Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (28 page)

“Is this your first time in trouble with the law?” one of the officers asked.

“I have had problems with the authorities since a 2005 case in Aruba, but after being detained for three months I was released without charges. Since then I have not had problems in Aruba, but I did in the Netherlands, where they tried to make it appear as if I was involved in prostitution with young girls in Thailand, but the story was not true.”

Having taken the investigators through his version of events, Joran was convinced that they would see that he was innocent. He had not murdered Stephany Flores. She had been alive when he last saw her in the company of the rogue Peruvian police officers.

With an air of confidence, he announced that he simply wanted to go home to Aruba. Should the Chilean government decide to expel him from the country, he wanted to be sure he wasn’t returned to Peru. His life was in danger there.

Chilean immigration officials informed Joran that on the following day he was going to be expelled at the Santa Rosa border crossing, the place where he had entered the country three days earlier.

Joran, defiant and hostile, refused to sign his statement.

SEVENTEEN

JUNE 24, 2005
PALM BEACH, ARUBA

Natalee Holloway had been missing for nearly a month when search-and-rescue expert Tim Miller stepped off the plane at Aruba’s Queen Beatrix International Airport on June 23. Miller understood the Holloways’ anguish and flew to Aruba when he received a request from the family to assist in the search for their daughter.

Tim’s empathy for the Holloways came from a place of personal experience. More than twenty years earlier, his sixteen-year-old daughter, Laura, had been murdered by a serial killer. Tim’s wife had been running late for work one afternoon and had left the high school sophomore talking on a payphone at a convenience store not far from their home in League City, Texas. The family had just moved into a new house and their phone had not yet been connected. When Laura’s call continued longer than her mother was able to wait, Laura assured her mother she would be fine and would walk the half mile home when the call was done.

When Laura failed to return home that night, her worried parents searched the neighborhood. The next morning, they filed a missing persons report at the police station.

Tim and his wife were told that Laura, a slight brunette with long feathered hair, had likely run away, the same prediction Dave Holloway had been given.

The couple was frantic. Their daughter suffered from seizures and needed medication. She would never have run away. Tim had been shocked that the police were not taking his daughter’s disappearance more seriously.

He became so desperate he began to do his own investigating. He discovered that another young woman had been found murdered six months earlier. The victim lived only a few blocks from the Millers.

Unwilling to sit doing nothing, Tim begged police to tell him exactly where the girl’s remains had been found, convinced a serial killer was operating in the area. He wanted to search this location for his missing daughter. But the police refused to tell him.

A year and a half later, Tim checked himself into a hospital. The stress of his missing daughter had destroyed his marriage. He had lost his job and had been drinking heavily. He even entertained thoughts of suicide.

One morning while he was in the hospital, he was reading a newspaper and learned the dreadful circumstances of Laura’s death. Police had found three sets of human remains in an abandoned oil field. One set was identified as Laura Miller. She had been shot in the head.

The bones were discovered in the location Tim had begged the police to disclose to him. Police later theorized that the oil field, within the city limits of League City, was the dumping ground of a deranged serial killer.

In 2000, Tim founded Texas EquuSearch, a nonprofit volunteer search-and-rescue operation dedicated to finding missing persons. He had participated in nearly five hundred searches and had reunited nearly one hundred people with their families by the time he became involved in the Holloway case.

Texas EquuSearch was based in Houston and its volunteers usually conducted their searches on horseback. Their means of transportation would have to be modified for the unique terrain of the Caribbean island. In Aruba, they would have to rely on all-terrain vehicles, boats with side-scan sonar, and scuba diving and canine search teams.

Tim brought a team of twenty-four people, many either current or former law enforcement personnel. He had initially agreed to stay on the island for a minimum of five days. But Tim was dogged to the point of obsessed in helping families find closure. Anyone who knew Tim Miller knew that if his work was not finished in five days he would stay until he was no longer needed.

Before beginning the search, Tim met with Chief Jan van der Straten to discuss how to proceed. The meeting was tense, with Van der Straten hesitant to have an outside team involved. But the two parties reached an agreement. Tim was allowed to commence his search on the condition that he would share any findings with the police before speaking to the media.

Since Natalee’s disappearance, other American search missions had provided their efforts. Special agents from the FBI had been dispatched, first from Miami and then from Alabama. They joined the thousands of unspecialized volunteer searchers who provided boots on the ground and support.

The federal agents had participated in the search of a cement plant and several ponds near the Kalpoeses’ home in Hooiberg; a large area south and east of the Aruba Racquet Club; and west of the Fisherman’s Hut.

Tim Miller and his team set off on Saturday, June 25, beginning with searches of wetlands on the northern tip of the island and areas around the California Lighthouse. They weren’t so much searching new areas as re-searching old ones. Eight rescue divers and four cadaver dogs with their handlers added their expertise.

For the water search, the team used a borrowed boat fitted with the side-scanning sonar equipment they had brought from Texas. Side-scan sonar was special equipment used for capturing images on the ocean floor.

The land search was equally difficult. The heat was unbearable and the terrain was grueling. The dogs had to wear specially designed booties to protect their paws from the cactus-strewn landscape.

When Tim Miller and his team began their search, five suspects were in custody, Joran van der Sloot, Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, Steve Croes, and Paulus van der Sloot. But two of the suspects, Paulus van der Sloot and Steve Croes, were going to be released the following day.

On Sunday, June 26, a hearing was held to determine if police had enough evidence to hold the men. Given that Paulus was a judge in training, a magistrate was flown in from the neighboring island of Curaçao to preside over the hearing to avoid any appearance of judicial impropriety. After listening to the public prosecutor’s argument for an extension on the forty-eight-hour detention of Paulus, the judge found insufficient evidence and ordered that he be released.

Aruba’s public prosecutor, Karin Janssen, cited two reasons for why her office believed Paulus should remain in custody.

The first was a discrepancy in his time line, specifically when he picked up Joran at the McDonald’s. Two witnesses, Beth Twitty and another person in the posse, insisted that Paulus had told the group in his driveway that he had picked up his son at 4:00
A.M.
on May 30. Later he had said he’d picked Joran up at 11:00
P.M.
on May 29. This inconsistency was so glaring that it could not be dismissed, written off as a foggy-headed man’s poor memory.

The second reason was the witness claim about a “no body, no case” discussion between Paulus and his son and the Kalpoe brothers. Paulus had explained to them that there could be no conviction without a corpse, and as such, Janssen believed that he had attempted to influence the outcome of the case.

During the hearing, Paulus stressed he had nothing to hide. He had been completely cooperative while in custody and was willing to testify in the event the case went to trial. Under Aruban law, parents have the right to refuse to testify against their children so Paulus’s promised willingness was supposed to shore up his apparent innocence.

Outside the courthouse, Paulus told a reporter from the Dutch television program
Nova
that he had been misunderstood. He said he had simply explained the procedures to the three young men so that they would not panic. “That was sufficient for the prosecutor to suspect that I was an accomplice,” he said.

Paulus raised questions about the prosecutor’s decision to include witness statements from two people who were “in the back of the crowd” that first night on his driveway and not the testimony of the female police officer, “to whom I was talking.”

Party boat disc jockey Steve Croes was also ordered released by the judge that Sunday after spending ten days in custody for his bizarre false alibi. Croes’s mother had been an emotional wreck since her son had been arrested. She was outside the courthouse when she learned the judge’s ruling that her son was free to return home, and overwhelmed with emotion, she collapsed on the sidewalk.

Anita was delighted she would be taking her husband home, but her son was not so fortunate. The judge ruled that Joran and the Kalpoe brothers would be held in detention for another eight days.

Joran was relieved that his father was out of jail. But the assurance from Paulus that there was safety in numbers was collapsing. When the elder Van der Sloot had given that advice, he had assumed that the three boys had been telling the truth about their movements on the night of May 29 into May 30.

However, now Freddy Zedan had come forward to inform the police and Joran’s parents that Joran and Natalee had been dropped off at the beach by the Marriott. Joran could no longer rely on him to keep their story straight.

Perhaps it was a police tactic, but detectives did not question Joran or the Kalpoe brothers for three days after Paulus van der Sloot was released from custody. The brief reprieve gave Joran time to craft an explanation for any discrepancies in his story.

On June 29, detectives Johnny Melvis Erasmus and Zoraida Magaly de Cuba resumed their questioning at police headquarters in Oranjestad, beginning with Joran’s cell phone use. In particular, they wanted to discuss the eight-and-a-half-minute phone call he had made to Deepak at 2:26
A.M.
on the night of Natalee Holloway’s disappearance.

While his friend Deepak had told police that the connection was terrible and that he could barely hear his Dutch friend, Joran claimed that he had had decent cell phone reception and could hear Deepak perfectly.

“When I called, I was with Natalee, the missing girl,” Joran recounted. “I spoke with him in Dutch and Papiamento to be certain that she wouldn’t understand what I was saying.

“I told Deepak that I was with the girl on the beach by the Fisherman’s Hut and that after we’d been dropped off there, the girl didn’t want to go back to her hotel, but rather walk in the northern direction. I told Deepak that I was on the beach close by the Fisherman’s Hut.

“Deepak said I always get lucky and always get the girls. I laughed.

“I asked Deepak if he could pick me up at the Fisherman’s Hut at the second group of trees, not the first. He said okay.

“Deepak told me during our conversation that he was talking to a Surinamese girl on the computer, in other words, he was chatting.

“Not long after our conversation, Satish,
not
Deepak, pulled up in the gray Honda.”

Detective Erasmus shifted further upright in his chair and shot his partner a look of disbelief. Instead of admitting that he had been caught in a lie, Joran was creating another story. Confronted with the hard evidence that Deepak had been at home on his computer and couldn’t possibly have picked him up at the beach that night, Joran offered up the younger Kalpoe.

Unlike Deepak, Satish had gone straight to sleep that night and had left no digital footprint. He had made no cell phone calls, and had not logged on to his computer. Aside from his brother, an exposed liar, no one could verify his whereabouts.

Joran was proud of his new version of events and continued to plug the other holes in his story. Putting Satish behind the wheel of the Honda explained his “thank-you” text message to Deepak.

“After I got back home, I sent Deepak a text message. The message was: ‘Hey, thanks. I’m home now. Can you go online?’”

Joran again confirmed that it had been his idea to make up the Holiday Inn story, and that Deepak had added the detail about the “dark-skinned” security guard.

He wanted to clarify another point about the route they drove that night. “Natalee did say that she wanted to see sharks, but never mentioned the lighthouse and we never went to the lighthouse.”

“Why did you lie to Natalee’s parents when they came to your house that night?” Detective Erasmus asked.

“First of all, I didn’t realize at the time that they were Natalee’s parents. I was told that they were FBI agents. Secondly, I was afraid that something bad had happened to her.”

Even though Joran had changed his story and was now claiming that it was Satish who had picked him up at the beach that night, he stopped short of suggesting that Satish had harmed the Alabama teen and insisted that the police officers take a closer look at Deepak.

“I have my suspicions regarding Deepak and whether or not he went back to the girl on the beach. I know how he thinks.…

“Satish…” Joran paused. “I don’t know.”

Joran ended the six-hour interview with contrived optimism. “I’m starting to believe more and more that the girl is alive, otherwise she’d have long since been found.”

While Joran was providing investigators with a new angle, Deepak Kalpoe was asserting his innocence in another interrogation in the same headquarters.

Since his arrest, Deepak had been interrogated more than ten times, and he was frustrated and angry. When Sergeant Clyde Burke asked him about his salary at the Cyberzone Internet Café, he became indignant.