The mother of murdered Alabama high school graduate Natalee Holloway has made a bold confession about the moment she came face-to-face with the man who killed her child — years before he confessed to killing the teen.
When 18-year-old Natalee went missing during a trip to Aruba in 2005, her mother, Beth, frantically rushed to the island and almost immediately confronted Natalee’s killer, Joran van der Sloot.
“I decided, ‘Tag is you,'” Beth said onscreen in the new Netflix documentary series “Taken: Natalee Holloway.”
Van der Sloot, now 39, did not confess to killing Natalee until 2023 and despite years of media coverage of the search, her body was never found.
When Beth confronted van der Sloot, she had no idea her daughter was dead. However, Natalee was last seen getting into a car with him after a night out with her friends, and he was the main suspect all along.
So, shortly after arriving in Aruba, Beth confronted van der Sloot at his home with his father, Paul. After interviewing the then 17-year-old Dutch killer, Beth knew in her “gut instinct” that van der Sloot was lying about what happened to Natalee, she said.
During their confrontation, van der Sloot’s lawyer father, Paul, allegedly told his son to “‘just say it,’ as if to say ‘tell them the truth,'” Beth claimed.
She recalls: “This is where (van der Sloot) gives the first detailed story of what happened. »
Van der Sloot allegedly told Beth he kissed Natalee on a beach, before dropping her off at her hotel, where she stumbled out of the car, hit her head and security guards helped her inside.
“I don’t know what parts of it (story) are true, but I knew he knew what happened to him,” Beth said, adding that she was certain the story was a lie.
Before confronting van der Sloot, Beth was also alarmed when she learned that he “told Natalee’s friends that he was a tourist just like them — and now we learn he was an Aruba local.”
Natalee was last seen on May 30, 2005, getting into a gray Honda with van der Sloot. Her friends had described the car to Beth.
When the grieving mother saw the car outside van der Sloot’s home, she recalled: “I looked at that gray Honda and thought, ‘Could Natalee be in that trunk?’ Could she be in that van der Sloot house?”
Beth remembers grabbing her daughter’s photo and telling van der Sloot, “give her back now!” »
She alleged he responded: “What do you want me to do?” ” adding that he “kept beating his chest.”
Aruba police arrested van der Sloot ten days after Natalee’s disappearance.
However, when they interrogated him, Gerold Dompig, Aruba’s police chief at the time, said on screen: “Normally, juvenile suspects break down during interrogation… But Joran was very difficult to interrogate.” »
Van der Sloot gave police conflicting stories about his night with Natalee, Dompig said, revealing: “He liked to be the dominant one, the center of attention… he changed his story, I think, 40 times.” »
In September of the same year, police in Aruba had to let van der Sloot go due to lack of evidence.
However, in 2012, van der Sloot pleaded guilty to the 2010 murder of Stephany Flores Ramírez, a 21-year-old Peruvian business student. In 2012, he was sentenced to 28 years in Peruvian prison.
“It was devastating,” Beth said on screen. “Another young girl lost her life, five years after Natalee was murdered. I mean, it was sickening. I knew he would kill again. It’s just a ticking time bomb.”
The FBI extradited van der Sloot to Alabama in 2023, and he confessed under a polygraph to bludgeoning Natalee to death on an Aruba beach and leaving her body in the ocean.
He accepted a plea deal to provide this information, in exchange for a concurrent sentence to the one he is serving in Peru.
Currently, van der Sloot is in prison in Peru.
“Taken: Natalee Holloway” is now streaming on Netflix.
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