Beth Holloway, mother of murdered Alabama graduate Natalee Holloway, says she confronted her daughter’s killer face to face within days of Natalee’s 2005 disappearance in Aruba — nearly two decades before he admitted to the crime.
The account comes from the new Netflix docuseries “Taken: Natalee Holloway.” Natalee, 18, vanished during a graduation trip to Aruba. She was last seen getting into a grey Honda with then-17-year-old Joran van der Sloot after a night out with friends. Van der Sloot was the main suspect from the start.
“I decided, ‘Tag, you’re it,'” Beth said on the series, describing her decision to confront him directly.
Beth traveled to van der Sloot’s home in Aruba and questioned him alongside his father, Paul, a lawyer. She said her gut told her van der Sloot was lying. During the confrontation, she claims Paul van der Sloot told his son to “just say it” — urging him toward the truth.
“That’s where [van der Sloot] gives the first detailed story as to what happened,” Beth recalled. He told her he kissed Natalee on a beach, dropped her at her hotel, and that she stumbled out of the car, hit her head, and was helped inside by security guards.
“I don’t know what parts of that [account] are true, but I knew that he knew what happened to her,” Beth said.
Before the confrontation, Beth grew suspicious after learning van der Sloot had told Natalee’s friends he was a tourist, when in fact he was a local. Outside his house, she spotted the grey Honda her daughter’s friends had described.
“I looked at that grey Honda, and I thought, ‘Could Natalee be in that trunk? Could she be in that van der Sloot home?'” Beth recalled.
Clutching a photo of her daughter, she said she told van der Sloot, “give her back now!” She says he responded, “what do you want me to do?” while repeatedly hitting his own chest.
An Interrogation That Went Nowhere
Aruban police arrested van der Sloot ten days after Natalee disappeared. Gerold Dompig, Aruba’s police chief at the time, said on the series that most underage suspects break down under questioning — van der Sloot did not.
“He liked being the dominant one, the center of attention,” Dompig said, noting van der Sloot changed his story roughly 40 times. By September 2005, police released him for lack of evidence. Natalee’s body was never found.
A Second Murder, Then a Confession
In 2012, van der Sloot pleaded guilty to the 2010 murder of 21-year-old Peruvian student Stephany Flores Ramírez, killed five years to the date of Natalee’s murder. He was sentenced to 28 years in a Peruvian prison.
“It was devastating,” Beth said. “Another young girl has lost her life… I knew he would kill again. He’s just a time bomb.”
The FBI extradited van der Sloot to Alabama in 2023. Under a polygraph, he confessed to bludgeoning Natalee to death on an Aruba beach and dumping her body in the ocean. He took a plea deal exchanging the confession for a sentence to run concurrent with his Peruvian term. Van der Sloot, now 39, remains imprisoned in Peru.
“Taken: Natalee Holloway” is streaming now on Netflix.
