Featured Image Credit: Family handout/ERNESTO BENAVIDES/AFP/GettyImages
Topics: True Crime, Travel, Life, Real Life, US News
Gregory Robinson
Topics: True Crime, Travel, Life, Real Life, US News
***Warning: this article contains graphic content.***
The mother of Natalee Holloway has spoken out after her daughter’s killer finally admitted to her murder.
Nearly two decades after Alabama teenager, Natalee Holloway, went missing in Aruba, the prime suspect, Joran van der Sloot, admitted to the crime to Holloway's mother.
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Holloway vanished on May 30, 2005 while on a trip to Aruba.
She lived in Mountain Brook, Alabama and graduated from Mountain Brook High School on May 24, 2005, days before the trip, for which she travelled with other graduates.
She was last seen leaving a bar with Joran van der Sloot, now 35, who was later identified as a suspect in her disappearance. However, he was never charged in connection with her death.
Holloway's remains have never been found. She was declared legally dead in 2012.
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Convicted murderer van der Sloot is currently serving a 28-year sentence in a Peruvian prison after he killed Stephany Flores Ramírez in the country in 2010.
Ramírez was found in a hotel room in Lima that was registered under van der Sloot's name.
He then went on to confess to her murder in 2012 and has been behind bars ever since.
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After being charged with wire fraud and extortion, van der Sloot was then extradited from Peru to the United States back in June, and is currently being held at the Hoover City Jail in Alabama, which is where he took a plea deal and confessed to Holloway’s murder. He did so after agreeing to share details about Holloway’s murder and what he did with her body.
“He finally confessed that he killed Natalee. He described when and how he killed her,” Holloway’s mother, Beth, said, per Inside Edition.
In a transcript of a recorded interview with was submitted to the court, and released on Wednesday (18 October), reveals the brutal way he murdered the teenager.
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“I’m with Natalee walking along the beach, we start kissing each other, she tells me ‘no.’ She tells me she doesn't want me to. I insist. She ends up kneeing me in the crotch. I get up and I kick her extremely hard in the face. Right next to her there’s a cinder block. I smash her head in with it completely,” van der Sloot said. “I half pull, and half walk with her in the ocean. I walk up to about my knees into the ocean and I push her off into the sea.”
When van der Sloot appeared in the courtroom in Birmingham, Alabama, he issued an apology to the Holloway family and said he hoped his statement would give the family some closure.
“You look like hell,” Beth told her daughter’s killer in court. “I do not see how you’re going to make it. You are a killer and I want you to remember that every time that jail door slams.”