Joran van der Sloot admits to killing Natalee Holloway, judge says
Crime
A federal judge said that Joran van der Sloot had confessed to killing Ms. Holloway in agreeing to plead guilty to extortion and wire fraud charges, The Associated Press reported.
The man who has long been linked to the 2005 disappearance of American teenager Natalee Holloway described in court documents released Wednesday brutally attacking her on a beach in Aruba after she rejected his advances.
It was the first time that details of Holloway’s disappearance have been made public, and it came after Joran van der Sloot, a 36-year-old Dutchman, agreed to provide “full, complete, accurate and truthful information” about it in exchange for a 20-year sentence on extortion and wire fraud charges.
As part of a plea agreement, van der Sloot pleaded guilty Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama in Birmingham to charges that he had tried to extort Holloway’s mother, prosecutors said. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
In court, Judge Anna M. Manasco said that as part of the sentencing decision, van der Sloot had confessed to killing Holloway and disposing of her remains, The Associated Press reported.
Van der Sloot has been serving a 28-year prison sentence in Peru for the 2010 murder of a 21-year-old Peruvian student, Stephany Flores. He will have to return to Peru to finish his sentence for that crime as well as another for a drug-smuggling charge.
“You have brutally murdered, in separate instances years apart, two young women who refused your sexual advances,” Manasco said, according to the AP.
Van der Sloot has never been charged in Holloway’s death or her disappearance while on a trip with her high school class in Aruba, the Caribbean island nation and former Dutch colony where van der Sloot was living at the time.
Beth Holloway, Natalee’s mother, said at a news conference after the hearing that van der Sloot had “finally confessed” and that more details would be made public.
“As far as I am concerned it’s over. It’s over,” she said. “I’m satisfied knowing that he did it; he did it alone, and he disposed of her alone.”
Natalee Holloway was 18 when she disappeared May 30, 2005, after a night out during the trip . She has never been found, and a judge declared her legally dead in 2012. The unsolved case has been the subject of intense public interest, especially in the Netherlands and the United States.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
