Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (22 page)

Officers led the handcuffed teen into the rear holding area. The air was oppressively hot. Most of the eight cells that he could see were occupied. When his jailors led him to a vacant Cell 6, his ambivalence turned to anxiety. The five-by-five-foot cage had a cement floor and metal bars. There was no bed, and the toilet was a hole in the floor. This was a far cry from the bachelor apartment he called home on Montanja Street. There would be no sneaking out of these quarters.

Joran wasn’t able to make visual contact with the other inmates, so he listened attentively to their jailhouse banter. He quickly learned that the men were in custody for a variety of offenses, from stealing computers to drunk driving to possession of firearms.

“What are you in for, man?” someone asked him.

Joran told him he had been arrested in connection with the missing American girl.

“The guy in Cell 3 is in for the same thing,” another inmate yelled.

Ever since Natalee’s disappearance had become a news story, Joran had carefully followed the coverage. With the announcement that Cell 3 held someone connected to the case, Joran knew the man had to be one of the two black security guards, either Mickey John or Abraham Jones. He was surprised at how upbeat the man acted, noticing he spent a lot of time singing.

Joran, having been complicit in framing him, knew he was innocent. But how would Joran know how an innocent man behaved if he was not in such a position himself? Joran engaged the detainee in conversation, and when he learned that he had a wife and daughter, deduced that he was Abraham Jones. Joran confessed that he felt horrible for incriminating Jones, and he cried about it.

The empathy ended there. His overwhelming discomfort was his primary focus. He complained about the coffee being cold and the lack of dining utensils; all meals were eaten with only hands. He complained about the shower system, described as a pipe in the wall of his cell that streamed water two times a day, at 7:00
A.M.
and 7:00
P.M.
, for exactly five minutes. He complained that he didn’t have a pillow, and that he had to sleep on the floor. He complained that sleeping in the cell block’s stifling heat was almost impossible, on or off the floor.

The first morning in custody, Joran awoke to the spray of lukewarm water pelting the floor of his cell. It was the 7:00
A.M.
shower. He quickly shoved his clothes and towel between the bars, stripped down, and did his best to wash away the jailhouse grime.

As he was toweling off, two investigators appeared and told him he had to come with them. Joran was placed in handcuffs, and led past the other cells. Thinking furtively, he pulled his shirt up over his face in case there were camera crews waiting outside. He was put in the back of a patrol car and driven to the central police station in Oranjestad.

Detective Dennis Jacobs was waiting for him, and led him to a small interrogation room where a camera had been set up. His partner, Luigi Croes, joined them in the room.

“How are you doing?” Jacobs asked.

“Okay,” Joran replied.

Jacobs explained that the interview would be recorded, and that he was not obligated to speak. In response to questions, Joran repeated the Holiday Inn story. He told the detectives that Deepak’s car was clean, and that he usually sat up front because his legs were long.

“If you can barely fit in the backseat, how did you have room to finger Natalee as you had claimed?”

“Deepak and Satish pulled their seats forward because they aren’t very tall.”

At noon, Joran received his lunch in a holding area. His meal and water came with no utensils, exactly the same as at his cell. His bathroom break was unsuccessful—Joran was unable to urinate under the unblinking glare of Detective Jacobs in the doorway.

The afternoon brought more interrogation. Joran told detectives that he kept two pairs of boxing gloves in his apartment, and would sometimes stage bouts with his friends. He described Deepak as the weakest of the bunch. “Sometimes I allow my girlfriend and her sister to box.” He smiled.

“How many girlfriends do you have?” Jacobs asked.

“I only have one girlfriend and her name is Florencia. Before I had Elaine and before that Carmen. At the moment she is my friend Freddy’s girlfriend.

“I’ve had a girlfriend since I was fourteen. My first girlfriend now lives in the States. She and I were both enrolled at the International School of Aruba. I also had a girlfriend named Melody. I have had five serious girlfriends since I was fourteen.”

“What about Deepak and Satish? Do either of them have a girlfriend?”

“They don’t have girlfriends,” Joran said. “Satish told me that he had a girlfriend in Surinam. I have thought about the fact that they don’t have girlfriends, but not everybody needs to have a girlfriend.”

The detectives wanted to know if Joran had access to a boat. “Do any of your friends have a boat?”

“My friend Koen’s father has a boat, a speedboat. I don’t know the name of the boat, but it is at Koen’s house. I have never gone out on the speedboat. I get seasick. Koen doesn’t have a boating license, but I assume he knows how to operate the boat.”

“Are you currently under the treatment of a doctor?” Jacobs asked.

“I am not,” Joran said. “I am being treated by a dentist because I have a toothache. I am also under the treatment of a psychologist because I felt bad about the fact that the girl had gone missing.”

Joran explained that his parents had also taken him to a psychologist at the children’s clinic in Oranjestad because he had stolen money from them.

“How do you get along with your brothers and your parents?”

“I get along fine with them,” Joran said. “Usually I discuss my curfew with my mother because she is the one who makes the decisions. I always want to stay out later than she says.”

“Who were you in contact with the day before you were arrested?”

“The day before we were arrested, Deepak, Satish, and I were at my house. We were on the Internet.” Joran explained that they went on the Web site
www.rhielworld.com
because his picture had been posted on that site. He said that he and the brothers took down his Hotmail account and his profile on Tickle, a social networking site. Joran explained that his user name there had been “loverboy362.”

“This is an account where you can leave pictures and you can meet with other people,” Joran explained. “I then opened another e-mail account and sent an e-mail to rhielworld with the request to respect my privacy and remove my picture from their Web site. The man e-mailed me back and wrote that he would respect my privacy and remove my picture.”

After the interview, Joran was moved back to a holding cell before being returned to the Noord Police Station at 9:00
P.M.

Joran’s parents were waiting in the lobby. He was happy to see his father, although he was not permitted to speak with him. Only his mother was allowed in the interview area for her ten-minute unsupervised visit.

Anita van der Sloot confronted her son about her conversation with Freddy. Not one to hold back emotions, Anita expressed her fury that he had lied to everyone, and how disappointed she and her husband were with him.

Joran’s reaction was calm and phlegmatic.

“Freddy always tells the truth,” he said.

If Joran’s mother had suspicions that her son was involved in a crime, she kept those thoughts to herself. In an interview with CBS’s
Early Show
that aired on the morning of June 13, Anita van der Sloot showed support for Joran.

“I believe in my son,” she said. “He is innocent, two hundred percent.”

Anita said that her son had wanted to participate in the searches, but was advised against it. “It drove him crazy that he couldn’t do anything,” she said. “He still believes that Natalee is still alive and will turn up somewhere.”

Two days after Deepak’s stunning admissions, Aruba’s police chief, Jan van der Straten, sat down with Joran van der Sloot for an “informal chat.” The brief conversation took place on June 13, at 1:00
P.M.
at the police station in Oranjestad, where Joran was being detained.

Since being confronted with Deepak’s version of the events, Joran had admitted that he lied to police about escorting the young woman back to her hotel. Van der Straten was a personal friend of Joran’s father, Paulus, and unfounded rumors persisted that he was attempting to influence the outcome of the investigation. “Why did you lie to your father about dropping the girl at the Holiday Inn?” Van der Straten asked.

“I didn’t want him to be disappointed in me,” Joran explained, choking back tears. His father had raised him to be proper, and to not see a woman home would have been shameful, not the way a gentleman would have behaved. He maintained that he lied about dropping Natalee at the Holiday Inn because he had exercised poor judgment and he was embarrassed. But now that Deepak had broken ranks, he felt compelled to tell the truth.

Joran exhibited differing emotions during his brief exchange with the police chief, sometimes crying, sometimes answering in a matter-of-fact manner. He appeared distraught about how this ordeal was affecting his own family, especially his parents, but never showed concern for Natalee or the Holloway family.

He confirmed that he and Natalee had been dropped off at the public beach not far from the Marriott. He said that he had taken her to a spot near the Fisherman’s Hut, a collection of concrete shacks built to withstand the elements where local fishermen store their equipment. The Hut was a ten-minute walk from the Holiday Inn, directly at the edge of the water. At high tide, the waves lapped at the doors of the small, pale blue shacks with their corrugated roofs. “Can you tell me what happened after the girl had fallen asleep on the beach near the Fisherman’s Hut?”

“I called Deepak and he came with two dogs,” Joran said. Joran speculated that Deepak returned later that night, knowing that there was a girl passed out on the beach. “I think he raped the girl or did something to her.”

Van der Straten bluffed, looking for a reaction. “Where was the girl buried, then?”

“I think she was buried next to the wall of the Fisherman’s Hut.”

“I suggest you answer only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the following question,” Van der Straten coaxed. “Was the girl thrown into the sea?”

“No,” Joran answered, but quickly revised his reply to, “I mean, I don’t know.”

Later that night, Joran was driven to the deserted stretch of beach next to the Marriott known to locals as “Lover’s Lane,” accompanied by four police officers. There, Joran pointed to an area next to the Fisherman’s Hut.

“That’s where he did it,” Joran said, referring to his friend Deepak. “That’s where he probably raped and murdered Natalee.”

*   *   *

Unbeknownst to Joran, the area around the Fisherman’s Hut had been searched earlier in the day. The police had drained a four- to six-foot-deep mangrove swamp located behind the Fisherman’s Hut on Malmok Beach. Using fire engine pumps powered by a generator on a flatbed truck, they siphoned water from the pond. FBI agents and a search-and-rescue team from the Miami-Dade Police Department helped in the operation. Detective Alan Lowy and his cadaver canine, Bugg, performed a search of the Fisherman’s Hut area, which was followed by a foot search by Aruban police detectives and uniformed officers.

The scene was too much for Beth Twitty, who had arrived in a police cruiser. This kind of search was a recovery, not a rescue. She had wanted to be there, but police needed to hold her elbows to keep her from collapsing on the sand.

The search turned up no sign of Natalee.

On June 14, Joran sat down with detectives Dennis Jacobs and Luigi Croes at police headquarters in Oranjestad to detail his latest story. The interview began at 10:00
A.M.
Joran admitted that he had lied about dropping Natalee at the Holiday Inn, claiming he was scared of his father’s reaction to learning that he had left a girl asleep on the beach. He was also worried about the reaction of his girlfriend, whom he didn’t want to know about the rendezvous.

“One thing my father definitely told me was to tell the truth. My father was right. I should have done that,” he lied.

Now he was saying that Deepak and Satish had dropped him and Natalee at the beach next to the Marriott just before 2:00
A.M.
He described their hour and a half together, beginning with Natalee and him strolling the beach hand in hand.

“While we were walking, I noticed there was sand in my shoes. So I took off my shoes and socks, tucked my socks into my shoes, and held them in my hand as we walked down the beach. Natalee and I stood for a time at the water’s edge and kissed. She told me that she liked Aruba.”

Joran said the two talked for a bit and then walked in the direction of the Holiday Inn. “On the way there Natalee told me that she didn’t want to go back to the hotel, she wanted to walk in the other direction.

“We sat down on the beach in front of the Marriott, close to the water. There, I placed my shoes on the sand and we started French kissing and talking. At some point, Natalee told me she wanted to keep walking down the beach. We stayed about five minutes in front of the Marriott, then we stood up and walked hand in hand in the direction of the Fisherman’s Hut. We French kissed each other but that wasn’t easy because we were walking.”

Joran said Natalee still wanted to see the sharks on the north coast, but he told her it was too far and he wasn’t walking there with her.

“When we got to the first building of the Fisherman’s Hut, she told me that we should sit on the beach. We sat in the sand next to each other and then lay on top of each other. We had dry sex.”

“I was lying on the sand and she was sitting on me and pretending like we were having sex. I told Natalee that I didn’t have any condoms on me. She said that it was better that we didn’t have sex.

“After that, Natalee put her hand down my pants and masturbated me.

“I opened my trousers so that my penis could come out and make it easier. While she was masturbating me, she told me to tell her before I came so that I wouldn’t come on her because she didn’t want that to happen. Before I came, I told her so. When I came, I came into my own hands.