Disappearance of Natalee Holloway
Natalee Holloway (born October 21, 1986) is a U.S. teenager from Mountain Brook, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham, whose disappearance on May 30, 2005 during a post-graduation trip in Aruba caused citizen concern in Aruba along with a media sensation in the United States.
Disappearance
Holloway and 124 fellow graduates of Mountain Brook High School were visiting Aruba on an unofficial senior class graduation trip. She was last seen leaving Carlos’n Charlie’s, a popular tourist-oriented bar and grill, early in the morning with Dutch-born Joran van der Sloot, the then 17-year-old son of an ex-judicial official trainee, and two companions, Satish and Deepak Kalpoe, Surinamese-born brothers of East Indian origin, in Deepak's car.
Natalee Holloway did not appear for her return flight the next morning, nor did she appear in any security camera footage of the hotel lobby in the course of the night. Her passport, packed bags, and cellular phone were found in her hotel room. Searches of the island began immediately, but have been fruitless to date.
Holloway was to have started her undergraduate studies on a full scholarship at the University of Alabama in August 2005.
Investigation
On May 30, immediately following her missed flight, Natalee's stepfather and mother, Jug and Beth Twitty, traveled to Aruba with friends. Within four hours of landing in Aruba the Twittys went to the Aruba police with the name and address of Joran van der Sloot, the person last seen with their daughter. Accompanied by two Aruba policemen, they went to the Van der Sloot home looking for Natalee. During this encounter, Joran and Deepak related their first story.
This initial story was that they drove Holloway to the "California Lighthouse" area of Arashi Beach where she and Joran "made out" for a short time before they dropped her off at her hotel around 2:00 A.M. They said she fell down and hit her head as she got out of the car, but refused help, and that she was approached by a black security guard as the boys drove away. On June 5, Aruban Police detained Antonius "Mickey" John, 30, and Abraham Jones, 28, former security guards for the nearby Allegra Hotel. On June 9 Van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers were arrested as suspects involved in a crime against Natalee with “reasonable suspicion of murder, manslaughter or intentional containment with the dead as consequence.” John and Jones were released on June 13.
On Friday June 17 a fourth person, later identified as disc jockey Steve Gregory Croes, 26, was also arrested. On June 22 Aruban police detained Joran's father, Paulus van der Sloot, for questioning, and arrested him the same day. Paulus was released on June 26 after agreeing to waive his right not to testify against his son. Croes was released on June 27. On Monday, July 4, a Judge Commissioner released Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, but they were re-arrested on August 26 along with another new suspect, Freddy Arambatzis, Joran's friend and neighbor. [1]
On Saturday, September 3, 2005, all four suspects were released from pre-trial confinement on the condition that they remain available to police, however on September 14 all restrictions on the remaining suspects were removed by an Aruban Court of Appeals. Though all technically remain suspects, they are no longer in the custody of the court. Joran Van Der Sloot now resides in Holland, where he is attending college.
Beth Twitty has stated in televised interviews that both Joran van der Sloot and Deepak Kalpoe have, at different times, admitted to having sexual intercourse with Natalee while she was 'slipping in and out of consciousness'. If true, this would appear, according to Aruban law, to be an admission of rape. [2]
The search for physical evidence has been unsuccessful, and marked by false leads. Blonde hairs attached to a piece of duct tape found by an Aruban park ranger were DNA tested, but the hair was not from Holloway. A small lake near the Aruba Racquet Club was partly drained between July 27 and 30, after a witness claimed to have seen Joran, Deepak, and Satish sitting parked on a dirt road nearby between 2:30 AM and 3:00 AM on the morning Natalee disappeared. [3]. Another witness claims to have seen Joran, Paulus, and Deepak burying a nude, blonde-haired woman in a landfill during the first week after Natalee disappeared. The police searched the landfill by hand for two hours on one day, finding nothing of interest. Later, when a volunteer search team learned about the witness, the landfill was extensively searched with heavy garbage-moving/digging equipment. On August 15 it was reported that when search team members arrived at the landfill, the excavated area had been filled in with new garbage. Several bones had washed up on an Aruban beach and generated some interest, until an analysis of the bones determined they were not from a human. A blood-stained mattress was discovered, but the blood was canine. On July 4, the Netherlands unsuccessfully deployed three F-16 warplanes, equipped with infrared sensors, to aid in the search.
The reward for information leading to Holloway’s safe return, contributed by the Holloway's family, private donors, the Aruban government, and Carlos'n'Charlie's Restaurant, has grown to $1,000,000. A $250,000 reward is also offered for information about her whereabouts, alive or dead. [4].
Criticism of the investigation
Commentators in the United States have frequently criticized the apparent lack of progress by Aruban police, headed by Superintendent Jan ven der Straaten, in solving this case. Aruban officials blame some of this on a lack of understanding of the Dutch judicial procedures employed on the island. Various uncorroborated theories alleging a cover-up have so far not resulted in any official response.
Alabama Governor Bob Riley and U.S. Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) pressured Aruban authorities to accept more assistance from the FBI. On Friday July 22, Aruban Prime Minister Nelson Oduber wrote to Attorney General Karin Jannsen asking that island police give the FBI complete access to their dossiers on the investigation. On the same day, during a special session for state budgets, the Alabama House of Representatives passed a resolution asking Alabama residents not to visit Aruba until the case is resolved.special session See Boycott Aruba.
The Twittys, early vocal critics of the Aruban officials, initially apologized for their public criticism of the handling of the case. Jug Twitty wrote Governor Bob Riley on August 4 asking Alabama not to boycott Aruba. [5]. As tensions heightened between the Holloway family and Aruban investigators in September, renewed calls for a boycott of the island have been aired by supporters on American television. Controversial philanthropist Joe Mammana has also pledged to travel to Aruba in support of efforts to resolve the case. [6]
Media Coverage
Locally, the Aruban Press published extensive news on the story both in Dutch [7] and in the local Papiamento language [8]. The story generated some interest in the Netherlands when Joran and Paulus van der Sloot were arrested, but this interest quickly subdued a few days later.
U.S. television networks devoted much air time to the search for Natalee Holloway, the investigation of her disappearance, and rumors surrounding the case; Greta Van Susteren, host of On The Record on Fox News, perhaps most prominently. The saturation of coverage triggered a backlash among some media critics who saw the attention paid to this case as disproportionate, presumably because Holloway is a young attractive blonde girl. They have labeled the sensation a symptom of "missing white woman syndrome". Others see this as a mother's fight for the truth. MSNBC ran a segment on "How mom keeps spotlight on the Holloway case." CNN ran a segment criticizing the amount of coverage their competitors have been giving to the story [9].
Other commentators have criticized the disproportionate amount of government and media attention directed towards the finding of Holloway, such as the use of F-16 Fighting Falcons to aid the search, while over 800,000 other children are reported missing each year. [10]
Immediately following the announcement that the Netherlands was sending F-16s to join the search, the popular blog Kuro5hin published a scathing editorial comparing the coverage of Holloway's disappearance with that of Reyna Alvarado-Carrera, a 13-year old Hispanic girl who disappeared from her home in Norcross, Georgia, in May. The article, which features an expletive in the title, has continuously remained atop Google's search results for "Natalee Holloway".
The saturation coverage of Holloway's disappearance by the American media was largely superseded in late August 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. Beth Twitty has alleged that Aruba has taken advantage of the media hiatus to release the suspects and discourage continued U.S. media presence on the island. [11]
On September 20, 2005, Beth Twitty appeared on the Dr. Phil television show, the sole topic of which was her daughter's case. On the show, host Dr. Phil McGraw urged viewers to boycott tourism in Aruba until the case is solved.
Related Articles
External Links
- The Birmingham News full coverage
- Caribbean Net News - Netherlands Antilles
- Court TV full coverage
- Yahoo! News full coverage
- Notable weblog coverage and discussion: