Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (24 page)

“The headmaster banned these people from the school grounds.”

Joran’s father explained that he did speak with Joran and his friends about what to expect if they were indeed arrested. He explained to them basic interrogation procedures, as well as how long they could be detained. “If they didn’t find the girl, then I knew there was a possibility that the boys would become suspects again.

“I found it strange that they were not questioned any further, and concluded from this that they had evidence that the girl had been seen after the boys dropped her off.”

He emphasized that the girl had disappeared on May 30, but after taking their initial witness statements, the police had seemingly lost interest in them. Nine days passed between their initial statements and their arrests and subsequent interrogations on June 9.

“Have you spoken to any of your friends about this?”

“We most likely did speak about all this with the friends who’d been stopping by. It was on everyone’s mind. A few of our friends are members of the ‘Friends of Aruba,’ a social network for newcomers to the island, and were closely involved in the search for the girl.”

Paulus expressed other concerns about his son’s gambling and cheating. He seemed more preoccupied that Joran had been gambling for money than he was about Natalee’s disappearance or her family’s unbearable pain. He was completely frustrated that his son had disobeyed his house rules.

“I allow Joran to play in the free tournaments, but he’s not allowed to play in the casinos for real money,” he explained.

Three days later, Paulus was arrested.

FOURTEEN

MAY 31, 2005
ARICA, CHILE

Having successfully negotiated the Peruvian border crossing, Joran van der Sloot was confident he would pass through the Chilean customs several hundred yards ahead with similar ease. At 3:00
P.M.
that Monday, a Chilean border patrol officer, seated at a window inside the modest brick building, stamped his passport. Minutes later, another officer waved the white minivan driven by taxi driver John Williams through the highway security booths.

Carlos kept his front passenger seat, and Joran was in back as the three proceeded south on the Pan-American Highway. En route, Joran switched his clothes. He exchanged the gaudy blue shorts and short-sleeved T-shirt with beige shorts and a black turtleneck.

The van encountered its first Chilean army checkpoint within ten minutes of finally being underway. These guard posts were insufferable for Joran. But the poker face he had managed throughout these brief delays in Peru served him well again. The three were stopped, checked, and waved through with satisfaction.

Finally the outskirts of Arica loomed. Clusters of rectangular warehouses rose from the cactus scrub, their parking areas brimming with eighteen-wheelers. Arica was an important port city on the Pacific Ocean, and the semi-trucks were either delivering cargo to the container ships or picking up freight for destinations all over South America.

Arica was the “City of Eternal Spring.” Surfers seeking an endless summer swarmed to its renowned “El Gringo” pipeline. High-end and budget travelers loved the Pacific Ocean locale, its casino, and its myriad hotels, bars, and restaurants. Shoppers found the two beautiful pedestrian malls, Plaza Colón and Vicuña Mackenna, abundant with duty-free shops and outdoor restaurants. However, the one and only point of interest for John Williams and Carlos Euribe was a bank, hopefully one with accessible money for Joran van der Sloot.

John Williams found a parking place near the El Morro de Arica, a huge outcropping of burnt-sienna rock that dominated the skyline and was the site of a monumental battle between Peru and Chile one hundred and thirty years earlier.

Today, the salty air was thick with the aroma of bougainvillea and steaks cooking over wood-fired grills as Joran and his two escorts started off on foot in this foreign town. At 4:30
P.M.
, the banks had all closed, but ATMs were available outside four or five bank buildings.

Joran tried his card at them all, but he was denied. He needed a human teller, he lamented.

Waiting until the next day was out of the question. John Oswaldo was stuck at the border and John Williams had been traveling with this scoundrel longer than any passenger in his livery career.

Joran fumbled through various pockets and found a wad of 288 nuevos soles, about U.S.$100. He promised to wire the driver the outstanding balance in the morning.

John Williams was furious. This payment, plus promissory note, was unacceptable. Voluntarily or compelled by force, Joran added his Ferrari-brand watch, worth more than $7,000 by his account, to the settlement. In fact, he unloaded most of his possessions faster than a hot-fingered hood at a pawnshop. He gave them a digital camera without a battery; a blue Nokia cell phone that was missing its SIM card; two cell phone chargers; a paperback biography of Prohibition-era gangster, Al Capone entitled
Al Capone, Chicago’s King of Crime,
by Nate Hendley; a bottle of Arrow-brand cologne; a metal tin of Prickly Heat foot powder; a brown leather portfolio case from the Wyndham Hotel marked “The Right Way. The Wyndham Way”; and a Nicorette inhaler.

Joran even threw in the red, white, and black striped short-sleeved polo shirt that he had been wearing when he left the Hotel Tac for the last time on the morning of May 30.

With a shove and a curse, John Williams and Carlos Euribe slammed the van doors and left Joran behind still with his stories and lies, but without his watch. They retrieved John Oswaldo at the border at 6:00
P.M.
They stopped in Santa Rosa for dinner, and divided up the loot.

John Oswaldo took the Ferrari watch and the digital camera. Carlos Euribe got the red, white, and black striped shirt, the cell phone, the foot powder, and the Al Capone biography. John Williams kept the box of Ben Wa balls, believing Joran’s overblown worth of the ten-dollar trinkets. Joran had described them as jade, valued at a few hundred dollars. John Williams called them “the Chinese game inside of which are two small balls that shine.” The police identified them as “a small box lined in green fabric inside of which are two green balls with a symbol in black and white that make musical sounds.” In any fashion, for the moment, they were his.

Twelve hours later, back in Ica on the morning of June 1, the brothers, bone tired and underbathed, were delighted to be home to business as usual. Even though they had been swindled, they had inflated their fare enough to at least have extracted an acceptable profit.

The following morning, a Channel 4 news segment playing in their living room interrupted their relaxed mood. The story was about the murder of a twenty-one-year-old woman, Stephany Flores, in Lima, 150 miles away. And the face of their rogue passenger stared back at them in a photo on the television screen.

He was the prime suspect, the news announced, calling him a presumed murderer. The story detailed the murder of the daughter of a famous race-car driver, and how the suspect had fled, leaving her lifeless body in a hotel room. He was also implicated in the disappearance of a young American woman on vacation in the Caribbean five years earlier, assumed to be murdered, as well.

The Piscontes were dumbstruck. It was at that moment, they claimed, that they realized they had aided a fugitive, a murderer, in escaping Peru. As they flipped the channels the story was everywhere. There was even an American newscast discussing the case. They began to comprehend that they had become part of an international incident. They had just spent the last twenty-four hours with him in extremely close quarters—first in Ica giving the stranger a solitary ride; then haggling and handshaking in Nazca; then storytelling, even joking and laughing, en route to Arica. The odyssey had ended in a spit and a curse.

Across town, Carlos Pretil had heard the news over the radio and immediately called the Pisconte home to speak with the brothers. But the line was busy. Moments later, his friend, John Oswaldo, called him back. Oswaldo sounded nervous. He confirmed that from news reports it appeared that Joran, the Dutch citizen they had just driven to Chile, was the prime suspect in the murder of Stephany Flores back in Lima.

“I’ve got to get off the phone,” John Oswaldo announced, his voice shaky and tinged with fear. “The police and the media just arrived at our house.”

The taxi drivers had not been hard to locate. Immigration officials had entered their DNI numbers into a logbook at the border crossing. The three men were scared and initially gave police conflicting accounts of their ride to Chile. But after hearing investigators rattle off a long list of possible criminal charges, including crime against the administration of justice, crime against jurisidictional function, material concealment, and omission of reporting to police, they were more forthcoming.

“What was your passenger’s demeanor during the trip? Was he nervous, as if he were running away?” police in Ica asked John Pisconte.

“He acted normally. He didn’t seem nervous, he smoked and he slept. In a space of thirty minutes he would light up a cigarette, finish it and light up again, and having smoked a whole pack, he went on smoking a cigarette every half hour.”

“Did you have any knowledge that Joran had murdered Stephany inside the Tac Hotel?”

“I heard through the newscast on Wednesday, June 2, 2010, that they made reference to me and that I was the driver of the vehicle that took him to Arica.”

“Did you call the police and if not, why not, when you learned that Joran, who you had transported, had likely killed Miss Stephany Flores?”

The taxi driver paused before answering. “I didn’t call the police because I got scared,” he admitted. “I did think about it. But around noon on June 2, Commander Caparo of the DIRINCRI from Ica arrived at my home and he interrogated me about the case and I said that ‘Yes, in effect, I had transported Joran to Arica.’”

By agreeing to give a stranger a ride, the three Peruvian taxi drivers had unwittingly become key witnesses in one of the most high-profile murder cases Peru had ever seen.

FIFTEEN

JUNE 23, 2005
ARUBA

The June morning had brought the usual baking heat, mitigated by the prevailing easterly breezes. Anita and Paulus van der Sloot had just left the Korrectie Instituut Aruba in Sint Nicolaas (KIA), Joran’s latest place of confinement, when Anita’s cell phone rang with important news.

A sprawling correctional center, the Korrectie Instituut Aruba was perched on a bluff overlooking the Caribbean Sea, at the northernmost tip of the island. It was the most secure of Aruba’s detention facilities, surrounded by a dual perimeter, a chain-link fence topped by barbed wire and a high cement wall with watch towers on each of the four corners. It rarely reached its maximum capacity of three hundred prisoners, the vast majority of whom were facing charges relating to drug trafficking. Herds of goats grazed the scrub that grew between the prison and the bluff.

Joran and the Kalpoe brothers had arrived separately the day before, June 22. Joran was isolated in the juvenile wing. Under Aruban law, they could be detained there for one hundred days without being formally charged, and then they would have to be either charged or released.

That Thursday, Anita had spent almost forty minutes visiting with Joran. Although Paulus had accompanied her, he was barred from contact as per the judge’s order so he remained in a waiting room.

The Van der Sloots were on their way home when Anita answered the call from her excited neighbor. He was calling to inform them that uniformed police officers were outside their house.

Concerned, Anita immediately dialed Chief Jan van der Straten to find out what was happening. She was told that she and Paulus should go directly to the Noord Police Station.

The police chief had not elaborated, and the couple, wondering and worrying, pulled up to the Warda di Polis. The building looked more like a La Quinta Inn with its faux Spanish façade than a police headquarters, but at 2:00
P.M.
, the couple parked and hurried inside. The police officers waiting in the lobby area promptly arrested the elder Van der Sloot for his suspected involvement in Natalee Holloway’s disappearance. Paulus was furious.

“To answer your question as to what I have to say about my arrest for charges of accessory to murder, manslaughter, and kidnapping resulting in death, I can state this: I find it ridiculous and absurd!” Paulus sniped at Detective Roland Tromp and Sergeant Clyde Burke. “To answer your question to the degree of ridiculousness, I can say this: I think that my arrest reaches the highest level of ridiculousness and absurdity.”

Although Paulus agreed to participate in the interrogation, which was conducted in Dutch, his request to have his lawyer present was denied. Even without a lawyer, the precision of his language was undeniably lawyerly and calculated.

Detectives began dissecting Paulus’s time line. In all his official statements to police, he said he had picked up Joran at the McDonald’s on Palm Beach at 11:00
P.M.
on May 29. But Natalee’s mother, Beth Twitty, remembered a different story. The night that they had all gathered in the Van der Sloots’ driveway, Paulus had told the group he had retrieved Joran sometime around 4:00
A.M.
on May 30.

“Can you explain the discrepancy?” Burke asked.

“I have previously stated that I picked up Joran on Sunday May 29 in front of McDonald’s at approximately 11:00
P.M.
Then I woke up at approximately 5:45
A.M.
on that Monday morning. During the time in between, I was sleeping and didn’t hear that Joran had gone out or come back either; 5:45
A.M.
is when my alarm always goes off and when I wake up. I wake the children at around 6:00
A.M.

“I woke up Valentijn, Sebastian, and Joran.”

“Was Joran difficult to wake up that Monday morning?”