Beth Holloway has revealed how she confronted her daughter’s killer face-to-face within hours of arriving in Aruba.
The Alabama mother, now in her sixties, rushed to the Caribbean island in May 2005 after 18-year-old Natalee Holloway vanished during a high school graduation trip. Beth located Joran van der Sloot, then 17, at his family home alongside his father, Paul, and immediately pressed him for answers about the missing teen.
“I decided, ‘Tag, you’re it,'” Beth said onscreen in the new Netflix docuseries “Taken: Natalee Holloway.”
She had spotted a grey Honda parked outside the residence — the same vehicle Natalee’s friends described seeing her enter on the night she disappeared. Beth recalled staring at the car and thinking, “Could Natalee be in that trunk? Could she be in that van der Sloot home?”
Clutching her daughter’s photograph, Beth demanded action from the teenage suspect. She told him, “give her back now!”
Van der Sloot allegedly responded, “what do you want me to do?” while repeatedly striking his own chest. His father, Paul, who was also present, appeared to urge candor from his son. Beth claimed Paul told him, “‘just say it,’ as if to say, ‘tell them the truth.'”
That prompting, she said, produced van der Sloot’s first detailed account of the evening. He allegedly claimed he had kissed Natalee on a beach, then driven her to her hotel, where she stumbled from the car, struck her head, and was assisted inside by security personnel.
“I don’t know what parts of that [account] are true, but I knew that he knew what happened to her,” Beth said, adding that she felt certain the story was a lie.
Beth’s suspicion had already been triggered by another discovery. Before the confrontation, she learned that van der Sloot had misrepresented himself to Natalee’s friends, claiming he was a tourist rather than a local Aruban resident. “Had told Natalee’s friends that he was a tourist just like them — and now, we’re learning he was some Aruban local,” she recounted.
Aruban authorities arrested van der Sloot ten days after Natalee’s disappearance. Gerold Dompig, the island’s police chief at the time, appeared in the docuseries to describe the interrogation challenges. “Normally, underaged suspects break down under interrogation…But, Joran was very difficult to interrogate,” Dompig said. The chief explained that van der Sloot offered conflicting accounts of his night with Natalee, noting, “He liked being the dominant one, the center of attention…he changed his story I think 40 times.”
The lack of physical evidence forced Aruban police to release van der Sloot that September. Natalee’s body was never recovered despite years of intensive media coverage and search efforts.
Beth’s early intuition about van der Sloot’s danger proved prophetic. In 2010, he murdered 21-year-old Peruvian business student Stephany Flores Ramírez, exactly five years after Natalee’s disappearance. Van der Sloot pleaded guilty in 2012 and received a 28-year prison sentence in Peru.
“It was devastating,” Beth said onscreen. “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.”
The FBI eventually extradited van der Sloot, now 39, to Alabama in 2023. Under polygraph examination, he confessed to bludgeoning Natalee to death on an Aruba beach and disposing of her body in the ocean. He secured a concurrent sentence with his Peruvian term in exchange for providing this information.
Van der Sloot remains incarcerated in Peru.
“Taken: Natalee Holloway” is now streaming on Netflix.