Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (23 page)

“I stood up and washed my hands in the ocean. I then walked back to Natalee and we continued to French kiss. I started feeling her breasts and continued to finger her with two fingers. I believe I fingered Natalee for about fifteen minutes.

“At some point, I thought that I had been fingering her for long enough. I stopped doing it, and I told Natalee that we should go back to her hotel.

“I also told her that I had school in the morning,” Joran claimed. “I asked her to walk with me back to the Holiday Inn. She said she didn’t want to. I offered to escort her, thinking that she would agree. But Natalee refused, saying she didn’t want to go back to her hotel. She said she wanted to stay there on the beach.”

Joran admitted to the officers that he grew frustrated, and at one point, picked Natalee up and began walking with her in his arms toward the hotel. “Natalee told me to put her down,” he said. “I put her down, and I thought to myself, That’s it! And I called Deepak.”

Joran claimed it was 3:00
A.M.
when he dialed his Surinamese friend from his cell phone. “I asked Deepak what he was doing. He said he was chatting online. I told him the girl wouldn’t listen and she was sleeping on the beach. I asked him if he would come and pick me up.”

Joran claimed that Deepak said he would head right over. Their conversation lasted only a few minutes. “I then walked back to Natalee. She was still sleeping and I lay down next to her.”

According to Joran, it was around 3:30
A.M.
when Deepak came in the silver lowrider to get him. On the way to drop him at his apartment, he said he told Deepak that he had left the girl on the beach and that she was being annoying because she didn’t want to go back to her hotel.

“Deepak asked if I had fucked her. I told him that I hadn’t because I didn’t have a condom. I even told him that I’d lifted her up and tried to carry her, but she didn’t want to go back to the Holiday Inn.”

“‘Fuck that bitch,’” Joran said Deepak had exclaimed.

In the car, Joran said he told Deepak about the sneakers, a pair of white-and-blue K-Swiss, size fourteen, that he had left on the sand. Unlike Joran, who needed to wake up for school in the morning, Deepak told him he didn’t have work the next day.

According to Joran, at 3:45
A.M.
, Deepak dropped him at his house and told him that he was going home to log on to his computer. “I asked Deepak if he could pick up my sneakers. He told me that he would go and get them immediately and then he drove off,” Joran said.

Joran was creating a scenario that left open the possibility that his friend Deepak, knowing that Natalee was lying passed out on the sand, had returned to the site of their rendezvous, where he raped and murdered her.

Joran said that the next day he took the bus to school, returning around 4:00
P.M.
His mother was still in Holland. After finishing his homework, his father gave him a ride to the Aruba Racquet Club for his daily tennis lesson. But he wasn’t in the mood to play tennis; he wanted to gamble. He had lied to his tennis instructor, excusing himself from his lesson because he was exhausted. He told the instructor the elaborate story of the night out with the American girl.

So, with his tennis lesson canceled, Joran went for a swim with a seventeen-year-old Dutch-Argentinean girl he had been dating, as well. Then, he called his friends Guido and Andre to arrange to meet up with them later that evening at the casino at the Radisson Resort.

Joran said he walked along the beach from the racquet club to the Palm Beach hotel strip, stopping in front of the Marriott to look for his missing sneakers. The beach was crowded, and he didn’t find them. He said he did not go to the Fisherman’s Hut to see if Natalee was still there. He figured she would have woken up by then. At that moment, he was more worried about the shoes he’d left behind, because he was not aware that Natalee was missing.

Joran said he played at the gaming tables of the casino inside the Radisson until 1:00
A.M.
, when Deepak arrived. He told the investigators he was on a roll and wanted to remain at the poker table for another hour.

Joran never mentioned the fight that Deepak claimed, in his police interrogation, had occurred between Joran and a tourist, who had accused the Dutch teen of cheating at the tables. He simply said that Deepak wanted to go to the Wyndham, so the two climbed into the gray Honda and set off on J. E. Irausquin Boulevard. They were just pulling into the Wyndham parking lot when Joran’s father called him on his cell.

“He told me the police were at the house and they were looking for a missing girl.” Joran said he immediately told Deepak a girl had gone missing, and without hesitation, his friend said, “It must be that girl from last night.”

Joran said he thought about the American girl he had left on the beach. He hoped Deepak hadn’t hurt her. Deepak was the one who had crafted the story about driving Natalee to the Holiday Inn, flagrantly implicating his friend.

Although Jacobs and Croes had not personally taken Deepak’s most recent statement, they were familiar with what the Surinamese man had told police. Joran’s version of the night and Deepak’s description were different in several seemingly minor details. However, someone was lying, and determining who was the liar was critical.

Joran continued implicating Deepak, telling the detectives that he had called his friend on the way to the Bubali Police Station with his father the day after Natalee disappeared. “I told Deepak I was en route to the police station to make a statement about the missing girl. Deepak’s answer to this was ‘Shit!’ Deepak reminded me to stick to the story that we had dropped the girl off at the Holiday Inn.”

Joran said that after that night at the Radisson casino and the Wyndham parking lot, he and Deepak only had telephone contact. He had called the elder Kalpoe to warn him about his father’s concern that the FBI might tap their phones and monitor their online chats.

While most people would have taken this advice, and stayed away from phones and chat rooms, Joran said he deliberately did the exact opposite. He suggested to Deepak that they speak as often as possible, repeating the same lie. That way, the fabrication would seem like the truth to any surreptitious listeners.

He also confessed to detectives that he had told his friend Freddy Zedan and both his parents about his suspicion that Deepak may have gone back to the beach and raped the girl. He claimed that Freddy had told him if that were the case, he would be in serious trouble since he was the last person to be seen with her.

Sitting before the detectives that Tuesday afternoon, Joran was confident about his newest version of the events of May 30. He was sure he had outsmarted the officers with his theory about Deepak.

But holding up a computer printout, Jacobs and Croes called his bluff. Leaning forward in his chair, the heavy-set Jacobs asked, “Isn’t it true that on May 30 at approximately 3:15
A.M.
, you sent Deepak a text message saying: ‘Hey Buddy, I’m back home and will see you tomorrow,’ to which Deepak replied, ‘OK.’”

Jacobs saw a flash of anger in Joran’s eyes. He was caught. Why would he send Deepak a message telling him that he was safe at home, if Deepak had been the one to drop him off? Joran mentally grabbed at any answer that might work but found nothing. “Yes, it’s true,” he finally muttered, aggravated and disarmed. He looked down at the table. “I did send Deepak that message.”

He was cornered. He didn’t want to talk anymore. “If you have more questions, I am willing to answer them tomorrow,” he said.

By then, detectives were confident they had their man. Now, they had to locate Natalee.

THIRTEEN

JUNE 13, 2005
SINT NICOLAAS, ARUBA

The two security guards, who had been pulled from their beds, handcuffed, and paraded before the cameras ten days earlier, were quietly released from jail under the cover of darkness.

Shortly after 11:00
P.M.
, Mickey John walked out of the police station. Ninety minutes later, Abraham Jones was released. A small crowd of well-wishers, mainly other blacks, stood outside the blue-and-white police station in Sint Nicolaas to greet them. The Aruban government had intended to have their liberations go unnoticed, as if the men’s detentions had been minor inconveniences. However, news crews had been alerted and, despite the late hour, captured their release on camera and broadcast it to audiences in the United States.

Now freed, the security guards became players in the media frenzy. Mickey John appeared on Greta Van Susteren’s Fox TV Show
On the Record
to say, “The justice system, the detectives, they’re all fools.”

Even though the pair was no longer behind bars, they were not officially cleared as suspects. Their association with the case continued to hold them in a never-ending nightmare. With the black mark of suspicion hanging over them, they couldn’t find employment on this small island where everyone knew everyone else’s business.

“Since the incident, I can’t get work,” John grieved more than four months after his release. “My lawyer said that after three months, the charges would be expunged. But it’s now October and there has still been no clearance. I can’t fill out a job application and honestly say that I have never been arrested because the prosecutor will not clear the file,” John lamented.

More red herrings and bizarre leads were soon pulled from the sea. Steve Croes’s arrest was his own fault. He was the man whose name Deepak had offered as an alibi witness early in the investigation. He was a disc jockey on a party boat, the
Tattoo
, that ferried groups from the hotel strip for off-shore sunset cruises with effusive drinking and dancing. Despite early rumors that Natalee and some of her friends had cruised on the
Tattoo,
and thereby encountered Croes, this was unfounded. Croes’s real connection to the case was his acquaintance with Deepak.

The twenty-six-year-old divorced father was a customer at the Internet café where Deepak worked. According to Deepak, Croes approached him in the days after Natalee went missing claiming he had seen Deepak and his friends dropping the American teen at the Holiday Inn. The claim was impossible, but Deepak seized the opportunity to have an alibi and passed Croes’s name to police.

Croes’s ten-day detention was the result of his bizarre self-involvement. In custody, he admitted that he had not seen them drop the girl at the Holiday Inn. He had only overheard Deepak tell the story to someone else at the café and voluntarily stepped forward. By now, Joran and the Kalpoe brothers had already changed their stories. Croes’s motive for sacrificing himself as an alibi witness remains a mystery, although one could surmise that he sought money or fame. His nautical experience aboard the
Tattoo
certainly piqued the interest of investigators, who were actively pursuing a theory that the teen had been discarded at sea. He was now facing felony charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice. As for his arrest, however, he was completely useless in the effort to find Natalee.

*   *   *

On the afternoon of June 15, police officers again descended on the Van der Sloots’ orange stucco home. While some conducted a room-to-room search, others stood guard at the edge of the property. Two vehicles, Anita’s blue Hyundai Tucson and Paulus’s red Suzuki Samurai, were towed away from the scene and processed for blood, fibers, and other forensic evidence.

Special agents from the FBI performed forensic testing on the vehicles four days after they had been impounded to determine if either car had been used to transport a body. Using a luminol-like product called Starlight Bloodhound that is commercially available and used by hunters to track wounded game at night, agents received positive responses on the steering wheel, stick shift, the key hole/ignition area, and the interior driver’s door pull of Anita’s Hyundai. But more specific tests using Hemident, a more sensitive forensic tool that could detect trace amounts of blood as little as one part per million, were negative. Similar tests performed on Deepak Kalpoe’s silver Honda tested negative, as well.

During the execution of the search warrant, police carried other evidence from the Van der Sloot home in paper bags. Later that same day, more investigators arrived to aid officers already on the scene.

A Dutch forensic team, led by senior homicide forensic investigator Paul van der Hoven, performed a search of Joran’s apartment. The apartment was also scanned by Miami-Dade police detective Alan Lowy and his canine, Bugg, assisted by special agents from the FBI.

Bugg and his handler also performed searches of a vacant lot adjacent to the Van der Sloot residence, and a rear garden. But there were no hits.

A few days later, police questioned Paulus van der Sloot. He agreed to sit down with Detective Tromp and Sergeant Burke to answer questions related to his son’s detainment.

On the evening of June 18, Paulus told the officers that he had wholly believed the story his son and his friends had told him about dropping Natalee at the Holiday Inn.

“After that, Freddy came by to see us with another story,” he said dryly. “My wife and I were very upset with Joran that he had not told the truth from the beginning.”

Freddy came back to the Van der Sloots that evening with his parents. He had been reluctant, having an exam the next day that needed his attention, but Paulus had retained a lawyer, Antonio Carlo, for Joran. He wanted Freddy to talk to him.

Paulus admitted that in the days after Natalee’s disappearance, he spoke with Joran and the Kalpoe brothers on a regular basis. “The girl remained missing, and that preyed on their minds,” he explained. “Satish and Deepak’s mother called us, and we spoke to her at the house. She was also concerned and wanted to share those concerns.

“Joran completed his exams and attended school as normal. My wife took him to and fro since she is a teacher at his school. Once, there was an incident at the International School Joran attends when family members of the missing girl hung up posters with her picture on them and the text: ‘Kidnapped: Ask Joran van der Sloot.’