Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (4 page)

Stephany parked the Jeep at the school and grabbed her wallet out of the truck’s glove compartment. To Carola’s astonishment, Stephany pulled out a thick wad of crisp, high-denomination Peruvian currency while the two stood on the sidewalk, a calliope chiming a carnival tune in the background.

“Can you hold on to these?” she asked. “I don’t want to leave them in the truck,” Stephany said, explaining she had won the money at a casino five days earlier.

Carola was stunned. Stephany was driving around with the equivalent of thousands of U.S. dollars in her glove box. If she had won the cash five days earlier, why hadn’t she put it in the bank or at least in a safe place in her home?

Carola was one of the few friends who knew Stephany liked to gamble. During a phone call that past Monday, Stephany had boasted of winning 7,000 nuevos soles, about U.S.$2,500, in a poker tournament. Carola had been skeptical about the amount of money her friend claimed to have won. She had heard these big-fish stories before. As was true with most gamblers, Stephany tended to inflate the sum of her winnings and minimize the sum of her losses. Sometimes she would even offer proof. “Take a look at this,” she would say, opening her wallet to reveal thick wads of cash.

Carola found this side of Stephany’s personality disturbing. People were killed in Lima for smaller sums all the time. It seemed dangerous to be walking around the city carrying so much cash. Yet, Stephany didn’t appear at all concerned.

Not wanting to spoil her friend’s good time, Carola agreed to hold the money while they walked around the carnival. She told Ricardo that Stephany was particularly jovial as they strolled the school grounds, at one point declaring that she was having the time of her life. She loved their spontaneous decision to enjoy something different.

After several hours of eating cotton candy and playing tombola, a game similar to bingo, the two headed to the El Pacifico Hotel, a moderately priced hotel in the Jesus Maria district, not far from Miraflores. There, they rented a room so they could try out the video games and enjoy a few hours of privacy.

At around 11:30
P.M.
, Stephany and Carola rendezvoused with another friend, Carolina Gallo, in the hotel lobby. Gallo was a slender brunette with brilliant white teeth. She had also attended the University of Lima with them and was on their futsal team. The three women had plans to go to the Pub del Gringo in Barranco, a lively Bohemian district south of Miraflores that was popular with Lima’s young hipster set. The neighborhood, built on cliffs overlooking the Pacific, had a rich colonial history evidenced by the stunning homes built by German and British immigrants dating back to the 1800s.

Unfortunately, Barranco, the once beautiful seaside resort, had fallen on hard times and had been plagued by drugs and crime for decades. Now, it was in a renaissance, with trendy new bars and art galleries opening on an almost daily basis. It was the hot place to be seen and party.

At 2:00
A.M.
the three called it a night. Carolina was tired and had to get up early for work. Stephany agreed to drop her off at her boyfriend’s house in Miraflores. From there, she drove Carola to the Phillips Company on Avenida Paseo de la República in San Isidro, where she worked in tech support earning the equivalent of about U.S.$1,000 a month. Carola planned to sleep on the couch in the small sixth-floor staff room before reporting for her shift at 7:00
A.M.
rather than go home.

“I’ll call you as soon as I get home,” Stephany said. She then waited at the curb to make sure that Carola made it safely past the doorman and into the building before pulling away. It was 2:54
A.M.
when she sent her friend a text, “I love you. I need to pee, did they open the door?”

“Yes, my love,” Carola replied at 2:58
A.M.
“Did you arrive?”

Eight minutes passed before Carola received a reply. “I’m going up right now, I’ll call you.”

Carola was relieved thinking that her friend had arrived safely at her destination and fell asleep believing that Stephany was on her way upstairs to her bedroom. But it simply wasn’t true.

After dropping Carola at her office, Stephany had other plans. She drove straight to the Atlantic City Casino, one of the swankiest and most visually striking casinos in Miraflores. Sitting at the crossroads of the main drags of Alfredo Benavides and Larco avenues, the glow of the Atlantic City was visible from blocks away. Thousands of brilliant lightbulbs illuminated the mirrored gold surface of the building creating an almost supernova-like effect on an otherwise dark and uninteresting block populated by Internet cafés and office buildings. Valets in coats with long red tails and top hats looked like they’d stepped out of Victorian England standing beneath the curving red and gold marquis to greet gamblers at the enormous entryway framed by forty-foot waterfalls. The marble floors and colossal gold chandeliers were as glitzy as anything found in Vegas.

The Atlantic City Casino was a modern and full-service establishment and was open twenty-four hours a day. In addition to five hundred slot machines and gaming tables on the main level, there were also private poker suites and a karaoke lounge upstairs, as well the five-star restaurant, Eliazar, and the more casual Lulo’s Ice Cream Shop.

Stephany was already at a gaming table in one of the upstairs poker suites when she sent a text message to Carola saying she had arrived home safely. Her parents and friends had no way of knowing that her secret visits to the casinos of Miraflores were becoming more frequent, the stakes increasingly high.

It was just before 3:00
A.M.
when casino surveillance cameras captured her taking a seat alongside a young Dutchman named Joran van der Sloot. Seen on video, the encounter seemed friendly and random. The two shook hands. For a minute Stephany appeared unsure about taking either of the two vacant chairs next to the lanky, dark-haired foreigner with the thin mustache and closely cropped beard. The fair-skinned young man was dressed casually in a long-sleeved collared shirt that hung loosely from his athletic frame. His well-worn blue jeans had holes in both knees. Cameras caught Stephany considering an empty chair at another table before she settled into a chair to the man’s left side, leaving the seat between them empty.

Pulling her hair back nervously with her fingers, she seemed on edge, perhaps simply the result of the rush of adrenaline that went along with sitting down at the gaming table.

Joran watched as she pulled a small wallet with peace symbols and the words “peace,” “love me,” and “flower power” in purple and blue lettering from the pocket of her jeans, unzipped it, and tossed a wad of bills onto the table in front of the dealer. In a city where pickpockets and purse snatchings were part of the norm, many Peruvians kept their money in a simple billfold in their front pockets. And Stephany was carrying a lot of cash. Her wallet was stuffed with 100 and 50 nuevos soles bills.

For the next two hours, Stephany sipped wine while Van der Sloot downed the complimentary whiskey and colas and smoked countless cigarettes doled out one by one, courtesy of the house, by cocktail waitresses dressed in revealing black-and-white uniforms. He had entered the casino an hour earlier than Stephany, most likely anticipating her arrival.

The two had been introduced at the tables earlier in the week by a thirty-five-year-old Uruguayan poker player named Elton García, who was in Lima to participate in the Latin American Poker Tour, scheduled to begin at the Atlantic City Casino in a few days. García, like Joran, was a guest at the Hotel Tac, and the two men had struck up a casual friendship.

Joran had also wanted to be a competitor in the four-day poker tournament. Although he wasn’t a registered player like García, he had come to Peru with $25,000 and had hoped he would be able to buy his way in at the last minute. But the last two weeks had been a bust. He’d lost almost all his cash and barely had enough money to pay his hotel bill.

Joran was a well-known figure in the poker world, though more for his media notoriety than his poker skills, and had a reputation for being a “railbird.” Railbirds, in pokerspeak, were gamblers who watched from the sidelines. They got their name because as observers not placing bets, they must stand behind a rail. True railbirds would often scam or hustle to get back into the action.

Joran couldn’t pinpoint when his gambling became an addiction, but it had taken over his entire life. His world revolved around cards and jackpots, his next fix. All his actions were a means to that end.

Since his childhood back on the Caribbean island of Aruba, he had wanted to be a “player.” Now at twenty-two his life was in shambles. His mother wanted to have him committed to a psychiatric hospital, he had no real friends to speak of, and he suspected that the FBI was after him for an unsolved disappearance of a young woman in Aruba. All that remained from his once-promising former life was an all-consuming desire to gamble. Gambling was an expensive addiction to feed. With the Latin American Poker Tour just three days away, he needed cash desperately. The buy-in for the tournament was U.S.$2,700, and he would need additional money for betting.

Stephany Flores was oblivious to all of this as she sat next to the dangerous and desperate man. She had played cards with him earlier in the week, and he seemed like a nice, friendly Dutch tourist. During Joran’s stay in Peru, Stephany had been a regular at the Atlantic City Casino and there was a buzz about her recent winning streak. He knew she’d scored U.S.$10,000 at the baccarat tables that past Monday and had been winning ever since. The staff at the casino fawned over her, treating her like a VIP. Casinos didn’t do this for just anybody.

Since being introduced to her by Elton García earlier in the week, he and Stephany had played poker together several times, including an hour the night before. Joran had been quick to size her up. He learned that her father was a big shot and that she came from money.

It was 5:00
A.M.
when videotape from a camera trained on the casino floor captured Stephany cashing in her chips. Another in the establishment’s parking lot recorded her driving into the night with Joran, known internationally as a suspect in an unsolved murder. What ruse he used to lure the young woman out of the casino would prove one of the greatest mysteries surrounding the case.

Stephany appeared nervous on the tape, as though her instincts were telling her to walk away. But the Dutchman’s charm was almost hypnotic.

TWO

MAY 29, 2005
ARUBA, NETHERLANDS ANTILLES

Five years before Stephany Flores’s fateful meeting with Joran van der Sloot, the Dutchman was captured on security video inside another casino some 1,800 miles to the north of Lima on the Caribbean island of Aruba, a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This time, he was at the blackjack tables of the Excelsior, the oldest casino and poker room on the island. He had joined up with a group of college-bound girls from Alabama. The young women had no way of knowing that this brief encounter would irrevocably change their lives or that one of them would never return home to Alabama.

Joran, though only seventeen, was in the throes of a downward spiral. In the past couple of years, he’d been in trouble constantly. Despite having a monthly allowance of $160, he’d stolen money from his parents—fifty euros, about sixty-five dollars, from his father, and additional cash from his mother. Anita and Paulus had also caught their son in countless lies. Although he’d been a sweet child, he had become increasingly aggressive toward his siblings. During a family trip to Miami, he roughed up his middle brother, Valentijn, and had also been accused of attacking others outside the home. He had used his brother’s mobile phone without permission, and then broke the phone’s chip. Concerned, his parents sent him to a psychologist.

Anita and Paulus van der Sloot had hoped that the changes their eldest son was going through could be attributed to the fact that he’d entered puberty at an unusually young age. Early-onset puberty, or precocious puberty, could sometimes lead to aggressive conduct in boys who mature sexually before their peers.

Desperate to find a way for Joran to channel his emotions, his mother had pushed him to participate in yoga classes. She was convinced relaxation and meditation would improve his sense of well-being. But Joran was almost eighteen and the problems just seemed to be multiplying.

Unbeknownst to his parents, his drinking had become problematic. Joran was fifteen when he first tasted liquor, and while he assured his mother he was not drinking, on most nights he was out with his friends getting drunk on free cocktails at the casinos before hitting the clubs.

While he considered himself a social drinker, he had a high tolerance for alcohol and preferred the extra kick of whiskey and Coca-Cola to beer. He once bragged that he had to drink a case of beer before he began to feel tipsy or twenty to thirty glasses of whiskey or rum to get drunk. Physically, he was much bigger than his high school classmates. He was a muscular guy, standing six feet four, slender and athletic. His friends and family called him a “sporter,” a jock.

He was a star tennis player at the Aruba Racquet Club, where he and his father competed in regular doubles tournaments. He was also a standout soccer player and was recognized at the private school he attended for his aggressive style. When Joran channeled his anger, especially in athletics, he was capable of remarkable achievement, but his darker side was always circling just beneath the surface.

His friends knew that he was prone to aggression when intoxicated. They’d been out with him and seen him drinking. A few months earlier, while partying at the annual Mardi Gras celebration in the capital city of Oranjestad, Joran got into a confrontation with a homeless man. At first, Joran had sought the help of a policeman, who sent the homeless man away. However, when the homeless man returned, the situation escalated and Joran, somewhat intoxicated, snapped and threw the man off a bridge and into the water. His friends found his actions somewhat amusing, and excused him. After all, he had been provoked.