Joran van der Sloot sent chilling emails claiming Natalee Holloway was “still there” before his 2023 confession.
The Dutchman, now 39, contacted attorney John Q. Kelly in March 2010 with a brazen demand for cash in exchange for the location of the Alabama teenager’s remains. Holloway had vanished nearly five years earlier during a graduation trip to Aruba, and van der Sloot had long remained the prime suspect without facing charges.
In the new Netflix documentary “Taken: Natalee Holloway,” the actual messages are revealed for the first time. The first email to Kelly read: “Hi John, I will take you to Natalee. In return I want to receive $250,000.”
A follow-up message grew even more disturbing in its specificity. “John, I went by the location myself last week to pay respects and from what I felt and how the place looked she is still there,” van der Sloot wrote. A third promised: “I will take you to the place where Natalee is and once you see it you will understand a lot more.”
Kelly, interviewed for the three-part series, recalled his immediate skepticism. “I thought it was complete [expletive],” he said. “I knew he had no intention of giving any truthful information whatsoever.”
The attorney nonetheless saw an opportunity. “But I told Beth that there might be play there to get him trapped on an extortion wire fraud charge,” Kelly continued. Beth Holloway, Natalee’s mother, agreed to cooperate with federal authorities in an elaborate sting operation.
On May 10, 2010, Beth wired $15,000 to van der Sloot while Kelly handed over an additional $10,000 in cash at an Aruba hotel. Two FBI agents monitored the exchange from a nearby room. Never-before-seen footage in the documentary captures van der Sloot signing what he believed was a binding agreement promising to reveal Natalee’s whereabouts.
“I had to pretend like I thought this was a binding agreement,” Kelly explained in the doc. “I knew [Beth] wasn’t going to pay him the other $225,000. Because if he disclosed Natalee’s whereabouts he was going to be arrested for it, and if he didn’t disclose what happened, he was going to be arrested anyway for extortion and wire fraud.”
The information van der Sloot provided proved worthless. He claimed Holloway’s body was concealed in a house foundation, a lie quickly debunked by FBI investigators. He later acknowledged the tip was fabricated.
Less than a month after the sting, on June 3, 2010, van der Sloot was arrested in Chile for the murder of 21-year-old Stephany Flores Ramírez in a Lima hotel room. He was extradited to Peru and pleaded guilty in January 2012, receiving a 28-year prison sentence for that killing.
The extortion case against him remained dormant for years while he served time in Peru, where an additional 18 years were later tacked onto his sentence for drug trafficking behind bars.
Everything shifted on October 18, 2023, when van der Sloot appeared in federal court in Alabama and finally admitted what had happened to Natalee Holloway. As part of a plea agreement on one count of extortion and one count of wire fraud, he was required to give a truthful account of the 18-year-old’s death.
During that hearing, van der Sloot confessed to killing Holloway after she rejected his sexual advances following their departure from an Aruba nightclub. He stated that he kicked her in the face during an altercation, then bludgeoned her head with a cinder block. He dragged her body to the sea and pushed it into deeper water. Her remains have never been found.
He received a 20-year federal sentence for the financial crimes, to run concurrently with his Peruvian murder term. He has never been charged with Holloway’s murder itself.
Holloway had graduated from Mountain Brook High School just days before the fateful trip. On the final night of the celebration with fellow graduates, she left a club with van der Sloot, then 17, and was never seen again. The case consumed international media attention for nearly two decades as her family pursued answers and justice through multiple legal channels.
Van der Sloot currently resides at the maximum-security Challapalca Prison in Peru, where the extreme altitude and isolation have drawn scrutiny from human rights observers.
The Netflix documentary “Taken: Natalee Holloway” is now streaming.