation room prior to interviews with his son. "Why? Because they were afraid they would beat him up, slap him, knock him over or whatever. They weren't all his friends, just the police who had been in trouble,'' he said. "I think they saw their own protection also in the cameras."

Secondly, Mansur said, is that the written reports transcribed from the recorded interviews with Joran van der Sloot were altered by Paulus van der Sloot. "He's the one who in his handwriting corrected whatever was dangerous for his son,'' Mansur said. "Very few people know this, but I do because I have copies of all of those documents."

Those police documents, he said, were later destroyed. "Normally they would file them or take them to court,'' he said. "They tore them up. They don't exist."
"To me, it was a cover-up investigation,'' he said.

Prosecutor Olthof can't speak to the past but said his role as chief public prosecutor, he will do everything necessary to solve the case. "I've studied the file and my impression of the case is that very many leads have been investigated by the police, but sadly without result. The media were very interested in the case and were willing to help solve the case,'' he said. "Until the present day, it is unclear what happened on the 30th of May 2005 and who is responsible for the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. Many theories have surfaced in the last couple of years. For the Prosecutor's Office however, the goal is always the truth and finding the truth."

Earlier this month, a man named Jurrien De Jong told Inside Edition that he saw Joran van der Sloot chase Natalee into a small building under construction. He says van der Sloot then reemerged with Holloway in his arms, slammed her body on the floor then made an opening in a crawl space. He has previously told media this building is the Spyglass Tower of the Marriott Hotel in Aruba. "I saw Natalee Holloway on the last night that she was alive. I was the eyewitness," Jurrien De Jong told Inside Edition. "I knew she was dead."

De Jong said he never went to the police because he was involved in illegal activities at the time. He says he has come forward now because of a recent TV report where van der Sloot claims he was part of an undercover operation in which Holloway was buried at sea.

Olthof on Tuesday dismissed De Jong's claims, saying that no construction or building activities were underway at the location that De Jong has specifically pointed out as the spot where Natalee Holloway would have been hidden and/or buried. The foundation of the Spyglass Tower (that still had to be built at the time) and of the staircase of the Spyglass Tower was not in place. "This means that Natalee Holloway could never have been hidden and/or buried there," Olthof said. "This leads to the conclusion that the claims made by Mr. De Jong of what he saw on the night of 30th of May 2005, cannot be correct, and that his testimony, considering the aforementioned, does not add to the solving of this case."

Olthof told AL.com that in the past, the Prosecutor's Office received many tips about the case. "It is only logical that with the passing of the years, the amount of valuable information decreases. At the moment there are no actual tips that are sufficiently concrete and well-founded to justify further investigation,'' he said. "It is a well-known fact that as time progresses, it becomes more and more difficult to gather more evidence. The memory of the witnesses generally decreases also, as the occurrence goes back further in time."

"Nobody Cares About the Case"

Early on, the Aruban people sympathized with the Holloway family, particularly the grieving and distraught Beth Holloway, who stirred controversy with a call for a boycott of Aruba, an effort championed by then-Gov. Bob Riley. "Who would want to go to that nasty island? It's awful,'' she once said.

Aruban government officials complained to the U.S. State Department, with then-Prime Minister Nelson Oduber calling the boycott a "preposterous and irresponsible act." "We are not guerillas. We are not terrorists,'' Oduber said in 2005. "We don't pose a threat to the United States, nor to Alabama."

Beth Holloway later steered from the topic, and said people could decide for themselves. But, many Arubans say, the damage was done. "I don't blame Beth, she is a mom, but you cannot destroy an entire island,'' Patrick Pakel, a television journalist with ATV 15, an Aruba Broadcasting Company, told AL.com during a March interview on the island. "We did everything we could. The investigation took the entire yearly budget. They went millions and millions over. We had people praying, the government gave workers time off to search, and still we got criticized. It was a low-blow."

"Aruba is a safe place,'' Pakel said. "Nobody gets lost, but if they do, we bring in F-16's. I don't think they would do that for me in New York City. The American media was very mean to us. They didn't understand that whatever they felt, we felt too. The mysteries to them were a mystery to us too."

Mansur, who is fond of Beth Holloway and had her to dinner at his home, agreed. "You can't punish the island like that,'' he said. "The people, for one, resented it, because they weren't involved and were as anxious as Beth for the girl to be found."

Arubans know the Holloway case is still a hot-topic among Americans. Nelson "Speed" Andrade, a veteran journalist with Diaro and its companion website, 24ora.com, said he was recently in Miami when a store clerk asked for his identification. Upon seeing he was from Aruba, the conversation immediately turned to Natalee Holloway. "They hear Aruba, they link it to Natalee. The name, nobody's going to forget, but in Aruba, we don't even talk about it. Nobody cares about the case.''

"Tourists will be walking on the beach and find a bone and they call police thinking it is Natalee,'' Andrade said. "The police? If they get something, they check it out but there is nothing. She's gone."

Aruban police did not respond to more than a half-dozen requests for interviews, including an in-person request at the headquarters in the nearby town of Santa Cruz. And aside from the chief prosecutor, no other government official would discuss the case either. "Nobody wants to say anything about it,'' Andrade said.

That's because the case, and the subsequent call for a boycott, did indeed hurt the island, even if it was for a short while for most. In downtown Oranjestad, negative publicity shut down Carlos 'N Charlie's within two years of Natalee's disappearance. The building was literally torn down and rebuilt to look nothing like the original club. It reopened one building over, as Senor Frogs, but still business suffered and Senor Frogs eventually moved to the revamped to shiny, new shopping and dining center in the heart of the high-rise district miles away.

Most downtown business owners said they were too afraid to discuss the case. One shop owner did talk, but wouldn't allow his name used because he said the last time he spoke publicly to the media, he received a chastising telephone call from government officials. "It's almost destroyed me,'' he said. "My business has suffered."

"They want to get rid of the case. They want the case closed,'' Mansur said. "They don't want to hear anything about it. It did its damage to the island at that time, and they live with the thought that they don't want the case to be reopened."

"Economically, it didn't hurt Aruba. For a short while, yes,'' he said. "When it was going on for about 2 1/2 years and all these newspaper people from the states were here, yes, it had to affect the island because all of the information they were sending was negative. It's gone. It's finished."

"Now? Aruba is benefiting from it in the sense that more people now know Aruba,'' Mansur said. "They've seen the pictures and the videos of it over all the big channels of the U.S. and Aruba's tourism has grown quite a bit, not because of that but to a point where we reach a million visitors a year."

Sjeidy Feliciano, senior public relations and corporate communications specialist with the Aruba Tourism Authority, said the Holloway case hurt the Aruban people more than it hurt the island's primary industry of tourism. "We were devastated by what happened and did everything possible to assist the family and authorities,'' she said. "While our tourism has continued to grow over the years, our main challenge has been correcting inaccurate perceptions of the island based on this isolated incident. We are grateful to have such loyal visitors who choose Aruba as their vacation paradise and consistently convince their friends and family to visit as well."

Feliciano said that over the past 10 years, the government and the tourism authority have worked hard to overcome and revitalize and as a result, 2014 was a monumental year. "With 1.07 million stay-over visitors overall in a single year, Aruba made history as the previous record for annual stay-over visitors in Aruba was 979,256 in 2013. Last year's global growth included a 3.7 percent increase in arrivals from the U.S. market specifically."

A decade ago, Aruba recorded roughly 600,000 visitors annually.

"The island of Aruba is one of the safest destinations in the Caribbean,'' Feliciano said. "The overall crime rate relative to population size within the Caribbean is considered one of the lowest by the United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime."

Mansur agreed. "You can walk around this island anytime you want and you won't find any trouble," he said. "You have to have very bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time for something to happen to you. We've had one murder this year, and we had one murder last year."

Mansur said he doesn't believe the Holloway case will ever be solved. "A body in the ocean for 10 years, how can it survive? Maybe some bones, but I think even the bones would disappear with the oxidation process,'' he said. "I'm no expert in chemistry though."

As for van der Sloot, Mansur said, "This guy is just a psychopath. He should never be let free of jail, he should never walk the streets again. He is a danger."
Mansur said he will never forget the Holloway case and said, "I hope nothing ever happens over there like the case of Natalee."

"People have to be very careful when they visit foreign countries, and not just lose your head for just a moment and step into cars of people you don't know,'' he said. "I would avoid that at all costs. Not only in Aruba, but everywhere. Even the states."