Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (16 page)

“I went out by the same door and helped her get up,” Joran told the detectives. “The girl told me not to touch her and pushed my hands away. I watched as she then walked in the direction of the lobby of the Holiday Inn. I had not seen anyone in the lobby. My friends Deepak and Satish had told me they had seen a dark-skinned man in the lobby. They further told me that this man was a guard.”

Joran claimed that Natalee was leaning against one of the orange columns near the entrance to the resort when the three drove away.

Detectives had also interviewed Deepak and Satish Kalpoe at the Bubali Police Station, a small, run-down-looking cement facility on the beach next to the Wyndham Hotel. Deepak’s statement was also taken in Papiamento, while Satish spoke with the officers in Dutch.

Like Joran, the brothers agreed that Natalee was drunk. They claimed she approached their Dutch friend at Carlos’n Charlie’s, and begged him to join her on the dance floor. Deepak said Joran had declined her invitation; Satish remembered that Joran had indeed danced with the “white girl” that night.

The brothers each recounted standing at the bar, drinking whiskey and Cokes and shots of Bacardi, but neither man mentioned the body shot that Joran claimed to have sucked off Natalee’s stomach.

Deepak told the officers that when Natalee’s friends saw her hanging out the rear window of his car, they were upset. “A young person came over to my car and told her to get out of my car,” Deepak recalled. “I parked my car and I told the girl that she should go with her friends. She refused to do this. She said that my car was beautiful and she wanted to drive around for a while.

“Joran asked if she was certain that she wanted to drive around with us. And the girl answered, ‘Yes.’ I told Joran that I didn’t think it was a good idea that she remain with us because she was drunk and I didn’t want any problems,” the elder Kalpoe volunteered.

During the drive, Deepak said that Natalee and Joran were kissing and Joran was touching her breasts. He also claimed that at one point, when they had reached the lighthouse on Arashi Beach, the northernmost tip of the island, Natalee fell asleep. “I told Joran to wake her up and ask her what hotel she was staying at. I heard the girl tell Joran the Holiday Inn.”

Satish’s initial statement to police was remarkably similar to his brother’s, particularly the part about dropping Natalee at the Holiday Inn. Like Deepak, the younger Kalpoe recalled that Joran was kissing and touching Natalee in the backseat of his brother’s car, and that she appeared drunk. The two brothers also recounted how Natalee spilled out of the backseat and onto the pavement in front of the Holiday Inn, and had refused Joran’s help getting inside.

Like Joran, they also described a “dark-skinned” man standing in the lobby who they claimed must have been the last person seen with Natalee Holloway.

“He’s approximately one-point-eight meters tall, he has a heavy-set body, he has close-cropped hair, he wore a black T-shirt, he wore black cotton long trousers, which most of the guards wear, he had a walkie-talkie in his hand and spoke by means of the walkie-talkie,” Deepak described. “If I see the guard again, I will recognize him.”

Satish’s description of the security guard mirrored his brother’s. However, unlike his brother, he told the police that he did not think he would be able to recognize him again.

Neither Beth’s nor Dave’s groups were apprised of these interrogations, or any other actions that were taking place on behalf of their daughter. Beth was sure she had seen Deepak’s car in the parking lot of police headquarters on the morning she came to give an official statement to the police, but detectives failed to mention that they had spoken with the three young men.

Before Dave and Detective Jacobs parted ways at the Noord Police Station that day, Jacobs cautioned him that he had received reports that his ex-wife and her party had been knocking on the doors of crack houses in some of Aruba’s seedier neighborhoods following up on “tips” provided by local drug addicts in exchange for cash. The detective warned him that this was a dangerous and unfruitful way of doing business and he should persuade her to refrain.

Aware that Beth and Jug had the “drug deal gone wrong” angle covered, Dave and his group began searching the remoter beaches and backcountry. He hoped he’d find his daughter alive, but he was aware that if she had been killed a freshly dug grave was more likely to be found.

Beth did not coordinate her search strategies with Dave. Her parallel efforts had her plastering missing person posters of Natalee across the length and breadth of the island. The posters featured two color photographs of Natalee and a physical description: blue eyes, long blond hair, five feet four, 110 pounds. Soon everyone in Aruba was aware of the young woman’s disappearance. But the story was about to be international news.

Frustrated by what she perceived as police ineptitude, Beth turned to the cameras, first granting an interview to a local TV station. By June 2, the family’s heart-wrenching plight ran in
USA Today
and had been picked up by the cable news network CNN. Soon all the other networks followed.

Speaking to the camera, hoping her daughter was somewhere where she could hear her, Beth Twitty held up two cell phones and said, “Natalee, you can reach me on your cell phone. I have it, and it’s set up for international use now. And I also have my cell phone. It’s set up for international use. So please call me. And I will stay here until I find you.”

Natalee’s story had all the ingredients the media savored when looking for a sensational news event. A beautiful blonde; a smart, college-bound high school senior; an upscale, upstanding citizen vanishes in an exotic Caribbean paradise. Every parent’s worst nightmare of child abduction was captured in Beth Twitty’s anguish. Natalee was a sister, a friend, a classmate, a fellow American, a collective daughter vanishing in the prime of her life.

Her missing persons case was becoming mainstay cable news fodder, which had recently been dominated by pop star Michael Jackson’s arrest on child molestation charges.

When Beth and Dave first landed in Aruba, local interest in their daughter was moderate. Now, it seemed the whole island was looking for Natalee. For six days, police officers, members of the Royal Dutch Marines, and hundreds of volunteers, including Aruban citizens and American tourists vacationing on the island, combed the beaches and hiked the desert looking for any fresh disturbances in the earth. By Saturday, June 4, ten investigators from the FBI joined the three agents who had already been dispatched to the island.

Dutch coast guard officers searched the waters, as helicopters flew overhead. Volunteers from Aruba’s Search and Rescue Federation, the Aruban Red Cross, and other local organizations joined Dave in the daily land searches. The men would come back dehydrated, sunburned, and covered with scratches after hours of scouring the cactus-strewn terrain in the searing heat. In churches across Aruba, congregations prayed for Natalee’s safe return, a gesture that touched her deeply religious parents.

The reward money being offered for information leading to Natalee’s safe return was growing and now stood at $50,000. The Aruban Tourism Board and local business owners donated $20,000, and $30,000 was raised by the Holloway and Twitty families and their supporters back in Alabama. Still, no worthwhile leads fomented.

*   *   *

Beth had been staying in her daughter’s room at the Holiday Inn since her arrival on Aruba. Four days had passed investigating hunches, probing the police, and pasting posters when a knock on the door brought her news. A hotel employee in freshly pressed whites came to Room 7114 and told her they had located the video footage from cameras outside of the lobby. They thought they had spotted Natalee.

The employee escorted Beth and Jug to a nearby room where they found a group of uniformed police officers around a video screen. “Is that her? Is that Natalee?” one of the officers asked, pointing to a young woman with long blond hair entering the lobby.

In her heart Beth wanted to believe it was Natalee. She wanted to say, “Yes, that’s her.” But, she recognized the fair-haired teen in the grainy video as Natalee’s friend, Madison, by the way the young woman walked, by the way she carried herself.

Shuttling through the video of the rest of that evening, there was no sign of Natalee. There were no signs of Joran, Deepak, or Satish, either. Beth remembered the scene that Joran and Deepak had been willing to re-create the night of the confrontation in the Van der Sloots’ driveway. Everyone, Joran and Deepak included, had returned to the Holiday Inn. There, Joran and Deepak had performed a convincing reenactment of the events, demonstrating exactly where they had dropped off Natalee.

“We pulled up right here,” Joran had said, pointing to a spot on the roundabout in front of the hotel lobby. “As soon as she got out of the car, she fell down and hit her head. She was so drunk.”

If the story had been true, the cameras would have recorded the incident. The boys had concocted the entire story. The story and the video footage did not match. Furthermore, there was no “dark-skinned” security guard on staff, not that night or any night.

The three young men had flagrantly misled the police. The evidence of what was
not
on the tape proved it. Everything Joran had said had been a lie. Beth was now confident investigators had all the information they needed to arrest him.

NINE

JUNE 2, 2010
LIMA, PERU

Ricardo Flores made a vow to himself not to leave the Hotel Tac until his daughter’s body was removed from the hotel. Just after 4:30
A.M.
, when Lima was still dark, Detective Tong and two other officers wheeled the gurney, supporting a casket draped in black, up the ramp from the hotel’s underground parking garage. The coroner’s gunmetal-gray van stenciled with the words “DIRINCRI HOMICIDIOS” was parked at the top of the ramp waiting to receive the body and take it to the morgue, a twenty-minute drive. The sidewalk was illuminated with a steady stream of flashbulbs as reporters and news crews jockeyed for the right angle from which to capture the “money shot.”

Stephany’s father understood the feeding frenzy that occurs when reporters and photographers try to capture the scene of a murder and a body’s removal, especially when famous people are involved. He was so grateful that a friend had provided a proper casket so that his daughter would not have to suffer the indignity of being carried out in a body bag for the entire world to see.

Captain Juan Callan told Flores that his daughter’s body would undergo an autopsy later that morning. He’d have someone in the department phone him as soon as he knew more. A lump grew in Ricardo’s throat as he watched the coroner’s van carrying his beloved Stephany pull onto the street. “Let’s go home,” he murmured to his sons, climbing into the passenger seat of Richie’s car.

Turning onto Avenida Benavides, Ricardo looked back over his shoulder and noticed a caravan of news vehicles tailing them. They wanted a statement, a reaction from the grief-stricken father. He would have to speak to them in the future, but at the moment he simply wanted to be home holding his wife, who he had last seen collapsed in grief on the sidewalk. Without the support of his sons, Richie and Enrique, in the car with him, he would not even have been able to endure the short drive.

Richie used the quiet in the car to gently recount the grisly scene he had witnessed in the hotel room. Because there was blood everywhere, he wrongly assumed that his sister had been stabbed to death. He spared them the physical injuries to his beautiful sister’s face.

The three men strode into the house, arriving just ahead of the media. Ricardo found Mariaelena curled up on the couch in the living room. The sedative she had been given by the paramedics had helped, but her face was contorted with grief, tears running down her cheeks. Kneeling down, he kissed her on the forehead, stifling his own tears with great difficulty. As the patriarch of the family, he needed to remain strong.

Sitting beside his wife, he watched as the morning sun rose from the east. The dawn of another day without Stephany, he thought. He missed her so much. There was nothing to do now but wait.

Just after 8:00
A.M.
, the phone rang. As promised, Callan was keeping Flores updated.

“Van der Sloot has already fled Peru,” the officer on the phone related. Police had just spoken with Interpol and had been informed that Joran had crossed into Chile near the Peruvian border town of Tacna on May 31 at three in the afternoon, two days earlier. Van der Sloot was moving south and investigators worried he was headed for Argentina.

Hanging up the phone, Ricardo looked out the window to where dozens of reporters were camped out in front of his house. He was a savvy entertainment promoter and he realized he could use the media to his advantage.

Flores’s relations with the press were sometimes good, sometimes not. Several years earlier, he had promoted a Michael Jackson concert in Lima and had sold thousands of tickets. But the King of Pop had failed to honor his commitment and the show had to be canceled. The press had heckled Ricardo for months.

The cancellation had not been his fault, but reporters suggested that Jackson had never been booked and accused Ricardo of fraud. Although he was vindicated in a formal investigation, he struggled to forgive the press.

Now, however, they were needed and he needed to manage them to his benefit. Ricardo wanted the press, with its ability to disseminate information, to help in Joran’s capture. He wanted everyone to be familiar with Joran’s image and knew talking to the media would keep the case in the headlines.

Striding to the bathroom, Stephany’s father splashed handful after handful of cold water on his face before combing his hair and putting on a clean white shirt. He was exhausted but rose to the task as he stepped outside to address the cameras and microphones. The time for him to speak had arrived.