Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (14 page)

García grew uncomfortable, realizing he was indeed being interrogated. He reiterated that his relationships with Stephany and Joran were extremely casual, not much more than recognizing each other for a hello.

“What do you know about Stephany’s murder?”

“I don’t know anything about a murder. I heard about her disappearance from the press and the Internet. The players were talking about it and I worried about her because I knew who she was.

“When Joran didn’t arrive at the party at La Rosa Náutica, I worried about him, too, thinking that maybe he had also been kidnapped.”

“Do you know if either Stephany or Joran registered to participate in the Latin American Poker Championship?”

“They are not registered,” García said. “Only three hundred of the best players in the world are participating in the tournament. And I am participating.”

The man’s arrogance was not lost on the detective. “When was the last time you saw Joran van der Sloot?”

“On Sunday night, May 30, playing poker at the Atlantic City Casino. I think it was around ten.”

Unzipping his coat, Callan leaned forward in the chair. “Can you explain how it is that you and Joran came to be staying in the same hotel?”

“Purely by coincidence.” He elaborated that many of the players, even the local ones, stay at the Hotel Tac because it’s cheap and close to the casino.

“Besides you and Joran, how many other players are staying at the Hotel Tac?”

García responded tentatively that he knew of no others, only Joran.

“Can you please describe your relationship to Joran?”

He repeated that they weren’t friends, merely friendly travelers in a foreign city. He had played poker with him once or twice at the casino and that was all.

“Have you ever been in his room? Room 309?”

“No, I never went into his room.”

“Can you tell me in which country you met Van der Sloot?”

“I had never seen him before this visit to Peru.”

“Do you know where Joran is from?”

“He told me he lives in Aruba, but he is Dutch.”

The police captain nodded. He was suspicious. His years as a detective ingrained him with instincts and talents to glean information from things not spoken. Even though García claimed to have met Van der Sloot for the first time in Peru, he suspected the two had a history; perhaps they knew each other from Aruba. Discovering Joran’s phone number plugged in with García’s cell contacts kept Callan’s suspicions percolating.

Closing his notebook, the detective got up from his chair. “We need you to look at the body. You need to tell us if she is the one from the casino.”

The Uruguayan poker player became visibly shaken and was unable to comply, not unusual in corpse identification requests.

Instead, Callan produced the victim’s identification card, discovered in Van der Sloot’s room, to show Garíca.

“Is this the woman from the casino?”

“That’s her,” said García. “That’s Stephany.”

While Callan questioned the hotel guest in Room 406, members of his squad fanned out through the hotel, questioning employees and waking guests. Police were puzzled about the length of time that had elapsed from when the murder occurred to when Adeli discovered the decaying corpse in Room 309. From the state of decomposition, the body appeared to have been there for at least three days. Yet, no one had smelled anything unusual. Another troubling event, the employees of the hotel called the hotel’s owner about the body
before
they alerted police.

Investigators were suspicious, with payoffs a problem for law enforcement. Did Van der Sloot have any accomplices? Had he paid an employee to stay silent, or perhaps abet his escape by keeping the room locked and untended?

The fact that no one from the hotel had entered the room for such a long period seemed both strange and suspicious to investigators. This was a hotel and one would expect that the housekeeping staff would have made occasional visits to the room over three days, if for no other reason than to clean the room or turn down the bed. The fact that Joran was delinquent on his rent caused even more distrust. How had Stephany’s badly decomposed body gone unnoticed for so long? The open window had dissipated some of the smell, but the mystery of the undetected stench, foul and unmistakable, certainly could not be ignored.

Police quickly located the owner of the Hotel Tac, Kuan Bo, a twenty-six-year-old Chinese immigrant who spoke fluent Spanish. Bo told investigators that he first learned of the body in Room 309 when he received a call from a hotel employee on June 2 about forty minutes past midnight. He had been resting at home in Miraflores about fifteen blocks away when his cell phone rang. But instead of dialing 105, the Peruvian equivalent of 911, he raced to his hotel to assess the situation for himself.

A short time after arriving, he called the emergency number from the reception desk. According to Bo, the first police officers didn’t arrive for another hour.

Kuan Bo told the officers that he had no idea who Joran van der Sloot was. He explained that he had no regular presence at the hotel. He usually stopped by once a week to make sure everything was running smoothly. He employed managers to supervise the day-to-day business. In fact, he hadn’t even seen the name Van der Sloot until he looked up Room 309 in the guest registry when he was dialing 105 and discovered that the Dutchman had been a guest of his hotel since May 14.

Kuan Bo described the closed-circuit video system the hotel used for surveillance. While he was waiting for the police to arrive, the owner had done a bit of video sleuthing on his own. He had isolated footage of Joran entering the lobby several days earlier in the company of a female guest. He only had enough time to review a very small portion of the tapes. The entire hotel was fitted with cameras.

With days worth of tape and many camera angles to scrutinize, the work was tedious, but the team assembled a chilling video time line. The actual murder was committed out of detection, with no cameras monitoring the interiors of the guest rooms. What
was
recorded was invaluable. Joran van der Sloot’s movements, from the time he entered the hotel lobby with Stephany Flores in the early morning hours of Sunday, May 31, until he escorted her into his third-floor guest room minutes later, were there.

*   *   *

Assembling the video time line was not completely straightforward. Not all cameras were in sync with the actual time, detectives discovered. Discrepancies of up to ten minutes were found. The images, however, were powerful and unmistakable.

After arranging the footage into a chronological sequence, the detectives reviewed it from beginning to end in disbelief. Evidence like this was rare in their line of work.

Sitting in front of a video monitor, investigators first screened footage from cameras 11, 15, and 16, which were trained on the lobby and reception desk. The video, marked with a time code of 5:20
A.M.
, shows Joran van der Sloot approach the reception desk to request his room key. On the tape, Van der Sloot is seen wearing a wrinkled beige long-sleeved shirt and blue jeans. He flashes the receptionist a broad smile as she hands him the key. Twirling the key from the end of the plastic keychain in his left hand, he looks confident and amused. His companion, Stephany Flores, trails behind, head hung low. Her movements seem sluggish, almost as if she had been drugged. Stephany is wearing a black T-shirt and a dark pair of jeans.

Key in hand, Van der Sloot and Flores take the stairs up to his room on the third floor. Moments later, another camera positioned near the door to Room 309 shows Stephany following Joran into the hotel room. They enter his room like two strangers getting on an elevator, no signs of playfulness or flirtation. Joran does not even extend the fundamental courtesy of allowing ladies to go first. He can be seen turning on a light from a switch just inside the entryway before the door to the room closes.

Several hours pass before Joran exits Room 309, without Stephany. He steps into the brightly lit, linoleum-floored hallway. Emerging at the lobby level, he walks past the reception desk. He has changed his clothes. He is now wearing a red, white, and black striped short-sleeved shirt. The reception area camera records him in the lobby. He does not deposit the room key with the receptionist, as is customary. He leaves by the hotel’s front door at exactly a minute after 8:00
A.M.

Eleven minutes later, 8:12
A.M.
, Joran returns to the lobby’s stairwell carrying two disposable paper coffee cups, one in each hand, and heads up to the third floor. He enters his hotel room.

At 8:35
A.M.
, carrying the same cups, he comes out and looks up and down the hallway. He closes the door and locks it using his room key. Soon, he gestures, as if he is knocking on his door. He lingers for a few minutes pacing around in circles, shifting his weight back and forth, before finally staring directly into the camera.

He walks downstairs to the lobby. He approaches the reception desk smoking a cigarette and exchanges conversation with the receptionist. He makes a hand signal, as if he is holding a key and turning an imaginary lock.

At 8:39
A.M.
a hotel employee, Reynaldo Cruz, unlocks the door for the Dutchman with a spare key. Joran stands behind him, the cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger, the two cups of coffee in his left hand. He looks nervous.

Reynaldo Cruz, in a blue-and-white hotel uniform, pushes the door open a crack and walks away.

Van der Sloot again enters the room. Fifteen minutes later, he emerges from Room 309 for the last time, wearing a small green backpack on his back and carrying a beige case in his left hand.

Moments later, the lobby camera records him in his final departure from the Hotel Tac. He says nothing to the receptionist as he walks out into the morning sun, climbs into what appears to be Stephany’s Jeep, and disappears. The haughty, high-flying Dutchman; the wannabe poker king; the Papiamento pimp is gone.

After replaying the tapes several times, the detectives concluded that Van der Sloot had been aware of the cameras, but not necessarily before he and Stephany had entered the room. He appeared to be acting when he pretended to puzzle about being locked out and knocking. After all, he had just locked his own door.

The police theorized that the hapless victim was dead before 8:01
A.M.
, the beginning of the coffee-run drama. They figured that Joran had purposely staged the coffee run to craft an alibi, trying to falsely establish an opportunity for an alternative perpetrator. But when Cruz, the employee he had summoned to gain access to his room, only opened the door a crack, and therefore did not discover the murder scene, the plan failed.

*   *   *

The last time Joran was seen on tape was when he pulled away from the Hotel Tac in what was most certainly Stephany’s Jeep. However, detectives continued reviewing several days worth of footage from outside Room 309, astounded that no one was seen entering the room until night clerk Adeli Marchena discovered the body three days later. This lapse on the part of the hotel demanded answers.

“Do you know why your employees did not clean the room from May 30 until June 2?” homicide investigator José Silva asked.

Kuan Bo explained that unless a guest specifically requested a cleaning, staff had no reason to enter a room. But during an interview with Reynaldo Cruz, the man who had let Joran into his room using a spare key, and one of four employees on the hotel’s housekeeping staff, Cruz told Detective Silva that part of his duties were to clean the rooms every day. As far as he knew, there had been no order to avoid Room 309.

A police report later questioned the system that Bo described. Establishments in the category of the Hotel Tac, while inexpensive, almost always prided themselves on daily chambermaid service. And according to housekeeper Reynaldo Cruz, the Hotel Tac was no exception.

Given this lapse, investigators did not rule out complicity from hotel staff. The report concluded that the Hotel Tac could face “penal and administrative responsibility” sometime in the future. The sloppiness had given a fugitive a three-day lead in his flight from justice and had hampered the investigation.

*   *   *

Room 309 was an evidentiary goldmine. Police investigators produced fifty-three color photographs and a detailed, hand-drawn sketch of the room before they were done.

Investigators were quick to realize that the long-sleeved shirt that the victim was wearing, now soaked in blood, was the same shirt Van der Sloot had been wearing when the two entered the hotel. It appeared the suspect had dressed the young woman in the shirt after killing her. Why someone would put his clothes on a victim was chilling to contemplate.

According to an initial report, “The front of the shirt and the left sleeve are not buttoned up, nor are the left and right front pockets. The shirt on the victim’s body is loose and looks as if it is many sizes too big.”

Scrapings were taken from under the victim’s fingernails for DNA analysis. Police noted that no hair from the assailant or other clues were visible or obvious. The fingernails of both hands appeared broken and jagged as if she had put up a violent struggle.

Police left the room with evidence carefully boxed, bagged, and tagged, including five credit tickets from the tables at the Atlantic City Casino; a pair of bloody, light-blue All Star sneakers, size six and a half; a pair of bloody blue jeans, size thirty-six; and many other items including cigarette lighters, clothing, and an empty black canvas case. They also found a piece of paper torn from page thirty-eight of an appointment book with the handwritten words “Tony Igmaci $600” and two illegible signatures.

Nearly empty plastic Coca-Cola bottles and disposable paper cups from Holly’s Coffee were recovered and sent for toxicological testing. Cigarette butts collected from the ashtray were also collected and labeled.

A Prince tennis racquet discovered on the floor near the TV stand was initially treated as a potential murder weapon. But the racquet had no more than usual-use wear and tear, paint scratches, and minimally frayed strings. No signs that it had been used in a violent action were evident. Later, lab tests would confirm no trace blood or anything else of criminal interest on the racquet. Most likely Joran always had his tennis racquet with him. He played competitive tennis in his youth and had probably been looking to find a pickup game in Peru.