Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (35 page)

He always spoke courteously, rarely using profanity. Whenever women were around, he became gregarious and flirtatious. He liked blondes, he said, but enjoyed checking out girls of all types.

Steph was familiar with the Dutchman’s routine after only a couple of days. Joran liked sleeping late, getting out of bed in the early afternoon; he smoked incessantly; he never had money. Not only was he broke, but he seemed to be in debt, perhaps from a gambling or drug obligation.

Joran’s behavior caused Steph great concern. Not only was he financially responsible, but he was Joran’s host and, in a way, his representative. Joran was lighting up joints in his hotel room in a country with some of the harshest drug laws in the world. As an example, a drug trafficking conviction in Thailand can carry the death penalty. Joran was dismissive, even slightly amused by the producer’s fear of being raided by police and hauled off to prison. However, he stopped trying to convince Steph to join him for a smoke.

Joran had other notable habits. He thoroughly enjoyed room service. He ordered from the room menu regularly, but he was courteous about his indulgence and always asked Steph’s permission first.

The Dutchman always wore his baseball cap in public. He never left the hotel without it and liked that it protected him from inquiring glances. He often looked over his shoulder and tipped his cap low over his eyes toward his nose, as though he didn’t want to be recognized. No one on the streets of Bangkok seemed to be paying him any attention, however, except perhaps to marvel at his exceptional height.

Joran also tended to make his many cell phone calls by first stepping out of earshot. He seemed eagerly involved in some sort of business transaction. These phone calls seemed to make him more anxious than usual.

Part of Steph’s duties while in Bangkok was to keep Joran entertained until Greta arrived. Steph knew Joran liked to drink and party, but had no other babysitting activities planned. Luckily Joran had ideas of his own.

The outcast from Holland wanted to show Steph around Bangkok, his new city. Although the heat was oppressive, the two set out on a rickshaw tour.

They sat in the back of the cart while their guide pedaled. Joran knowledgably pointed out landmarks, and even spoke a little Thai. He was funny, interesting, and engaging. Outside the hotel, he seemed worldly and street smart. He was also manipulative, impatient, and eager to be paid.

Thailand was famous for its hand-tailored suits, and Steph found a well-regarded shop to custom order one for himself. The Canadian and Dutchman went together for the final fitting. Joran seemed genuinely piqued with excitement as he suggested minor alterations for the seamstress, saying that for his friend he wanted only the best. Steph had to constantly remind himself this was a business arrangement and not a friendship in the usual sense.

One evening, a party of three—Steph, Joran, and an American friend of Joran’s—went for cocktails and sushi at the world’s highest bar, Distil, in downtown Bangkok. Joran had recommended the outing. The upscale whiskey bar was on the rooftop of the city’s second tallest building, sixty-four floors high, and was frequented by trendsetters and celebrities. Steph nursed a glass of wine while Joran consumed rounds of whiskey and cola.

Joran’s indulgence seemed to relax him, and he slowly confided his current plight. He he had ended up in Thailand by chance, he said. He had been living in the Netherlands when he decided he wanted to go to Australia for a couple of years and work as a bartender. After the sting orchestrated by Peter de Vries and the scar-faced gangster Patrick van der Eem, he thought Australia would be a place where he would be able to live in anonymity and escape the ostracism his notoriety had created.

His flight to Sydney required a layover in Hong Kong. Authorities there connected him to the Holloway case, flagged him, and announced that Australia was not allowing him entry. He had to decide quickly where to go. He had a friend in Thailand and on a whim chose to go there.

He hoped to travel to Cambodia, where he also had a friend. He was thinking about enrolling in an online business school program.

Steph drew the conclusion that Joran was stuck in a catch-22. Although he seemed to want to shake the stigma of his past, he needed that very stigma to finance his future. Selling variations of his story was his only means of support.

While waiting for Greta Van Susteren’s arrival in Bangkok, Steph had been providing Joran with small down payments. But one afternoon, the money Joran had been promised didn’t arrive. Joran became edgy, antsy, and demanding. “You have to get the money,” he commanded angrily. “Take it out of your personal account!”

Steph persuaded him that the money would be available the next day. As far as his personal account, he simply did not have the funds, and even if he did, he would never fund him with what he viewed as blood money. Joran stormed around in anger. He desperately tried to resolve the issue with impractical solutions, and finally he had no choice but to wait.

Three days later, Greta made her entrance. Steph spent that morning preparing the hotel suite assigned to them for the interview. He set up the two cameras he had brought from New York. He arranged the dark teak furnishings to his liking.

Joran arrived at the suite dressed in a collared shirt and khaki slacks, but without his cap. He had not shaved off a thin scruffy beard. He reluctantly took a seat in a chair across from Greta, his face illuminated by one of the room’s table lamps. The pale yellow walls of the expansive suite served as the backdrop.

Joran began the interview by saying that he was going to provide Greta with answers about what had happened to Natalee. He claimed to have three audiotapes, recordings of long-distance phone calls with his father.

But, Joran said, the Natalee portion of his story had to be prefaced with an important related event. Several months before meeting Natalee, he had met a stranger in a casino in Aruba. He had expressed interest in young blond females, and said he would pay Joran $10,000 if he could procure one for him. He then gave him a card with his phone number.

Joran said he contacted the trader the night he met Natalee. “I told him I have a girl with me, and he’s like, okay come to the Marriott Hotel,” Joran told Greta.

Joran said that it had not been his intention to sell Natalee that evening when they first met, although it had been in the back of his mind.

When Greta asked about Deepak and Satish’s role, Joran declined to answer. But he eventually told Greta that both men had known of the plan and were paid a cut of the money he had received.

Joran explained that he had called the man while in Deepak’s car with Natalee that night, and the two had arranged a meeting. He said he spoke in Dutch so that Natalee wouldn’t be able to understand. He said they drove around for nearly an hour before going to the rendezvous site north of the Marriott that night. While he waited, he said he made out with Natalee. “But nothing more.”

Joran told Van Susteren that when he arrived, he didn’t see anyone at the beach and wondered if the meeting would even happen. “Then I saw a guy, and he came and he just handed me a bag, grabbed the girl by the arm and he went to the boat that he had in the water.”

“What did Natalee say?”

“She said nothing, not until she was on the boat,” Joran told the Fox News host. “And then she was like ‘Hey,’ you know, ‘What’s going on? You’re not coming with me’ … She wasn’t panicking or anything … I think she was pretty drunk.”

Joran claimed that the reason Natalee climbed aboard the boat willingly with a complete stranger was because he had reassured her that they were going on a boat ride together. “That’s my story, to go to the beach, that we were going to go on a boat,” Joran said.

Joran said the bag given to him by the boat driver contained money. While he had been promised $10,000 in cash, Joran lamented that several hundred dollars were missing. He assumed the boat driver had taken a little out for himself.

Next, Joran produced the three promised audiotapes. He said they would provide the evidence that would conclusively implicate his father in the cover-up of Natalee’s disappearance.

Joran told Greta he had confessed to three people about selling Natalee to a sex trader: his father, his lawyer, and one of his teachers at the International School of Aruba.

When Greta did not ease up in her questioning, Joran grew contentious.

“You want her alive, right?” Greta probed.

“That would be the best thing in the world,” Joran replied.

“You’re the only one who can help.”

“If I had a million dollars, I would look into Natalee’s disappearance myself,” Joran snapped. With a scoff, he announced he was not going to implicate his father after all. Nor was he going to produce evidence against the two police officers/co-conspirators.

“Why won’t you tell us the truth?” Greta pressured.

“Because the truth hurts,” Joran growled and ripped the microphone from his collar, threatening to end the interview immediately. The meltdown occurred in the session’s first twenty minutes.

Steph, who had been operating both cameras, turned them off to pursue Joran. He found him in the second room of the suite and coaxed him back with the deliverance of a stiff drink.

The interview resumed, beginning with Joran’s implications of his father and the two Aruban authorities. After he confessed to his father—that Natalee had been abducted in a boat by his casino contact—his father was compelled to pay $50,000 to two savvy policemen who knew of the event. Joran said he and his father discussed the shakedown soon to be exposed in the secret recordings about to be placed in Greta’s care. The recordings would also show Joran’s desire to confess to authorities. However, his father would be heard advising him against such a move.

At the end of the interview, Joran took his cash payment and disappeared from the suite, bidding them farewell. Greta and Steph were left with three audiotapes and an envelope. The envelope was promised to contain irrefutable proof that a wire transfer had occurred between the sex trader and Joran for $10,000. This $10,000 was hush money, above and beyond the $10,000 cash he had received for handing over Natalee in the first place.

As Greta and her producer were waiting at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport to return to the United States, Greta received a text message from the Dutch exile. “Everything I told you was a lie,” he wrote. “I did it just for the money. I’m sorry.”

Greta turned to Steph to ask him what he thought.

“I think in the text Joran is telling the truth,” he answered.

Back in New York, Greta had the materials authenticated. Although a wire transaction for $10,000 had indeed taken place, the document Joran provided left unclear who had sent the money and under what circumstances. Media outlets had admittedly wired Joran $10,000 on various occasions to secure “licensed” interviews and this was potentially one of those transfers.

As for the audiotapes, the experts hired by Fox News were divided. One thought they were authentic, while another believed without a doubt that they were doctored. Either way, fake or real, truth or lies, Joran had been willing to sell out his own father for a fistful of cash.

Fox News dispatched Steph and a legal analyst, Jim Hammer, to Aruba to see if they would be able to get a reaction from Paulus van der Sloot regarding Joran’s latest revelations. Hammer was the former head of the homicide unit of the San Francisco district attorney’s office and had joined the cable news network in 2005.

In Thailand, Joran had confided to Steph that he was no longer in contact with his father, but he had not elaborated. But that did not preclude a reaction in Aruba from Paulus.

Armed with a transcript of the audiotapes, the two men staked out Paulus’s law office in Oranjestad. The elder Van der Sloot had abandoned his dream of becoming a judge after his son’s clash with the law and had gone into private practice instead, teaming with Joran’s criminal attorney, Antonio Carlo. His office was located in a low-slung, yellow-and-blue cement structure with a red tile roof in downtown Oranjestad.

Jim Hammer managed to catch Paulus’s attention as he tried to enter his law office. The newsman barked that Joran had been located in Thailand, and did Paulus have a reaction to his son’s latest claims.

Steph operated the camera that captured Paulus’s face dropping in the unexpected confrontation. He looked queasy as he ducked into his building. But Hammer was able to thrust a transcript of Greta’s interview into his hand.

In spite of Joran’s text message that everything he had confessed in his Fox exclusive was a lie, the interview was broadcast four months later anyway. Greta Van Susteren began the piece with a disclaimer and a warning. She enticed viewers with the pledge of a “surprise ending.” As promised, the surprise was revealed during the show’s wrap up. Joran had sent her a text that everything previously taped and then aired moments ago had all been lies.

Joran’s attorney during his civil case in New York in 2006, Joe Tacopina, was critical of the interview and the tactics and the negotiations to procure it in his own interview with Greta.

“You paid him for a tape that he made and wound up getting an hour interview with him,” Joe said on air. “And so be it, Greta. Great TV, great ratings.”

“Do you have a problem with that?” Greta asked.

“Yes, I do have a problem with it, Greta, because if you offered Joran $10,000 tomorrow and asked him to tell you a fifth story, he would do it. Clearly, he’s a sick kid,” Tacopina remarked.

He went on to shore up Joran’s innocence in Natalee’s disappearance. “But I still tell you, I stand by the notion that the investigation into the disappearance of Natalee Holloway has not led to Joran. That’s the bottom line. No one expects anyone to believe anything this kid has to say anymore. Quite frankly, he’s on the verge of sociopath.…”

*   *   *

Not long after Joran’s meeting with Greta Van Susteren in July, Peter de Vries, Joran’s nemesis, staged another sting captured by hidden cameras.

This time, the video recordings show Joran acting as a recruiter in a sex-trafficking operation. The setting is a guest room in the Landmark Hotel, a five-star high-rise lodging located on Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok.