Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (21 page)

When he was awake, Joran was more talkative than he had been from Ica to Nazca. He told the trio he was from Aruba. Much had happened to him since he had first left the island five years earlier, including a residency in Thailand and the death of his father. These he kept secret. In response to questions about his employment, the pathological liar told the cabdrivers that he worked for his father at a civil engineering business. A few hours later, Joran elaborated, saying he had lived in Aruba for the past seventeen years, where his father owned a cement factory.

Methodically, every three hours, Joran asked the men how much longer it would be before they reached Tacna. He seemed anxious, and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was lost in thought. Often, he was shivering, most likely because he was underdressed in his shorts and T-shirt. Although southern Peru is known to Peruvians as the “Land of the Sun,” the desert nights could be frigid.

Six hours into the trip, about halfway, Joran asked the group if they could stop so that he could buy a Peruvian newspaper. He was told Moquegua would be their pit stop, about half an hour away. Around 7:00
A.M.
, they arrived in Moquegua, a scorched, barren town with a wrought-iron fountain by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel embellishing the small central square.

The drivers were hungry and wanted to stop at a café on the square for breakfast. Joran, oddly, did not want to join them. “I’m not hungry. I’ll just wait here,” he said, reminding them about the newspaper.

Over breakfast, the three talked about their passenger. There was something suspicious about him. The consensus was that he was likely carrying drugs.

John Oswaldo picked up a copy of the newspaper
El Ojo
and handed it to Van der Sloot as he climbed back into the minivan.

“How much longer until we get there?” Joran asked.

“Three or four hours more, my friend.”

Again underway, Joran began spinning a picaresque tale, saying he had stabbed a man with a lot of money. He was on his way to Santiago, Chile, where his girlfriend was waiting.

The taxi drivers were speechless. Perhaps the Aruban, with his rudimentary Spanish, had meant something else. Or, perhaps he was hinting that their part in his flight would be well rewarded, with a cut of the stolen money. Either way, they kept silent.

After passing through a police checkpoint in Tomasiri, Joran said he needed to urinate. The van pulled into a rest area and everyone but John Williams got out to use the bathroom.

John Williams had just been awoken from a nap break and he noticed Joran outside the van’s window. He was shifting his laptop from his black backpack to his beige duffel bag.

Outside, his twin also detected Joran rearranging his luggage, removing some clothes from the duffel before dumping the rest of the contents into a garbage-strewn gulley beside the road. He also threw out a bag of marijuana before climbing back into the van.

Around noon, the men arrived in Tacna, another hectic and dangerous outpost, despite its palm-lined avenues. This was the final stop, about twenty miles from the Chilean border. A visit to the Scotia Bank was in order. Joran had only advanced the men $175 of their $500, so he still owed the drivers the remaining $325.

He was good for it, he insisted. Nevertheless, John Oswaldo accompanied him to the bank machine and watched intently as Joran inserted a white bank card with the Maestro logo. The screen showed there was no balance.

“No worries,” Joran said. He had another bank card from the Bank of Aruba. That account, he claimed, had a balance of 9,800 euros, almost U.S.$13,000, but he had to make his withdrawal from a bank-authorized ATM. If the men wanted to be paid, they would have to take him to Arica, Chile, where a Bank of Aruba automated teller awaited.

Arica was only thirty miles away, but going there involved crossing a border. The cabbies were extremely apprehensive. They had been driving all night, and still had the 475-mile return trip to Ica to make. They had heard this stranger bragging about assault and robbery with a knife and had watched him dump marijuana in the woods. No one knew what else he was carrying. Still, getting paid seemed worth the trouble of going to Arica.

None of the three had made the border crossing before, so they inquired at the taxi terminal as to what documents were necessary to proceed. The paperwork was straightforward. Only DNI cards, the standard Peruvian national identification cards, were required. Local cabbies told them a typical fare for this trip was twenty nuevos soles, about seven dollars.

Three hundred nuevos soles, $100, would get him to Chile, the cabdrivers told him. Joran did not make a counteroffer. He simply agreed.

At one-thirty that afternoon, the group, smelly, worn, dirty, and strained, fell into the van for the last leg. John Oswaldo was at the wheel when they departed for the Peruvian-Chilean border crossing in Santa Rosa.

But this twenty-mile finale was not without daunting obstacles. They still had the Atacama Desert and the Peru-Chile border control to navigate.

The Atacama Desert is a rust-colored, parched, otherwordly landscape that looks like the surface of Mars. Most of its six-hundred-mile stretch is on the Chilean side of the border, with only the Tacna region of the desert in southern Peru. It is the driest place on earth, inhospitable and remote, with no animal life, no vegetation, and no reports of rain in recorded history. Beneath the surface, hundreds of mines run tunnels to rich gold and copper deposits. In fact, the thirty-three Chilean miners, trapped a half mile underground for sixty-nine days in 2010, were in an Atacama mining operation.

In contrast, the border complex at Santa Rosa is a mammoth, glimmering, glass-and-metal structure rising out of the desert sandscape like the mirage of a spaceship. The sleek, modern facility looks more like a state-of-the-art airport than a provincial border checkpoint. Outside, security guards flank the roads and man the booths that stop the vehicular traffic. Inside, armed immigration officers take care of routine business and any travel or security problems.

Staring out the window of the minivan, Joran watched the complex grow bigger and more threatening as they approached. His heart was pounding, not knowing if Interpol had marked him as a fugitive and put out an alert.

However, only John Oswaldo was impeded in their border crossing. His DNI card was too damaged to allow him passage into Chile. Not wanting to scuttle the mission, he volunteered to wait in Peru while the others proceeded.

Just the three, John Williams Pisconte, Carlos Euribe Pretil, and Joran Andreas Petrus van der Sloot, exited the car and entered the blast of air-conditioning that chilled the final frontier. They registered with immigration control as required by Peruvian law for all international travelers. Joran, a master of concealing emotions, deliberately slowed his breathing and assumed the posture of a weary tourist. At the booth, the high-rolling Dutchman, the only one traveling with a passport, watched his document be approved and stamped, and the trio exited to the van.

At three that afternoon, John Williams took the wheel, replacing his brother. Carlos claimed the front passenger seat. Joran, relieved, melted into his backseat as the gates to the frontier checkpoint faded from view.

He had made it out of Peru and silently vowed to himself to never return.

TWELVE

JUNE 12, 2005
ARUBA

In the two weeks since Natalee Holloway had gone missing, members of law enforcement and hundreds of local volunteers had conducted wide-scale land, air, and water searches, and five people had been taken into custody. Yet, no link could be made between the two dark-skinned security guards and the three young men who were last seen with Natalee.

There was no crime scene, no body, and sorting out the ever-changing mishmash of truths and lies offered by Joran, Deepak, and Satish was proving a maddening experience. If there was, indeed, a witness who could corroborate Deepak’s newest version of the events—that he and his brother had left Joran and Natalee at the beach next to the Marriott and had not returned to pick him up—then detectives wanted to speak to this person immediately.

On June 12, officers followed up on Deepak’s tip that Joran might have discussed his movements with his friend and confidant, Freddy Zedan. Freddy, a twenty-one-year-old Latino who called himself “Loco Man Pimp,” was three years older than Joran, and spoke Papiamento. He was from Venezuela, and lived with his parents a few houses away from the Van der Sloots in Noord.

Joran was fifteen when he first met Freddy at a tennis tournament at the Aruba Racquet Club. He idolized the light-skinned Hispanic man who wasted no time introducing Joran to Aruba’s nightlife.

Freddy was charismatic, smooth, and utterly fearless. With a washboard stomach and perpetual tan, he was a hit with the young female vacationers. But his handicap was that he couldn’t speak English. Their relationship, then, was a perfect complement—Freddy had the swagger and Joran had the language. Together, they combed the beaches and checked out the nightclubs for pretty female tourists.

Freddy appeared nervous when he sat down with detectives, but he wanted to tell the truth. He recounted Joran’s visit to his home on Monday, May 30. He had returned home that afternoon to find his Dutch friend in the kitchen talking with his sister. The two went to his bedroom, where Joran told him about meeting an American girl at the casino, going to Carlos’n Charlie’s, and dropping her off at the Holiday Inn. But the next day at the racquet club, Freddy recalled that Joran looked stressed and preoccupied.

Freddy said that he asked him what was bothering him and Joran confessed that he had lied to him the previous day and wanted to share a secret. He had not dropped Natalee at her hotel, as he and the Kalpoe brothers had told police. Instead, he and Deepak and Satish had driven with the young woman to the beach on the north side of the Marriott Hotel, where he said she collapsed several times. The last time, she did not wake up.

Unsure of what to do, the three panicked. “We left her on the beach and then Deepak and Satish drove me home,” Freddy recalled him saying, repeating Joran’s second version of the events.

After he talked to the police, Freddy felt obliged to visit Joran’s parents. He was concerned about his friend and thought that Paulus and Anita van der Sloot needed to hear the truth. Aware that Joran’s father was a judge in training, he believed he would likely know what to do. That afternoon, he telephoned the Van der Sloot home and spoke with Anita. He told her that he had just been interviewed by police, and asked if it would be okay if he came by the house. Freddy arrived wth his girlfriend that afternoon. The two joined Anita in the Van der Sloots’ dining room, painted a cheerful shade of orange and filled with Anita’s colorful paintings propped on easels in the corners. The three sat down at the long wood table.

“I need to tell you the truth,” Freddy began.

Anita grew pale as she listened to the young man detail the confidential conversations he had had with her son, the ones he had just recounted for police. Paulus van der Sloot emerged from the kitchen to participate in the conversation.

Joran’s parents believed Freddy’s story. They knew how capable their son was of lying, of staring them in the eyes and spinning deceit. But those lies now seemed petty. He had stolen money, he had snuck out of the house, and he had run up minutes on his brother’s cell phone. Now, with shame and horror, they began grasping that this lie was different, possibly involving murder, and almost certainly involving a cover-up.

Paulus had reluctantly accepted the story Joran and the Kalpoe brothers had first told him. But now faced with Freddy’s revelations, Paulus’s thoughts cycled through the potential legal ramifications. If Joran wasn’t involved in Natalee’s disappearance, then why had he created such an elaborate cover story? These certainly seemed like actions of someone guilty. But, this was his son.

Anita and Paulus intended to confront Joran with Freddy’s account. Based on his version, it was more probable that Joran would need a full-blown legal defense with lawyers to support it. As hope for an innocent explanation crumbled, mental issues and psychiatric justifications were discussed. The possibilities were sickening.

Leaving the girl alone on the beach was bad judgment, but not criminal. Was there more to this nighmare than Joran had even confessed to Freddy?

*   *   *

On June 9, 2005, when Joran was first taken into custody and brought to the Noord Police Station, he was barred from any contact with his father. Joran’s father had been with him at the casual meeting with police at the Bubali Police Station on June 1. Although Jan van der Straten had wanted the interviews with Detective Jacobs and Sergeant Kelly to be with Joran alone, Paulus had insisted on being present.

The police chief knew he had no choice. Joran was seventeen and still a minor. Dutch law allows minors to have parents present during police questioning.

But now, regardless of being a minor, Joran’s status had changed from witness to suspect. Van der Straten, following a judge’s orders, forbade communication with Paulus, granting permission only to Anita, his mother, for daily ten-minute visits.

Authorities understood the conflict. Paulus straddled the boundary between “father of a minor suspect” and “officer of the courts.” Being a judge in training, and in a high position in the Dutch judiciary, he could easily give Joran insider legal advice if he had access to him. And as a lawyer, he could then have the right to lawyer-client confidentiality over their conversations.

The chief knew the danger of allowing Paulus visitation. But he knew the repercussions of
not
allowing it. He carried out the judge’s ruling to keep the father and son apart. The elder Van der Sloot was incensed. He was sure that Dutch law had been violated, and he filed a complaint with the court.

The living conditions for Mickey John and Deepak Kalpoe at their police station were uncomfortable, but Sint Nicolaas at least offered a poured slab for a bed. At the Noord facility where Joran was housed, inmates were forced to sleep on the concrete floor. Joran casually emptied his pockets and removed the laces from his shoes, as directed by the police.