Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (12 page)

Luckily out of earshot from Beth, Joran described how he and Natalee had walked out of Carlos’n Charlie’s arm in arm. Once outside, he asked if he could go with her to the Holiday Inn.

“She said that she wanted to see my house,” he claimed. “I had told her that that was okay.” It was an odd admission, considering that while at the blackjack tables at the Excelsior Casino he’d told the young women that he was a tourist and staying at the Holiday Inn.

Joran said that going for a ride had been Natalee’s idea. “So me and Deepak and Satish took Natalee for a ride. I sat together with her in the back of Deepak’s car. Deepak was driving and Satish was in the passenger seat.

“She told us to drive past her friends so that they could see the car. Natalee’s friends were standing on the corner of Royal Plaza at the southeast side when we drove by. In the car, we started to kiss each other. My friend Deepak drove by Choose-A-Name, Karma Lounge, and after that we drove over the Saskia Road in the direction of the hotels.

“In the car, I touched her breasts and vagina.”

In sickening detail, Joran described how he fingered Natalee. He even described the panties she had been wearing that night.

“We drove past all the hotels,” Joran continued. “In the car, I told Natalee that I could not go with her to my house. She then told me that she wanted to go to the north coast to see sharks.

“I told her there were no sharks to be seen at the north coast. She answered that there were sharks there and she had seen them already. We decided to drive in that direction.

“On the way, she asked us where we were taking her. She further told us to bring her to the Holiday Inn because the next day she would have to travel back to the United States. We drove past the lighthouse and after that to the Holiday Inn hotel.

“In the car, she said that her mother was the sister of Hitler and that her family owned a plantation.” Joran also claimed that Natalee asked him if Deepak and Satish were his slaves, and told him that back in the United States, where she came from, “black people work as slaves on the plantations.”

“The girl was very drunk,” he said a second time.

Joran claimed that after driving around, he, Deepak, and Satish dropped Natalee off in front of the Holiday Inn at around 2:00
A.M.
, and watched the petite blonde stagger toward the lobby as they drove away.

It was a remarkable story. But was it true?

Now, Jug Twitty returned to join the others. Simultaneously, the men voiced their skepticism. “This was not done with subtlety,” Paulus van der Sloot later claimed. “They were very accusing and Joran was made aware of the discrepancies in his story.” In Paulus’s opinion, his son’s inconsistencies were very minor and he felt that Joran was being treated unreasonably harshly.

But the discrepancies were glaring. Joran claimed that Natalee wanted to see his house, but he had told everyone he was staying at the Holiday Inn. Natalee’s friends said she had been drinking but seemed in control at closing time, but Joran said she was very drunk. None of Natalee’s friends remembered Joran doing Jell-O shots out of her navel at Carlos’n Charlie’s that night. In fact, they claimed she hadn’t even said hello to Joran when she passed him on her way out of the ladies’ room. And his story of sexual activity in the backseat was revolting and unbelievable. Natalee didn’t even have a boyfriend. It seemed unlikely that she would have engaged in such behavior with someone she had just met in the backseat of a stranger’s car with two other men sitting in the front seat.

“No jurisdiction! You have no jurisdiction,” Paulus shouted in his thick Dutch accent. “He does not have to talk to you! You have no manners.”

Turning to his son, he instructed, “Direct your statements to the officers and not the Americans.”

The moment was significant. Then and there Paulus van der Sloot transformed from father to attorney. His hostile tone unleashed a torrent of angry words from the Americans.

“Just tell us where the girl is!” Ruffner Page demanded.

Joran insisted that he dropped Natalee at the Holiday Inn. But the Mountain Brook students on the phone with Beth did not believe him.

“No, he didn’t drop her at the Holiday Inn,” they shouted into the phone. “She’s in the house,” they cried. “Go inside and get her!” The Mountain Brook teens were convinced that Natalee had been kidnapped.

Beth was beside herself. Natalee’s roommate, Lee Broughton, was adamant. She told Mrs. Twitty that she was in the Holiday Inn lobby until 3:00
A.M.
that Sunday greeting her fellow classmates as they returned to the hotel from their final night out. If Natalee had stumbled in, as Joran was claiming, she would have seen her.

“He’s lying!” they shouted.

SEVEN

TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 2010
LIMA, PERU

Stephany Flores’s eldest brother, Richie, was curled up on the couch next to his young son watching
SpongeBob SquarePants
when he got the call from his brother Enrique. After reviewing the surveillance video at the Atlantic City Casino, Richie had returned home to his apartment in Miraflores to spend some time with Sebastian. His son’s first birthday weekend had started out okay, but with his sister missing it had turned into the worst kind of nightmare. Even though he wasn’t being rational, Richie found himself feeling guilty for being disappointed with Stephany for not attending Sebastian’s birthday lunch that past Saturday.

He had hoped for some sleep and to make the best of the remaining hours of his weekend with his son. After shared TV time and a big kiss, they had both turned in, hoping for a good night’s sleep, but no one in the Flores family would get any rest that night. Richie had just nodded off on the couch in the living room when the vibration of the cell phone in his pocket snapped him back to life.

“The guy on the video with Stephany is a killer,” Enrique blurted out, unsure where to begin.

“Slow down, Kee-Kay,” Richie said, addressing his brother by his childhood nickname. “What do you mean, he’s a killer?”

“Carolina Googled him. He’s done this before,” Enrique replied, detailing what the family had learned since dispersing at the casino.

Richie listened in horror as his brother told him about Carolina’s gruesome discovery. The Dutchman, Joran van der Sloot, who was last seen with Stephany, was suspected in the murder of a young woman in Aruba five years before.

Richie could hear his stepmother weeping in the background as Enrique pointed out the similarities in the two women’s disappearances.

“They both disappeared on May thirtieth. He took Stephany on the five-year anniversary of the first girl’s abduction,” Enrique said, his anger rising.

Richie sat rigid and upright on the gray leather couch listening intently to every detail. Like Stephany, the girl in Aruba had also met Joran in a casino, and despite countless searches her body had never been found.

“I’ll be right over,” Richie said. Waking the nanny, he apologized for the last-minute request at such a late hour. He had to find his sister.

Upon hearing this latest development, Richie knew that Stephany was in grave danger, and he and Enrique needed to actively join the search. Miraflores was their backyard, after all. The two men knew the hotels that foreigners tended to frequent. If Van der Sloot was still in the area, they would find him.

Just after midnight, Richie pulled his dark-colored four-door BMW up to the curb in front of his family’s home. The lights were all on and Enrique was waiting for him by the front door. In his hand, his brother held a photo of Stephany as well as a photo of Van der Sloot that his wife Carolina had printed from the Internet using Stephany’s computer.

“Maybe someone will recognize him,” Enrique said, shrugging. He was determined to find his sister, but, from what he had read about Van der Sloot’s past, realized this was probably not going to end well.

In the photograph, which appeared to be several years old, a smiling pimple-faced Joran was holding open a zippered sweatshirt revealing a light blue T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “It’s Not Nice to Stare.”

Armed with the color photos, the two brothers began driving from hotel to hotel. Van der Sloot was a tourist after all; he must be a hotel guest somewhere. Their first stop was La Casa Roja, a budget hostel they knew was popular with Dutch tourists.

It was approaching 1:00
A.M.
when the Flores brothers rang the doorbell of the three-story restored colonial mansion painted a deep shade of red and encircled by a bright yellow wrought-iron fence. The owners were Hare Krishnas who ran a small vegetarian restaurant out of the guesthouse. In spite of the late hour, they welcomed the brothers inside. However, neither they nor the other guests recognized Joran from the photograph.

From there, the two began a grid search of the bars, casinos, and hotels around the Atlantic City Casino, but no one recognized Van der Sloot’s photo. In the middle of the night, the streets were almost empty.

On a normal evening driving around together, Richie and Enrique would have been laughing and listening to the radio. But tonight an awkward silence chilled the car as they hurried through bars, hotels, and restaurants. They both knew that Stephany was more than likely dead and neither of them wanted to put it into words.

Three days had passed since she’d last been seen in the company of a suspected killer. Their sister was not one to be exploited, but physical strength had its limits. They’d both viewed the casino video and saw how Van der Sloot had towered over her. If his intention was to kill her, she would not have had much of a chance.

The temperature continued to drop as the night wore on and the air felt cool and damp. Shortly before 3:00
A.M.
Richie’s cell phone rang. “That’s probably Dad,” he said, reaching to answer it.

However, he did not recognize the man’s voice on the other end of the line and never learned his identity. He had news about Stephany.

“Go to the Hotel Tac on República de Panama,” the caller said before hanging up abruptly. Richie wasn’t sure what to think, but immediately headed toward the location.

He had driven past the Hotel Tac many times on his way to and from business meetings and nights out at restaurants and nightclubs. It was next to the Primax gas station and across the street from the giant Wong grocery store where he sometimes did his food shopping. He was now so filled with anxiety that he drove to the wrong location a few blocks away on Paseo de la Republica. With a bang on the steering wheel, he corrected his mistake and turned around.

The two brothers were unprepared for what they encountered as they approached the correct hotel. The entire block was awash in police lights. Investigators were gathered on the sidewalk outside the gaudy gold rectangular structure with black-tinted windows. Above them, the name of the hotel was written in bold green capital letters. The ground floor of the hotel housed a small “casino,” nothing more than a gaming room filled with digital slot machines that rarely had more than a handful of customers who played with quarter-size tokens bearing the hotel’s name.

What an awful place to wind up, Richie thought. It looked like a hot-sheet motel, one of those by-the-hour places where couples met for quick sexual encounters.

Although the brothers weren’t certain, they feared the worst. Richie and Enrique got out of their car, walked up to the yellow police tape, and identified themselves to a uniformed policeman.

“Stay where you are,” the officer instructed. “I’ll get a detective.”

Soon a grim-faced detective approached the two men and gently informed them that their sister was dead. A hotel employee had found her body earlier in the evening. It appeared that she had been there for several days.

“I’m very sorry,” the officer told Richie and Enrique. “There’s no sign of Van der Sloot in the hotel.”

Not wanting his father to learn about Stephany’s murder on the news, Richie ran to his car, leaving Enrique at the scene, and raced back to the family’s house in Surco. One of the most difficult conversations of the young man’s life followed. His father did not take the news well, and demanded that Richie take him to the crime scene.

Ricardo Flores Sr. usually did all the driving. He was, after all, a race-car driver. But having already taken an antianxiety medication, he wanted Richie behind the wheel.

*   *   *

When the time came, Richie volunteered to make the identification of his little sister himself. He did not want the task, but he wanted to spare his father additional anguish. This was not the first time he had stepped in to ease his father’s suffering. When he was fourteen years old, he was asked to identify the body of a dead aunt because his father said the stress would make him faint.

Not only had the young Richie identified his relative, but he had then been instructed to help dress the corpse and lift it into the coffin. The horror of having some skin come off his aunt’s ankle in his hand was a haunting moment he would never forget.

At the time, Richie had been angry with his father for asking him to do such a grown-up job. But now, he felt better prepared.

Head down, heart racing, he nervously followed the officers up the stairs, stopping outside of Room 309. Several plainclothes detectives braced him for what he was about to see, standing just beside him as he entered the tiny room. His sister’s body was on the floor, covered in dried blood, so badly beaten that she was hardly recognizable. But it was Stephany. There was no doubt.

*   *   *

Stepping out onto the sidewalk, Richie locked eyes with his father who appeared so much smaller than the proud, fearless man who raced cars on steep mountain roads for sport. He looked broken.

With gentle sympathy, he admonished his father not to climb the stairs to the third floor. Investigators agreed, telling the elder Flores that he should remember his daughter the way she was.

The three Flores men remained outside on the sidewalk as police secured the hotel. Ricardo was doing his best to contain his emotions when he heard his wife’s frantic cries.