Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (20 page)

Investigators wanted to know why Deepak had perjured himself. If his new version of the events was true, then neither of the Kalpoes had done anything to Natalee. They had put themselves in harm’s way for no reason at all. Before, they were innocent and now they were potential accomplices.

Deepak explained his two reasons for lying. His friend had asked him to lie and he was afraid of the police, foreseeing himself in terrible trouble if Natalee never reappeared.

The idea that Joran had killed or even harmed the young American had seemed ridiculous to him at the time. Deepak said that Joran had been “sociable” and not at all aggressive at Carlos’n Charlie’s that night.

During the interview, police asked Deepak if there was anyone who could corroborate his story. He offered Freddy Zedan’s name, Joran’s neighbor, friend, and confidant. “Joran and Freddy have known each other for a long time and Joran trusts him. If you go and talk to Freddy, he will tell you the made-up story and maybe also the truth.”

Deepak’s new version of the events of May 30 was filled with other stunning admissions. Natalee had not made any racist comments as Joran had claimed. He also said that Joran’s father, Paulus, believed their story, and had even found a lawyer for the Kalpoe brothers. “He told us that if we were to be arrested to remain calm and not come up with a different story,” Deepak explained.

“What do you think happened to Natalee Holloway?” Sergeant Burke asked.

“I think that Joran raped her, but is afraid to admit it. I don’t think he murdered her.”

“What makes you think he raped her?” the officer prodded.

“I think that because he doesn’t want to tell the truth.”

*   *   *

Shortly before midnight, Detective Roland Tromp and Sergeant Shaniro Kelly loaded their prisoner, Deepak Kalpoe, into the back of a police car to return him to Cell 22 at the Sint Nicolaas Police Station. During the trip, the men attempted to pry a little more information out of Deepak. “The statement you just gave, was it the whole truth or did you have a plan B just in case what you guys had made up went wrong?”

Deepak told the officers that he had nothing to add to his statement and that there had been no plan B.

“Is it true that Paulus van der Sloot told you guys that if there was no body, the police had no case?”

Deepak told the officers that during one of his visits to the Van der Sloot home in the days after Natalee went missing, Joran’s father had come into the room with a law book and explained what they needed to know in case they were arrested. According to Deepak, Paulus van der Sloot told them that authorities were required to advise them of their rights; that they would first be held for six hours; that they could be locked up after that; that they would have to be brought before a district attorney within two days; that the district attorney could decide to hold them for an additional eight days; that the judge commissioner could order them held for another eight days; that in total they could be held for 116 days; and that after that they could go home because, without a body, the police did not have a case.

Detective Tromp was stunned. “So Joran’s father gave you guys some legal advice?”

“Yes,” Deepak confirmed. “That’s correct.”

Paulus van der Sloot’s supposed “no body, no case” statement to his son and the Kalpoe brothers prompted police to open an investigation into the elder Van der Sloot’s possible involvement in the cover-up of a crime. Was this textbook legal advice or something more sinister? The media and police would read a great deal into this supposed statement. How would Paulus van der Sloot know that there wasn’t a body unless he had inside information? There was even speculation that if Natalee had been murdered, Paulus had helped dispose of the body.

Over the next few days, Deepak described the admonishment that he and Joran had received from Paulus the night Beth Twitty’s posse came to the Van der Sloot home to search for Natalee. After the reenactment at the Holiday Inn, where Deepak and Joran had provided their blow-by-blow account of Natalee’s farewell, Paulus and the two young men returned to the house, where he scolded and lectured them.

“Have you now learned your lesson?” Paulus implored.

Deepak said he answered, “Yes. Never give a ride to a stranger.”

ELEVEN

MAY 30, 2005
ICA, PERU

When the video camera in Lima’s Hotel Tac captured Joran van der Sloot exiting the hotel for the final time on the morning of May 30, he was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved red-and-white-striped polo shirt. His dark brown hair was military-style short.

Twelve hours later, a cosmetically altered Van der Sloot turned up more than 150 miles south of Lima in Ica, Peru, a bleak and downtrodden city of about 200,000 people. Ica was still recovering from the 7.5-magnitude earthquake that had rocked the region three years earlier, with many families still living in temporary housing. Despite the devastation, tourists and backpackers still made the five-hour trek from Lima, using Ica as a base for adventure—sand boarding on the dunes, visiting the magical oasis of Huacachina, or touring the vineyards that grow the famous Pisco white grape, picked and distilled into the liquor for the Pisco Sour, Peru’s national drink.

Although no arrest warrant had yet been issued, Joran was a fugitive, trying to get out of Peru as quickly as possible. After abandoning Stephany Flores’s black Jeep on a side street near the Las Palmas Air Force Base, he had fled the area on foot. How he made the 150-mile journey south to Ica was unclear. Somewhere along the route, he had stopped long enough to shave his head and dye his remaining stubble an orange blond. He also changed his clothing, and was now sporting electric-blue Bermuda shorts, white sneakers, and a dark-colored T-shirt.

With a backpack slung over his shoulders and a beige duffel bag in one hand, he was perfectly disguised as a typical gringo on vacation as he walked Ica’s downtown drag. It was a dusty stretch of road bordered by lean-to cabstands and run-down bus companies servicing long-distance travelers. His ruddy complexion and towering frame made it impossible for him to avoid attention, so he opted for the “tourist” character, a role he had perfected as a teenager in Aruba.

John Williams Pisconte, a taxi driver, was standing in front of his white minivan, waiting for a paying stranger to come along. He was sipping coffee and talking with his twin brother, John Oswaldo, when a rangy foreigner with a shaved head and bright blue shorts falling below his knees approached. Although Joran spoke only broken Spanish, he had no trouble communicating. He wanted to go to the Peruvian town of Nazca.

“No problem,” said Pisconte, motioning him to climb into the minivan. The twins lived with their parents in Ica. Their small business made enough money to allow them a decent living, better than most people in the area. The two serviced the interprovincial route between Ica and Nazca, seventy-five miles southeast, rarely venturing outside their geographic comfort zone.

In Peru, Nazca was a hugely popular tourist destination. The Nazca Lines, hundreds of drawings intricately etched into the red desert plains surrounding the town, drew visitors from all over the world. They were an archeological wonder, akin to the pyramids on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Scholars have attributed the elaborate geometric figures and depictions of plants and animals to an early Nazca culture, dating them to between 400 and 650
A.D.
Their scale was so massive that once in Nazca, tourists bought tickets for small plane rides, at forty to fifty dollars a person, to view the six-hundred-foot monkey, the giant lizard, and other magnificent geoglyphs. In 1994, the Nazca Lines were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Ica was the staging area for Nazca. John Williams Pisconte and his brother earned about $350 a month shuttling passengers back and forth, filling the shared van to capacity before departing.

Joran van der Sloot appeared to be the first of another load of tourists as he got into the van. But after only a few minutes, he grew impatient. He didn’t want to wait for the minivan to fill up with additional passengers. Irritated and anxious, he asked about the “express” service, saying he would pay a negotiated fare and have the van for himself.

He needed to get out of Peru as quickly as possible and had no time for this small-town way of doing business. After a short negotiation, the two settled on a one-way price of thirty dollars, the equivalent of six passengers.

John Williams smiled when he drove up beside the red Nissan station wagon owned by his twin brother, John Oswaldo. John Oswaldo was busy hustling customers into his transport. But John Williams was full, with only one passenger, and ready to embark.

The two men bore little physical resemblance to each other. John Williams had a long narrow face, dark skin, and close-cropped black hair. His brother John Oswaldo’s features were round and fleshy.

“
Hasta pronto.
See you in Nazca,” the thirty-one-year-old Ican native called, pulling away from the curb with Joran.

His passenger was a chain-smoker, he realized very soon after they were underway. Observing from his rearview mirror, he watched the foreigner finish one Marlboro, only to immediately light another. If he wasn’t smoking, he was sleeping.

He seemed to prefer silence to making conversation. At first, he didn’t answer simple questions like what he did for a living. Eventually, he became more talkative, telling the cabdriver that he was from Holland and had come to see the country. He said he had been to Cuzco, an ancient Incan town high in the Andes with centuries-old cobblestone streets and beautiful churches. Most tourists stop in Cuzco on their way to Machu Picchu, the Lost City of the Incas, so Joran’s lie was appropriate.

“The girls in Peru are very pretty,” Joran said, grinning.

“Where are you heading now?” Pisconte asked.

“Arica,” Joran replied, referring to a small Chilean town about four hundred miles south, just on the other side of the Peruvian border. He explained that he was planning to tour the southern half of South America.

Around 11:40
P.M.
that Sunday night, Pisconte dropped his passenger at the town’s main roundabout, near the gas station. Nazca was a dangerous place, especially at night. Abject poverty and inattentive visitors mixed, making for a high likelihood of personal theft. Even locals avoided public transportation at night.

Here, at midnight, Joran found himself at the bus station, alone, a foreigner with a roll of money in his front pocket, a six-foot-four-inch-tall target. The Nazca terminal was dirty and lawless, surrounded by
pueblos jóvenes,
shantytowns. Despite his size and his seasoned-traveler expertise, he was worried.

Less than twenty minutes later, Joran was desperately seeking his cabbie. He found John Williams at the roundabout chatting with a group of other van drivers.

“Hey, did you bring me here?” Joran yelled.

“What happened?” Pisconte asked, noting the man was pale and nervous. “Did you leave something in the van?”

“No, I want you to take me to Tacna.”

Pisconte was familiar with Tacna. The Peruvian border town was four hundred miles south on the Pan-American Highway. He also knew this well-paying customer was making his way to Chile. Joran had told him about a girlfriend there on the trip from Ica. However, the midnight hour and the distance made the trip close to impossible.

“There are buses over there,” he said, pointing to the run-down cinderblock terminal. “Besides, I don’t know the roads down there very well.”

The ride from Nazca to Tacna along the Pan-American Highway was one lane in each direction with the Pacific Ocean on the right and the Andes on the left. During the day, the drive was breathtaking. But John Williams was exhausted, having spent the day driving back and forth on his usual route.

Joran was insistent and pleaded with the cabdriver to reconsider.

“Let me talk to my brother,” he said, waving to John Oswaldo, who had just entered the roundabout in his red wagon.

After a few minutes, Pisconte snapped his fingers at Van der Sloot. “Okay, we’ll do it for fifteen hundred nuevos soles!”

Five hundred dollars was more than either brother earned in a month. Joran agreed to the price, even though he knew he didn’t have the money to pay the fare.

Because of the length of the trip, the brothers hired a third cabbie to help with the driving. For seven dollars, Carlos Euribe Pretil joined the journey. Pretil looked more like a lounge singer than a taxi driver, with his curly reddish locks combed into a pompadour. The thirty-eight-year-old Peruvian was unaware of the pay disparity, seven dollars for him, $493 for the twins, when he climbed into the back of the minivan with Joran.

They’d been driving south on the Pan-American Highway for several hours when John Oswaldo turned around to talk to their passenger, who had just awoken from a nap. “What’s your name?”

“Van der Sloot.”

Joran told the men he had had problems in Lima, but didn’t elaborate. Instead, he reclined in his seat and closed his eyes again.

All three cabbies were startled at how their fare reacted as they slowed at their first highway police checkpoint. The checkpoints were scattered along the length of the route to curb contraband, usually drugs. They were manned by heavily armed uniformed police in bulletproof vests, carrying automatic weapons. Sometimes a vehicle was pulled over to check papers and passports, and occasionally a random search was conducted.

Joran had no idea if the police were looking for him, or if Stephany’s body had even been discovered. Nearly sixteen hours had passed since he’d walked out of the Hotel Tac alone. He assumed that her body had been found and that law enforcement had issued an Interpol alert.

Sitting erect in the back of the van, Joran lit a cigarette and watched nervously out the window of the minivan as they were slowed, then waved through, a procedure that repeated itself at least a half dozen times along the highway.