Beth Holloway has spoken out about the moment she confronted the man who killed her daughter.
Beth Holloway, 62, sat down with NBC News last week to discuss the Netflix documentary “Taken: Natalee Holloway,” which revisits the 2005 disappearance of her 18-year-old daughter Natalee during a high school graduation trip to Aruba. The three-part series, released this month, arrives nearly two decades after Natalee vanished and follows Beth’s relentless pursuit of answers across multiple countries and legal systems.
“I finally have a conclusion. There’s a finale,” Beth said in the interview. “It took me 18 years to get the answers.”
The Alabama mother flew to Aruba within hours of learning Natalee had gone missing on May 30, 2005. Once there, she quickly encountered Joran van der Sloot, then a 17-year-old local who had been with Natalee the night she disappeared. Beth said she immediately sensed his involvement.
“My initial interaction with Joran was another moment of, ‘He knows. He knows what happened to her,'” she recalled.
Van der Sloot was questioned multiple times in the years following Natalee’s disappearance but was never charged in Aruba due to lack of evidence. He was already serving a 28-year prison sentence in Peru for the 2010 murder of Stephany Flores, 21, when he finally admitted to killing Natalee in 2023. The confession came as part of a plea deal in a separate U.S. Federal case.
Beth described the admission as both devastating and necessary. “The torturous part is the not knowing, and as shocking and as torturous as it is to hear this, it is finally a relief to know that’s what I had been searching for for 18 years,” she said. “I had to know, no matter how brutal it was. I needed to know what happened.”
She called the confession “a long time coming.”
The path to that admission involved years of legal maneuvering and what Beth’s attorney, John Q. Kelly, has described as an elaborate extortion scheme. Van der Sloot contacted Kelly seeking $250,000 in exchange for information about the location of Natalee’s remains. Kelly traveled to Aruba to deliver a $25,000 down payment, footage of which appears in the Netflix documentary. The information van der Sloot provided proved false.
Beth subsequently sued him for wire fraud and extortion in Alabama federal court. A judge sentenced him to 20 years, to be served concurrently with his Peruvian murder sentence. He will remain imprisoned until at least 2045.
Beth has said the Netflix documentary represents the first complete account of her two-decade ordeal. “But justice takes a lot of work, and I felt like now’s the time to tell, for the first time, a comprehensive and conclusive story of what happened to Natalee and her journey of 20 years,” she explained.
Natalee Holloway was last seen leaving an Aruba nightclub with van der Sloot and two other local men, brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, in the early hours of May 30, 2005. She failed to appear for her return flight to Alabama later that day. Extensive searches of the island and surrounding waters found no trace of her body, and the case became one of the most heavily covered missing-person investigations in modern media history.