Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (33 page)

•  that he had no secrets and that police could even listen in on the conversations he’d had with his parents.

•  that he knew that he has gotten himself into trouble by lying, just as Deepak and Satish had.

•  that he had gotten himself into trouble by manipulating the wire taps on his phones.

•  that he had only come up with the Holiday Inn story in the car with Deepak on the way to his house, and not before.

•  that at that time Satish knew nothing of the concocted plan.

•  that Natalee’s parents didn’t first come by to find out where she was, but were aggressive right away and accusing and called him an asshole.

And so concluded Joran’s off-the-record record.

*   *   *

Joran was the only one remaining in custody, but the police were still busy with a short list of characters, some familiar, some new. They still had the Kalpoe brothers under surveillance. The gardener, Carlos Ramos, had raised questions that needed attention.

On August 16, in a strange phone call to the Natalee tip line in Alabama, a woman identified herself as an ex-girlfriend of Deepak Kalpoe. The connection was bad and the caller was nervous.

She claimed that Deepak had sent her a text message, asking that she tell authorities that he was with her the night Natalee Holloway disappeared. She also claimed he told her “the gardener was lying.”

She had only managed that much information when someone entered her room and she deliberately disconnected. She called back and disconnected several more times, but eventually provided the operator with a cell phone number. The operator passed the information to the FBI field office in Birmingham. But as was so often the case, this lead was another dead end.

On August 26, Deepak and Satish were rearrested, along with Joran’s good friend, Freddy Zedan. Although there was wild speculation that there had finally been a break in the Holloway case, the allegations against the three turned out to be unrelated to Natalee’s disappearance. The arrests were sparked by a complaint that the four young men had taken advantage of an underage girl sometime prior to Natalee’s arrival on Aruba.

According to Freddy Zedan’s lawyer, Diana Emerencia, her client was being accused of taking photos of a young girl in “tempting poses” and showing those photos to other people. Emerencia said Zedan was also suspected of having unspecified “physical contact” with the girl. Emerencia said that her client had denied all the charges, but had admitted he had been there when the photos were taken.

Joran’s mother, Anita, also confirmed that her son and his friends were present at the time the photos were taken, but denied that the snapshots had sexual undertones.

“They are lovely pictures of a young girl in a bikini,” she told reporters. She called the charges a desperate attempt to get the boys to talk, although there was nothing to talk about. She called the whole thing nonsense.

Joran’s lawyer, Antonio Carlo, said that during the hearing prosecutors introduced two allegations of a “sexual nature” against his client. But he stopped short of specifying what those allegations were.

Prosecutors were asking that the Kalpoe brothers be detained for another eight days, and Joran be held for another thirty days.

But the prosecutor’s pleas were to no avail. Under gloriously sunny skies, a smiling Joran van der Sloot emerged from the Korrectie Instituut Aruba on Saturday, September 3. A judge had ruled at a hearing two days earlier that there was insufficient evidence to hold the eighteen-year-old and ordered his release on the condition that he remain in Dutch territory. The judge also ordered the conditional release of Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, stipulating they remain in Aruba because of their visa requirements.

Despite the enormously extensive coverage devoted to the Holloway case, the release of the three young men barely made headlines in the United States. Hurricane Katrina had made landfall in New Orleans two days before the hearing, and the city was devasted; 80 percent of it was under water. Eighteen hundred people had lost their lives. News crews everywhere had been redeployed to a press staging area, as close to ground zero as safety concerns would allow. The largest natural disaster in the United States in a hundred years usurped any interest in the newfound freedom of three young suspects in Aruba, 1,763 miles away.

Beth Twitty was devastated by their release, however. She accused the Aruban government of cowardice. “They have chosen to hide underneath the cloak of Hurricane Katrina,” she fumed. Beth believed that if the investigation had been handled properly from the beginning “the world would not have witnessed and experienced the pain and suffering my family and I have endured.”

That Sunday, Beth boarded a plane for Alabama, but vowed to make frequent trips back to Aruba to continue her fight for justice for Natalee.

Anita shared Beth’s sentiment that the investigation was botched from the beginning, but for different reasons. Her concern was that Joran and the entire Van der Sloot family had been scapegoats in a witchhunt.

“His life has been turned upside down,” she told reporters on the day of his release. “We were the victims of slander based on rumor and gossip. It is easy to destroy the lives of people, especially through the press.”

Anita van der Sloot believed police were looking in the wrong direction. Despite Joran having perjured himself, she knew in her heart that he was not capable of murder. She felt police should focus on Natalee’s home life; perhaps she was unhappy and had maybe run away. Joran’s mother also believed that investigators should widen their search to include Venezuela.

Nearly every inch of the island and its surrounding waters had been searched, but nothing had been discovered. As much as the police hated to admit it, Paulus’s rumored advice to Joran and his friends, “no body, no case,” had proved to be an accurate assessment of the situation.

Investigators were at a loss to explain how a seventeen-year-old could have murdered a young woman and disposed of her body during the brief window of time between 1:00
A.M.
, when Joran and Natalee left Carlos’n Charlie’s, and 3:45
A.M.
, when Joran logged on to his home computer to send Deepak the thank you message.

If Natalee had died on the beach that night, where was her body? If Joran had tossed it into the waters right off the beach, it would have surely washed back ashore. He would have needed access to a boat, and time to weigh the body down properly to ensure that it would not float up to the surface. But Joran didn’t own a boat, which meant he would have needed an accomplice. How would he have been able to find an accomplice willing to participate in such an unsavory mission at that hour, who was loyal enough to keep the secret? Was his father involved? And if so, again, where was the body? Was it possible that the last time Joran saw Natalee she was alive, but asleep or passed out, and someone besides him was involved? If an accidental death had occurred, an alcohol overdose or a fatal fall, why did Joran not offer or seek help?

The answers to these questions were no closer to being resolved, but Joran was free to resume his life regardless.

TWENTY

SEPTEMBER 7, 2005
ARNHEM, HOLLAND

Four days after Joran regained his freedom, he and his father flew to Holland to attempt a new start there. The teen had withdrawn his matriculation into the American university, Saint Leo’s, because of his notoriety and travel restrictions imposed by the judge. The promising young “sporter” was now back in Arnhem, the city where he had been born.

His mother was comforted by the fact that he would be with family while he was so far from Aruba. The legal fees had broken the family financially so at least in Holland he had a safe place to live and access to a free education. He moved in with his mother’s sister. His maternal grandmother lived only ten minutes away. He enrolled as a commuter student at the Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen, where he planned to study international business management.

By this time, his notoriety was international. Even in Holland, strangers pointed and gawked. On his first day of classes at the Hogeschool, Joran stood in front of his fellow classmates, introduced himself, and detailed his version of the events in Aruba. He was neither arrogant nor humble, but he had certainly made a bold impression.

The chance to reinvent himself in Holland was fleeting. Arnhem was near the Dutch town of Nijmegen, an ancient Roman stronghold four miles west of the German border. By number of casinos alone, Nijmegen was ranked number six out of ninety-one cities in the Netherlands with legalized gambling.

These world-class operations made Joran’s Aruban haunts seem like bingo parlors. The nightlife outside the casinos was also pulsating with bars, cafés, and dance clubs, all featuring booze and legalized drugs.

Joran had barely begun his studies when he slipped into his old habits. He moved out of his aunt’s house and shared an apartment with several other students, becoming lost in a fog of whiskey Cokes and marijuana smoke. While he was sleeping late into the afternoons, he was skipping classes and failing. Signs of depression were obscured by drinking. His waking hours were spent gambling and avoiding the press, who seemed unnervingly obsessed with him.

The obsession with news about him or, better,
from him,
was the perfect partner to his gambling addiction. News outlets paid him money for a story; money allowed him to gamble; gambling made him happy until he needed more money. And the media had deep pockets. He would tell 90 percent of his Natalee story exactly the same, but change up the last 10 percent to keep the public interested.

Joran was so shrewd he once bragged that he was offered $1 million to go on the record saying he had murdered the Alabama teen. As appealing as the offer was, he declined, saying prison life was not an experience he wanted to repeat.

Sometimes Joran’s careful media scheming backfired. In February 2006, he traveled to New York to sit down for an interview with ABC’s Chris Cuomo. Upon landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport, Joran was served with a civil lawsuit that had been filed in New York by Natalee’s parents, Beth and Dave. Unbeknownst to Joran, the process server was sitting three rows in front of him during the flight, so was able to serve him with the complaint while the plane taxied to the gate.

Joran’s father had arrived in New York earlier than his son and was waiting at the Lucerne Hotel when he was also served with legal papers. The lawsuit, filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, accused Joran of “malicious, wanton and willful disregard of the rights, safety and well-being of the plaintiffs and their daughter, Natalee Holloway.”

The sixteen-page filing described Joran as “The Predator,” and alleged that his parents, Anita and Paulus, had allowed him to spend his free time gambling, drinking, and “trawling for victims.” The suit also accused Paulus of creating a “permissive environment” for Joran that “knowingly facilitated” his own son’s “predatory” behavior toward Natalee.

Later that summer, the case was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. But Joran had learned the danger of traveling to the U.S.

Still, he brazenly continued to reap the profits from his “side” of the Natalee story. In April 2007, the arrogant nineteen-year-old published his autobiography,
De Zaak Natalee Holloway
(
The Case of Natalee Holloway
). He promised to be “open and honest about everything that happened, for anyone who wants to read it.” The book was published in Dutch, but never translated into English. The author and everything he represented had become so loathsome in Holland that even the name Joran, a once-popular name for a newborn boy, was shunned.

The book’s publisher never released sales figures for the book. The ghostwriter, Zvezdana Vukojevic, described her experience working with Joran in an article titled “The Madness of Joran” published in 2010 in a Dutch magazine,
Review.
The assignment had turned out to be a nightmare.

Vukojevic first met the teen to discuss the project in 2006, shortly after he had enrolled in the Hogeschool. He was haughty and entitled. He referred to his girlfriend at the time as “a groupie,” a joking reference to the perks of fame.

Success of the joint venture depended on Joran’s accessibility. After the teen promised his ghostwriter that he would happily and readily comply, Vukojevic began drafting Joran’s chronicles.

The writing sessions, however, were surreal. The meetings were on Joran’s terms and he would not accept being inconvenienced. Vukojevic complained of hours spent standing at the apartment door while Joran was asleep inside. A roommate would eventually answer the knock and Vukojevic would enter a pigsty reeking of beer and marijuana.

Sometimes Joran met with her for an hour, claiming his plans for the evening prevented him from staying longer. Other times, he created excuses to cancel altogether: he had dropped the phone in the tub; he had fallen at the train station and may have a broken leg; he had no more minutes left on his phone card. Once, he canceled out of paranoia. “They’re after me,” he cried.

His paranoia was well founded. Peter de Vries, a Dutch investigative reporter, had become Joran’s nemesis. The silver-haired De Vries and his television crew were relentless in their determination to see Joran behind bars.

Eventually, the book project was finished, with Vukojevic having toured Joran’s mother’s dining room in Aruba with its Natalee shrine, and having picked up Texas hold ’em tips from the self-described master of card games himself.

*   *   *

Joran’s publishing career was already short-lived when legal problems took precedence. In 2007, Joran was arrested in Arnhem on an Aruban warrant, with prosecutors citing “new incriminating evidence” in connection with Natalee’s disappearance. The Kalpoes were rearrested in Aruba the same day.

The new evidence came from computer and online chat records that had taken place between the three young men. Using technology that was not available to them in 2005, police uncovered a chat in which the three men had discussed “picking up American girls and what they planned to do with them.”