Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (3 page)

“We can’t find Stephany. She never came home last night. Have you heard from her?” His father sounded nervous and worried.

“No, Dad, I have no idea where she is.”

“We’ve been calling her cell phone and she’s not picking up. I’m worried something’s happened to her.”

Richie had never heard his father so rattled and did his best to calm him down. “I’ll call Enrique and see if he’s heard anything.”

Enrique was the younger of the two and had recently married. His bride, Carolina Jorge, was a stunning brunette from a small town in the tropical Amazon basin of southeastern Peru who quickly became like a second daughter to Ricardo and Mariaelena. A call to Enrique’s home yielded no further clues. It wasn’t unusual that Stephany’s two older brothers had not heard from their baby sister; they were grown and no longer lived at home. But they were protective of Stephany, whom they affectionately called “Booboo,” and immediately offered to help their father with the search.

By evening, the Flores family still hadn’t been able to get in touch with Stephany or her friends. The truth was they didn’t even know many of them. Stephany was a college senior and rarely brought her friends home like she had done when she was a child.

Panic was beginning to set in. Ricardo and Mariaelena were making no progress. Their daughter had vanished. Hours had passed and there was still no word. Ricardo was compelled to call the police.

*   *   *

“You have to wait for the ransom call,” an officer from the kidnapping squad of the Division of Criminal Investigations of the Peruvian National Police instructed.

Like every wealthy or well-known businessman in Lima, Ricardo Flores was acutely aware of the dangers faced by high-profile individuals and their families. Residential burglaries, street crimes, and carjackers were an ever-present reality in Lima. Gangs of young street toughs, known as “piranhas,” operated in packs, typically swarming their victims in broad daylight, quickly stripping them of anything of value.

Kidnappings were also a dangerous possibility. Although not as rampant as in the past, abductions were still common in Latin America and Lima, Peru, was no exception. The abductions usually fell into one of two scenarios, the “kidnap express” and the “kidnap and ransom.”

The kidnap express was quick and dirty. Kidnappers usually snatched their victims off the street around 11:00
P.M.
, drove them to an ATM machine, and ordered them to use their bank cards and passwords to withdraw the daily maximum, about $500. Typically, the victims were held until just after midnight, when they were instructed to again withdraw the daily limit, another $500.

Odd as it may sound, these kidnappings normally ended without violence. The victim was returned traumatized but otherwise unharmed, so long as the withdrawals were made. From a detached perspective, these were merely business transactions.

The second, less frequent type of abduction was the traditional kidnap and ransom. The stakes and demands were much higher, the negotiations could be prolonged and any number of things could go wrong during the victim-for-cash exchange. This was an urgent, grave business that was as likely to end in death as release.

Luckily, Ricardo Flores had not been a target as yet. But he wondered if Stephany could have fallen victim to a kidnap and ransom scheme. With his now-distraught wife sobbing in the background, he began blaming himself for not teaching his children about the evils of the world. He had given all five of them expensive private school educations, vacations at the family’s seaside beach house and trips to the United States. He had given Stephany money whenever she asked for it. He now found himself second-guessing the freedom he had afforded his daughter.

By Monday, dark and terrible thoughts of what might have happened flashed through his mind. Each time the phone rang Ricardo anxiously answered it. But it was never Stephany, only family members and concerned friends checking in. It was just before 1:00
P.M.
when the family finally received some news.

A member of the Peruvian police force was on the phone and believed he had located Stephany’s Jeep. Minutes earlier, officers responding to a suspicious vehicle call had run the plates, discovering it was registered to Stephany Flores. The truck with the tinted windows was found unlocked and abandoned in front of 154 Jorge Chávez Pasaje in the district of Surco Viejo, an impoverished, crime-plagued neighborhood. The officer described the vehicle as a black Jeep Compass 4 × 4, license plate number A1B-333. It had to be Stephany’s. She had purchased the car after selling the Mitsubishi in the Internet auction.

Ricardo jumped into his Mercedes and sped to the location. The four-lane, palm-lined boulevard to Surco Viejo ended in a dusty warren of one-way streets blocked by construction, detours, and police checkpoints. The sad empty eyes of poverty seemed to be the distinguishing feature of the people in the streets.

Cursing to himself, Ricardo watched as the neighborhood grew worse and worse. Two- and three-story apartment buildings painted in drab shades of brown, yellow, and cream sat abandoned, under construction, or in varying states of disrepair, many with exposed steel rebar jutting from the upper unfinished floors. Heavy metal grates protected first floor windows and doors. Clothes hung limply on makeshift lines on rooftops alongside a tangle of electrical wires that illegally siphoned electricity from the nearby grid. Elderly women in housecoats stood in doorways, and children in well-worn clothes and bare feet played soccer in the street. Ricardo knew the area was a
zona roja,
a red zone, with a reputation for drug activity and violence.

Pressing gently on the brakes, he looked left and right as the boulevard dead-ended at Las Palmas Air Force Base, where a young officer in combat boots and paramilitary garb stood guarding the entrance; a tank painted in white-and-green camouflage was parked just inside the perimeter. Looking out the passenger-side window he immediately spotted police vehicles and knew this was the place.

His daughter’s Jeep was parked nose in amid a row of late-model cars and taxis. A rusted-out red VW Bug sat just to its left. Above her vehicle, the words
“Sí a la Vida, No a las Drogas”
(Yes to Life, No to Drugs) were spray-painted in bold blue letters on the twelve-foot brick wall that surrounded the military base.

Ricardo was met by uniformed officers and briefed on what they had been able to piece together so far. They told him his daughter’s truck had been found about an hour earlier after a neighbor called in to report that an unfamiliar vehicle had been parked on the street for much of the weekend. The Jeep was brand new, and had seemed out of place on this impoverished block. Witnesses thought the vehicle might have belonged to someone from the air force base, which sat on the other side of the wall. They worried that its owner might have been the victim of foul play. Their hunch was half right.

Police criminalist José Sandoval Reyna had already begun his inspection of the Jeep. Sandoval had sprayed a reactive agent on all of the flat surfaces of the exterior and interior. His tests yielded fifty-four adhesive tapes containing partial fingerprint impressions lifted from the vehicle, along with samples of all the liquids found in the soda bottles and other containers collected from inside the car. He would soon send them to the lab for analysis.

The vehicle was messy, strewn with plastic bottles of Inca Cola, assorted fast-food wrappers, and dirty clothes, but it didn’t appear as if it had been the scene of a violent struggle.

Sandoval now needed to know if Ricardo knew the vehicle well enough to know if anything was missing.

“That’s Stephany’s, and so is that,” Ricardo told police as they held up various items found in the Jeep.

Ricardo recognized his daughter’s belongings, a jean jacket from the Hard Rock Café, a yellow Hollister sweatshirt, and a gym bag.

“She had a gaming system. I believe it was a Wii,” Ricardo said. “She had it with her on Saturday, but I don’t see it in the car.”

Investigators also found a blister pack for medicine, open and empty, on the passenger-side floor, a finding that fueled early reports in the press that Stephany may have been drugged by her assailant.

With Stephany’s Jeep located, police began working with the premise that the young woman had been abducted. Standing in the street next to Stephany’s car, officers from the kidnapping division asked Ricardo for his help in reconstructing his daughter’s movements over the past few days. The local media had already picked up the story, and there were conflicting reports in the press about Stephany’s whereabouts in the hours before her disappearance.

Neighborhood witnesses were sure that Stephany’s black Jeep had been parked on their block since as early as Friday. But from what Ricardo had told the officers, these witness reports didn’t seem possible. Ricardo was equally certain he had seen Stephany on Saturday morning. Confused, he called his wife to help construct a reliable time line. Mariaelena confirmed that Stephany had been home that Saturday morning, and that her daughter had returned to the house in her Jeep around 4:00
P.M.
that same afternoon before heading out with friends for the evening.

Believing Stephany may have been abducted, police began tracking down informants and looking into criminal enterprises that specialize in kidnappings. But this line of inquiry went nowhere. Information was currency in Lima, but there was none of the usual chatter on the street level; none of their sources knew anything. There was also another concern. In their experience, a demand for money should have come by now. That no ransom call was received was very troubling.

Desperate for answers, Ricardo began to do some digging of his own. He started with his daughter’s phone service provider, Nextel. For nearly three hours, he pleaded with phone company operators and their managers, explaining that his daughter had been kidnapped and he needed their help. The distraught father was convinced they could use her GPS-enabled phone to pinpoint her exact location. Nextel was only able to provide Flores with a list of the most recent outgoing calls made from Stephany’s phone. Information on the incoming calls, he was told, would take fifteen days to process.

Ricardo was furious. He was sure the technology existed to pinpoint his daughter’s exact location and couldn’t believe the phone company hadn’t been more helpful, given that this appeared to be a kidnapping.

Taking a deep breath, he began dialing the numbers the company had provided. There had been six calls between Friday, May 29, and Saturday, May 30, when she went missing. Two of them were to a medical insurance company, Pacifico Vida, probably about claims related to Stephany’s asthma treatments. Two others were to a fried chicken restaurant. Dialing the next number, Ricardo finally reached someone helpful, one of the girls Stephany had been out with on the night she disappeared.

Carola Sanguinetti was Stephany’s friend from the University of Lima. The two women had met during Stephany’s freshman year in 2006 and were teammates on the school’s futsal team, a fast-paced cousin to soccer that is played indoors. Carola, a well-toned and physically fit brunette with shoulder-length hair she wore tucked behind her ears, was seven years older than Stephany and had already graduated from the university, where Stephany was now a senior and poised to receive a diploma in business administration in the fall. Despite the age difference, the two shared many of the same interests and had been spending a good deal of time together of late.

With Carola’s help, Stephany’s father was able to flesh out a time line.

What he learned was that she, too, was worried about Stephany and had been trying to get in touch with his daughter since Sunday morning. The two had spent much of Saturday together, laughing and swapping gossip over lunch at Polleria Mediterraneo, an inexpensive grill near the Floreses’ home that specialized in
pollo a la brasa,
a Peruvian staple of salted chicken cooked over charcoal and typically served with French fries. It was a laid-back Saturday afternoon and they were dressed casually in jeans and sneakers.

“She seemed happy. She was in a great mood,” Carola told Mr. Flores.

She had been pleased to see Stephany so upbeat. Stephany tended to despair about her weight, unable to restore the thin figure of her youth. She had the family curse, her father and two older brothers being large men. Coping with the unwanted weight gain as a young woman, however, was causing her considerable stress.

While a fierce athlete, Stephany had a soft, self-deprecating side. If she took any offense to her friend calling her by the pet name “
Gordita,
” Little Pig, she didn’t show it. In turn, Stephany playfully referred to Carola as “
Chinita,
” an endearing term in Peru that literally translates to “little Asian girl,” or a girl who looks like she is mixed with more than one race.

The two women loved playing video games, and after lunch they set off in Stephany’s Jeep to Polvos Rosados, a market known for pirated DVDs, video games, and assorted black market electronics. There, they bought a movie and several games for Stephany’s Wii gaming system. Stephany had the system with her in the car, and was planning to rent a room at a hotel in town so she and Carola could play.

In Lima, as is true in most of Latin America, adult children typically lived at home with their parents until they were married. For privacy, they often rented hotel rooms, sometimes by the hour. While it sounds odd, Stephany’s older brother, Richie, said it wasn’t unusual for his sister to spend a few hours partying at a hotel, watching movies and socializing with friends.

On their way to the hotel, they drove past the Markham College, and discovered the school was hosting a carnival. It looked like fun and they decided to stop. The Markham College was a private preparatory academy where Lima’s elite sent their children to study. Stephany’s younger brothers had both attended. Having grown up in a circus environment, Stephany grew nostalgic at the sight of the festival. There were clowns with painted faces, food vendors, and games of chance.