Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (17 page)

At 8:35
A.M.
, Ricardo Flores emerged from his house, flanked by his two sons. Only three hours earlier he had watched helplessly as his only daughter’s body was wheeled from a tourist hotel. Now, he was determined to see that her killer be brought to justice.

Standing in front of the mahogany door of the family’s garage, Ricardo delivered his message.

“I am doing this out of consideration for other families,” Ricardo began, “so that this does not happen to them.”

Because of the notoriety of his daughter’s alleged assailant, Stephany’s murder was fast becoming an international story. Television crews from the United States and Holland joined the local journalists standing on the other side of the security gate surrounding the Floreses’ home.

His tone was calm and monotonic as he explained to reporters what he knew about Stephany’s last evening: She had been with friends. She met Van der Sloot in a casino. He had somehow lured her back to the hotel where he murdered her. “Van der Sloot is now on the run, possibly headed to Argentina, and I need your help in bringing him back to Peru,” Ricardo lamented. “This was not the first murder he committed. He did the same thing in 2005. But because he was underage and there was no evidence, he had walked away to kill again.

“Van der Sloot was previously implicated in the murder of a teenager in Aruba,” Ricardo continued, staring directly into the cameras. “Her body was never found. This time Van der Sloot must be stopped before he kills again.

“I don’t want this to happen to other families,” Ricardo implored. “I don’t want other families to go through what we are going through now.

“I know my daughter was stabbed,” Ricardo told the cameras, his calm demeanor replaced by a tragic faraway stare. “There was definitely a struggle, but I imagine an autopsy will provide more answers.”

“This is my daughter’s killer,” he finished, holding up two photos of a teenage Joran, dressed in a lime-green striped polo shirt.

Ricardo Flores was utterly exhausted, unable to speak another word. He broke down completely in free-flowing tears and breath-choking sobs. Richie and Enrique took over the microphones.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, at Lima’s central morgue nine blocks east of the Palace of Justice, Stephany’s body had been wheeled into a chilled autopsy suite. Unlike Miraflores, the neighborhood of Santos surrounding the morgue was a desperate and violent place, a barrio of “one-sink alleys,” districts so poor that residents of the many dead-end streets shared a communal faucet for laundry, cooking, and bathing. Dressed in white lab coats, Dr. Juan Martin Villalobos and his assistant, Sergio, carefully lifted the badly decomposed corpse onto the stainless steel table in preparation for the
necropsia.

Dr. Villalobos glanced over the paperwork that accompanied the body, a three-page, handwritten, all-purpose form completed shortly before 6:00
A.M.
when the cadaver was removed from the crime scene at the Hotel Tac. Skimming through Captain Juan Callan’s crime scene notes, he read aloud for the benefit of the other three individuals in the room: Sergio, his assistant; Dr. Judith Maguiña, another forensic pathologist; and a representative from the Public Ministry.

From Callan’s notes, Dr. Villalobos read to the team that the body had been discovered on top of a blood-soaked sheet. A tennis racquet had been found amid the clothing and other items near the body, but had tested negative for blood. If the racquet had been the murder weapon, the body would have presented bruises matching the patterns and dimensions of the racquet. The coroner noted that none were present.

Callan’s notes also indicated that the body was cold to the touch. A window of the hotel room had been left open and the body temperature of the victim had dropped to room temperature. The pathologist didn’t need a form to know the victim had suffered a violent and unnatural death. Looking at the body, this was unmistakably a homicide.

Stephany’s head alone told the story of a violent struggle. Both eyes were circled in dark blue-red bruises, her nose crushed and nearly flattened. More bruises covered her cheeks and chin and a bloody, viscous fluid oozed from her left ear. There were signs of petechial hemorrhaging, small blotches created as capillaries explode, on her face. These tiny red pinpoint marks occur when pressure is applied to the neck, a classic sign of strangulation.

Hitting the record button on a small digital recorder, Villalobos announced that he was ready to begin. He started with the basic information. The twenty-one-year-old student on the table before him was dressed in a black sleeveless T-shirt, a long-sleeved beige button-down shirt “soaked in blood on the back from the neck to the bottom,” a brown bra, and red underwear. Pausing, he noted that beneath the underwear was a sanitary napkin completely soaked in blood. The victim had been menstruating.

With the assistance of his lab tech, Villalobos cut away the clothing before removing Stephany’s jewelry—a white metal watch by Rip Curl, a silver ring, and two black-and-gray pendant earrings.

Stephany’s once dark brown eyes were now protruding from their sockets. A contact lens was missing from the right eye. “Pupils are opaque, fixed, and dilated with time of death occurring between two and three days,” he dictated into the recorder. It was just a ballpark guess. With a more recent death, he would have inserted a thermometer into the liver. A temperature reading from this organ would have narrowed the window considerably, but with a stone-cold corpse, the measurement would have been useless.

Turning back to Callan’s notes, Villalobos saw that the body had remained in the same position since the time of death. This was a fairly easy conclusion to reach given the victim’s fixed lividity. When a person dies, the heart stops pumping blood. Lacking pressure, the blood begins to settle and pools in the parts of the body closest to the ground and they take on a darker hue. The victim’s coloring was consistent with a body lying on the floor in the same position for several days.

Rigor mortis, a natural stiffening of the body, which occurs in the hours immediately after death, had come and gone. Stephany’s battered corpse was limp and flaccid. Putrefaction had begun to set in and her once beautiful oval face was now a horrifying kaleidoscope of green, blue, and purple. Taking some measurements, Villalobos noted that Stephany measured five feet six inches tall and weighed 154 pounds. She appeared well nourished and hydrated and had no tattoos.

Working his way from top to bottom he found two old scars, unrelated to recent events, one on her torso and another on her right leg. Her upper body presented more recent injuries including multiple bruises predominantly to the left-hand side of her face, neck, chest, arms, and abdomen. Her straight, once luxurious, chestnut-brown hair was caked with blood. A sickening red fluid oozed from both nostrils as dried blood mixed with other secretions created when a body decomposes. Her lips appeared blue and moist to the touch. Her teeth were intact.

Bruising around the neck was consistent with strangulation. More bruises and lesions were present on her chest. Her stomach appeared distended and was covered with bruises and lesions, as well. More bruises, lesions, scrapes, and cuts covered her upper and lower extremities. The second finger on her right hand had battle injuries. She had fought hard, but in vain.

Villalobos found no sign of recent sexual activity. In fact, based on examination, Stephany Flores was a virgin.

Readying his scalpel, saw, and other forensic tools, Villalobos began the internal exam. There were no signs of trauma to the top of the cranium, but there were internal lesions on the scalp and the rear base of the skull. The soft tissue of the brain, in an advanced state of putrefaction, had turned brittle. Its degraded condition made it difficult to handle, but it was showed that the young woman had suffered devastating internal injuries. Villalobos discovered a hemorrhage to the dura mater, the tough fibrous membrane that envelops the brain and spinal cord. Another hemorrhage was found in the fossa media, home to the brain’s temporal lobes, which control speech, vision, and memory. Subarachnoid hemorrhages of the cerebellum were noted.

Essentially, blood vessels just outside of Stephany’s brain had ruptured, allowing blood to flow into the empty space between the brain and the wall of the skull. The buildup of blood would have created pressure on the brain resulting in an intense headache, nausea, vomiting, and perhaps even unconsciousness.

But Villalobos doubted the brain injuries themselves were enough to kill this young woman. Had the assailant inflicted these injuries alone, in all likelihood Stephany Flores could have been saved.

Working his way down, Villalobos probed his fingers into the muscle tissue of Stephany’s neck. There, he discovered bright red hemorrhaging lining the third, fourth, and fifth cervical vertebrae, indicating she had been choked. Although it was an ugly injury, it was not necessarily fatal. Her neck had not been broken, contrary to prematurely leaked news reports.

The actual cause of Stephany’s death was not as straightforward as Dr. Villalobos had hoped. An X-ray of her hyoid bone, a fragile bone in the neck positioned under the jaw, raised the possibility that Stephany may have been alive but unconscious for quite some time before succumbing to her internal injuries. When the horseshoe-shaped hyoid bone is broken, it almost certainly means strangulation, but Stephany’s hyoid was intact.

Removing the liver, spleen, lungs, and pancreas to send off to the lab for pathologic study, Dr. Villalobos discovered a white, plastic gastric band in the young woman’s stomach. Stephany, it appeared, had struggled so much with her weight that she had a surgically placed bariatric band.

Toxicology results from the samples revealed the presence of amphetamines. The discovery of amphetamines in Stephany’s system prompted a range of speculation and theories. The first speculation, leaked soon after the discovery, suggested a date-rape drug scenario, supported by video footage of Stephany entering Joran’s hotel room. In the film, her motion is slow and shuffling. Her submissive position behind Joran reinforced the possibility of being drugged.

Amphetamines, however, are not a classic drug associated with date rape. In fact, amphetamines are stimulants with effects just the opposite of sluggishness and lethargy. More likely, Stephany’s behavior on the video was the consequence of extreme fatigue and alcohol consumption. The tape in the hotel is time-stamped 5:20
A.M.
And the casino footage had shown her sipping a glass of wine.

A more nefarious theory explored the possibility that Stephany was a recreational drug user or even a drug abuser. In the world of drugs, assassinations and murders are commonplace and debts are paid with lives. A blister pack for medication found in Stephany’s Jeep lent support to this idea. However, additional tests for cocaine, barbiturates, marijuana, and other illegal drugs came back negative.

The blister pack in the Jeep contained nothing more than over-the-counter cold medicine, and made sense—before she went out, Stephany had complained to her father about not feeling well.

The presence of amphetamines most likely had no bearing on the criminal investigation. The gastric band in Stephany’s stomach was evidence enough of her strong desire to control her weight. Amphetamines are commonly used as appetite suppressants; therefore, with the most popular uses for over-the-counter amphetamines being energy enhancement and weight loss, the mystery of the drug’s presence in Stephany’s system could be resolved.

The deteriorated condition of Stephany’s body made it impossible to get a blood sample from her remains. Instead, a sample was obtained from the blood-soaked shirt found on her body. Stephany was type A. No other blood but hers was found at the crime scene. If her assailant had been injured during the violent struggle in Room 309, he had left behind no blood evidence.

Perhaps the most disturbing finding in the autopsy was the possibility that Stephany may have been drifting in and out of consciousness for hours after her attack, helplessly lying on the hotel room floor. Her arms, fingers, and legs were blue and cyanotic, indicating that the deficiency of oxygen in her blood occurred
before
she died, rather than
after
she died.

Combined with the discovery of blood traces in the shower stall, the scene became complete: the horrifying scenario had Joran showering off the evidence as Stephany, alive but barely conscious, lay on the hotel room floor.

As for cause of death, Villalobos’s conclusion was surprisingly noncommittal. He explained that Stephany’s body had remained undiscovered for two to three days, had been in bad shape and had been, in his words, “in a state of putrefaction that makes an autopsy difficult.”

He concluded that Stephany’s death had been caused by the combined result of damage to the brain and cervical trauma due to choking. Villalobos also determined that the “causing agent” for Stephany’s injuries was a blunt instrument. Because the tennis racquet had been ruled out, the investigating detectives needed to reach their own conclusions regarding causing agent. All the evidence pointed to a rage killing.

Callan and his team suspected that the blunt instruments used to kill Stephany were Van der Sloot’s fists—that the Dutch traveler had savagely beaten the young woman for her cash, which he needed to gamble. After smothering her and rendering her unconscious, he posed her body to make it appear as though she had been the victim of a violent sexual assault. He then began his coffee-run charade to help create opportunities for other assailants and alternative explanations for her horrifyingly unnecessary death.

TEN

JUNE 4, 2005
ORANJESTAD, ARUBA

Beth Twitty’s impassioned pleas for the safe return of her missing daughter seized headlines in the United States and the family’s ordeal became media obsession for the cable news shows. The story of the missing Alabama student was a ratings coup; viewers couldn’t get enough.