After 18 years, Joran van der Sloot has finally come clean about how he killed Natalee Holloway.
The 36-year-old Dutch man confessed to the murder as part of an extortion trial related to the crime. In a taped confession on Oct. 3, van der Sloot recalled the night of Holloway’s disappearance and death on May 30, 2005, from the moment he and Holloway exited an Aruba nightclub with two other men, brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe.
Van der Sloot said Holloway, then 18, asked to be dropped off at her hotel, but he told the Kalpoes to drop them off further away so he and Holloway could walk along the beach and he “might still get a chance to be with her.”
He recalled that he and Holloway laid down on the beach, “and we start kissing each other.”
“I start feeling her up… and she tells me no,” he continued. “She tells me she doesn’t want me to feel her up. I insist. I keep feeling her up either way.”
Holloway then tried to stop the assault by kneeing van der Sloot in the crotch. In response, he said, “I get up on the beach and I kick her extremely hard in the face.”
“She’s laying down, unconscious, possibly even dead, but definitely unconscious,” he recalled. “I see right next to her there’s a huge cinderblock laying on the beach. I take this and I smash her head in with it completely. Her face basically collapses in. Even though it’s dark, I can see her face is collapsed in.”
“Afterwards I don’t exactly know what, you know — I’m scared. I don’t know what to do,” van der Sloot continued. “I decide to take her and put her into the ocean. So I grab her and I half pull, half walk with her into the ocean. I push her off. I walk up to about my knees into the ocean and I push her off into the sea. After that, I get out. I walk home.”
Holloway’s remains have never been discovered.
Holloway’s parents, Beth and Dave, both gave victim impact statements as part of the trial — in which van der Sloot pleaded guilty to extortion and wire fraud charges. He was extradited to the U.S. earlier this year following 2010 charges that allege he tried to extort Beth in exchange for information about her missing daughter’s remains.
Both parents said they believe van der Sloot’s confession, and that he acted alone, adding that his statements have been “verified by a comprehensive and conclusive polygraph test.”
“Despite everything he has done to us, he is not sorry for what he did,” Dave wrote in his statement. “He expresses no remorse, regret, or even compassion for committing the horrific crime that violently ended Natalee’s life and irreparably changed the trajectory of all of ours. He is evil personified.”
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