What happened to Natalee Holloway? Inside her disappearance and why her body has never been found
Natalee Holloway with her friend Claire Fierman in an undated photograph featured in ‘Taken: Natalee Holloway’Credit: NETFLIXKey Points
18-year-old Natalee Holloway went missing during a trip to Aruba in 2005.
The prime suspect in her disappearance, Joran van der Sloot, gave conflicting accounts of what happened before confessing to her murder in 2023. He has never been charged with the crime.
The new Netflix documentary series Taken: Natalee Holloway revisits the infamous case.
It’s been over two decades since Natalee Holloway went missing during a trip to Aruba. Despite a murder confession from the prime suspect in the case, questions still linger about the teenager’s disappearance.
Holloway was 18 years old in May 2005, when she joined her high school classmates for a graduation trip to the island. On the last night of the trip, Holloway disappeared after riding off in a car with three men, including Joran van der Sloot, who almost immediately became a prime suspect in the investigation. In the two decades that followed, van der Sloot was arrested — and released — multiple times, gave conflicting accounts of Holloway’s death, and extorted her mother, Beth, in exchange for purported information about her daughter’s remains.
The disappearance of Holloway has been the subject of extensive media coverage that includes several TV specials and documentaries, the latest of which, Netflix’s Taken: Natalee Holloway, features new interviews with Beth, as well as her friends and law enforcement officials who worked on the case. Although van der Sloot ultimately confessed and is currently serving time in prison, he has never been charged with murdering Holloway. Now, Beth is pursuing a new legal effort in the Netherlands to hold him accountable for her daughter’s death.
Here’s everything you about Holloway’s disappearance, van der Sloot’s involvement in the case, and why the missing teenager’s remains have never been found.
Who was Natalee Holloway?
Natalee Holloway with her mother Beth in a photograph featured in ‘Taken: Natalee Holloway’Credit: NETFLIX
Holloway was born on Oct. 21, 1986, in Tennessee to parents Beth and Dave, who divorced in 1993, according to her father’s memoir, Aruba: The Tragic Untold Story of Natalee Holloway and Corruption in Paradise.
In 2000, after marrying George “Jug” Twitty, Beth moved with her children to Mountain Brook, just outside of Birmingham, Ala., where Holloway attended Mountain Brook High School. “As Natalee completed her senior year, we were all excited about her next stepping stone in life,” Dave writes in his memoir. “She was prepared to go off to the University of Alabama on a full scholarship to major in premed after graduating with honors and a 4.15 grade point average.”
According to her father, Holloway “participated in numerous extracurricular activities, including the dance team and the Bible Club, and she was a member of both the math and Spanish honor societies.” In addition to her responsibilities at school, Holloway worked part-time at a health food store and, per NBC News, volunteered with the American Field Service, where she helped foreign-exchange students, as well as Natural Helpers, a peer support group.
What happened to Natalee Holloway?
Natalee Holloway in a photograph featured in ‘Taken: Natalee Holloway’Credit: NETFLIX
In February 2005, Holloway asked her parents for permission to join about 100 of her classmates on an annual graduation trip to Aruba that May. Holloway’s parents were of different minds about the trip. “It’s hard to admit it now, but at that time, we didn’t have any feelings of trepidation,” Beth says in Taken: Natalee Holloway. “I trusted Natalee. I mean, it’s a rite of passage.”
Dave was less convinced. “I was apprehensive about Natalee taking this type of trip, and I tried to talk her out of it,” he writes in his memoir. “I did not like the idea of her traveling that far away with so many other students and so few chaperones.” Ultimately, Dave gave his daughter a graduation gift equivalent to half the cost of the trip, and on May 26 she traveled with her classmates to Aruba, where they stayed at a Holiday Inn resort.
Even though the trip wasn’t “sanctioned” by the high school, Holloway’s friend Madison Greer tells producers of the Netflix doc that “the chaperones ended up being teachers,” who were younger and viewed the trip as a vacation for themselves as well. “They said, ‘We’re here for emergencies,’” Greer adds, “but they weren’t necessarily there to, like, babysit us.”
On May 29, their final night in Aruba, Greer says that she went out with a group of friends that included Holloway to a local casino, where they met 17-year-old Joran van der Sloot. “He said he was from Holland. He was a tourist, in college, on vacation,” recalls Greer, who says she invited van der Sloot to join them at their next destination, a popular bar called Carlos ‘n Charlie’s. When he arrived, van der Sloot began chatting with Holloway.
Later that night, when the bar closed, Greer says she wasn’t concerned when one of their friends saw Holloway get into a car with van der Sloot and two other men, because taxis were not clearly marked in Aruba. Those men were brothers Deepak Kalpoe, 21, and Satish Kalpoe, 18. “There’s no doubt in my mind that [Natalee] thought, ‘[The Kalpoe brothers] are local taxi drivers, and they’re gonna take me where we want to go, and then [back] to the hotel,’” Greer explains. (The Kalpoe brothers were never prosecuted in relation to Holloway’s disappearance and declined to speak with producers of Netflix’s Taken.)
The following morning, on May 30, Beth received a phone call from a number she didn’t recognize. “One of the organizers from the trip comes on the phone and tells me, ‘Natalee did not show up at the airport. No one has seen her, and she is missing,’” Beth recalls in Taken. “I knew instantly that I had to get Aruba to be there where she was. I had to go get her.” Holloway’s friends recounted the events of the previous evening and gave van der Sloot’s name to Beth, who discovered that he was actually a local resident and not a tourist, as he had claimed.
“The only thing going through my mind was, ‘Find this guy, get Natalee, bring her home,” says Beth, who accompanied police to van der Sloot’s home, where she eventually encountered the teenager and his father, Paulus. In a recording of his statement to police, van der Sloot claimed that he took Holloway to a beach, that they kissed, and that he drove her back to her hotel, where she stumbled out of the car and hit her head. He said that two security guards from the hotel then helped her inside.
“I thought, I don’t know what parts of that [story] are true, but I knew that he knew what happened to her,” Beth says.
What happened during the investigation into Natalee Holloway’s disappearance?
Beth Holloway in ‘Taken: Natalee Holloway’Credit: NETFLIX
Police initially arrested two former security guards who had worked at a nearby hotel, but released them after security footage contradicted van der Sloot’s account of returning Holloway to the Holiday Inn. As Beth recalls in Taken, she was growing frustrated with the efforts of local police and felt that their investigation was not progressing quickly enough. Gerold Dompig, who was the deputy police chief in Aruba at that time, explains that the officers had to “exclude” other possibilities.
Van der Sloot wasn’t arrested until June 9, when both he and the Kalpoe brothers were detained. “We needed to find that stuff which you can use to corner the suspect,” Dompig explains in reference to van der Sloot. “We hoped that he would start to break down.” Unfortunately, he says, “Joran was very difficult” during the interrogation. “He liked being the dominant one, the center of attention. He changed his story I think 40 times.”
Van der Sloot’s father, Paulus, was an attorney training to become a local judge, which made the investigation more complex. “That complicated matters seriously, because he had more visiting rights,” Dompig says in the doc. “His father being a judge in training was a problem for us, because he could give his son certain advice.” According to the former deputy police chief, that advice allegedly included Paulus telling his son “if there’s no body, there’s no crime.”
On Sept. 3, van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers were released from custody. “The main thing that was lacking in this case was that we never found Natalee,” says Dompig.
In November 2007, van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers were arrested again based on the discovery of new evidence. Prosecutors said the three men were suspected of “involvement in the voluntary manslaughter of Natalee Holloway or causing serious bodily harm to Natalee Holloway, resulting in her death,” per CNN. Prosecutors initially declined to disclose the nature of the new evidence to the press, and van der Sloot and the brothers were subsequently released in December 2007.
In an official statement, the Aruban Public Prosecutor’s Office said there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that “a crime of violence against Natalee Holloway had been committed nor that her death has been caused by involuntary actions by either of the suspects.”
Did Joran van der Sloot confess to killing Natalee Holloway?
Joran van der Sloot is escorted by agents in custody in a photo featured in ‘Taken: Natalee Holloway’Credit: NETFLIX
On multiple occasions between 2005 and 2016, van der Sloot offered conflicting explanations and confessions regarding Holloway’s disappearance. In 2008, van der Sloot was surreptitiously recorded on camera telling Patrick van der Eem that Holloway had suffered an apparent seizure and died, after which van der Sloot asked a friend to dump her body in the ocean. “She’ll never be found,” van der Sloot said in the footage, which aired on Dutch TV, according to the New York Daily News. Van der Sloot later said that he lied and was only telling van er Eem “what he wanted to hear.”
Later that year, van der Sloot made an appearance on a Fox News program hosted by Greta Van Susteren, who had previously traveled to Aruba in 2005 to cover the search for Holloway. Van der Sloot told Van Susteren that he sold Holloway to sex traffickers for $10,000. Just eight hours later, van der Sloot sent an email to producers in which he claimed that he lied during the interview.
Then, in February 2010, ABC News reported that van der Sloot had confessed yet again. Dutch tabloid Telegraaf published a story saying it had viewed a recorded interview between van der Sloot and Dutch television station RTL 5, in which he claimed that Holloway and an unnamed accomplice had been drinking and using cocaine at a friend’s house on the night of her disappearance. He said that Holloway fell from a balcony while dancing and that her death was an accident.
“We looked down and saw her lying there. Yes, there was blood. I think she fell on the ground with her head first,” van der Sloot reportedly said. “Her chin was to one side and I turned it the other way. There was blood on the ground too. There was no life.” Reached for comment, the Justice Department in Aruba said it had already investigated the claim and determined it wasn’t true.
Joran Van der Sloot is pictured during a hearing at the Lurigancho prison in Lima, Peru, on Jan. 13, 2012Credit: STR/AFP via Getty
Amid these confessions, in 2010 van der Sloot contacted Holloway’s family and offered to reveal what happened to the missing teenager in exchange for $250,000. “I thought it was complete bulls---,” Beth’s attorney, John Q. Kelly, says in Taken. “I knew he had no intention of giving any truthful information whatsoever, but I told Beth there might be a play to get him trapped with extortion and fraud charge.”
After coordinating with the FBI, Kelly traveled to Aruba in May to meet van der Sloot, who received a $25,000 payment from Kelly and Beth. He claimed that he got into a fight with Holloway, who died after hitting her head on a rock, and that his father buried her body in the foundation of a home that was under construction in 2005. Kelly and the FBI quickly determined this story was also untrue. “I pretended like I believed this,” Kelly explains. “In theory, Joran took twenty-five grand, had a good laugh, and went about his merry way. It didn’t bother me at all, because I knew how it was going to play out.”
On May 30, the five-year anniversary of Holloway’s disappearance, a 21-year-old woman named Stephany Flores Ramírez was murdered in Peru. Several days later, van der Sloot was arrested in Chile and subsequently confessed to police in Peru that he murdered Ramírez. “It was devastating,” Beth says in the Netflix doc. “Another young girl has lost her life, five years to the date that he murdered Natalee. I mean, it was sickening. I knew he would kill again. He’s just a time bomb.”
Van der Sloot pleaded guilty to the murder of Ramírez, and in January 2012 he was sentenced to 28 years in prison. In 2016, while serving his sentence in a Peruvian prison, van der Sloot made an additional confession that was recorded and obtained by RadarOnline and The National Enquirer. Van der Sloot said that he “always lied to the police” in Aruba and that he was “guilty” in the Holloway disappearance.
Was Natalee Holloway’s body ever found?
Beth Holloway participates in the launch of the Natalee Holloway Resource Center on June 8, 2010, in Washington, DCCredit: Mark Wilson/Getty
Sadly, Holloway’s remains have never been recovered. In 2011, Holloway’s father, Dave, filed a petition to have his daughter declared legally dead in Alabama. Beth initially opposed the petition, which a judge granted in January 2012. In a statement to PEOPLE, her attorney said, “Beth’s position is that if there’s that one sliver of hope that she can carry in her heart that Natalee might be alive somewhere, she wants to do that.”
The case took another turn in 2023, when the Peruvian government agreed to temporarily extradite van der Sloot to the United States to face federal charges related to extorting Holloway’s family. Though he initially pleaded not guilty to charges of extortion and wire fraud, van der Sloot later agreed to a plea deal: in exchange for a reduced sentence, he would plead guilty to the charges and confess to killing Holloway in 2005.
“Initially, I told the FBI agents Alex and Scott, ‘Tell Joran, Ms. Holloway says f--- you. I just want you to rot in prison for the rest of your life,’” Beth recalls in Taken. Unable to shake the feeling that she might finally learn what happened to her daughter, Beth agreed to the arrangement.
During a recorded interview conducted as part of the plea agreement, van der Sloot said that he was on a beach with Holloway when she rejected his advances. “She ends up kneeing me in the crotch,” he says in a recording featured in Taken. “I get up and kick her extremely hard in the face. She’s laying down, unconscious, possibly even dead.” Van der Sloot explains that he picked up a nearby cinder block and used it to “smash her head in... completely.” He then claims that he took Holloway’s body into the ocean, walked until the water was up to his knees, and released her “into the sea.”
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“Hearing the horrific and heinous crime he’s committed at that moment that she died, that was devastating,” Beth says. “But I knew he was telling the truth.” Van der Sloot was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison, to be served concurrently with his sentence in Peru.
Retired FBI agent Michael Leverock, who performed the polygraph exam, acknowledges there were concerns with van der Sloot’s latest confession. “The one part of the story that everyone had a problem with is that three yards out into the water, it just doesn’t sound right,” he explains. “Generally, you can’t just put somebody in the ocean. They’re gonna wash up.” But he adds that he believes van der Sloot because Leverock had recently taken a trip to Aruba, where he was told that the area of the island where Holloway’s remains were allegedly disposed of has “an offshore wind,” so “if something happens and you’re way out there, you’re not coming back in.”
Although Van der Sloot has never been charged with Holloway’s murder and her body has never been found, Beth recalls feeling a sense of relief following the confession. “I remember thinking, ‘My nightmare is over,’” she says. “The not knowing is the most torturous part.”
But Beth’s pursuit of justice isn’t over. In a November 2026 interview with Netflix, Beth said she had been working with Dutch attorneys to pursue murder charges. She added that a Dutch prosecutor was in the process of gathering documents related to the case. While van der Sloot has yet to be charged with Holloway’s murder, Beth remained determined to hold him accountable. The nightmare’s over, right? But I’m not done yet,” she said.
Where can I watch Taken: Natalee Holloway?
Taken: Natalee Holloway is available to stream on Netflix.
Source: Crime
