Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery (7 page)

Joran grabbed his drink and worked his way through the crowd to get a better look. Natalee’s friend, Lee, the tall brunette, was on the raised dance floor with her. Lee had been doing body shots at the bar. Typically, a woman lay across the bar, stomach exposed, as a man stood over her and sucked a shot of alcohol, usually tequila, from her navel.

“I’m going to the bar to do another shot,” Lee yelled over the music.

Natalee nodded and smiled. When Lee looked back from the bar, she noticed Joran, the Dutch tourist from the casino, standing by the stage steps watching Natalee dance. Lee and Natalee had bumped into Joran earlier as the two were walking out of the bathroom. Joran had nodded to them, but Natalee had not even said hello.

Sometime after midnight, two of Natalee’s roommates, Ruth and Madison, decided to call it a night. Madison went outside with two of her classmates to look for a taxi while Ruth went to find Natalee to make sure she understood they were leaving.

Across the crowd, Ruth spotted her friend standing at the bar with Joran, the young Dutchman who had helped her win back her money at the casino. The two were talking and Ruth jumped and gestured, trying to get her attention.

“We’re leaving,” she mouthed over the classic rock blasting from the speakers.

Natalee, like most of the Mountain Brook teens, had been drinking but seemed sober and in control. “Okay,” Natalee mouthed back, smiling.

Ruth waved, and Natalee waved back. If she had thought for a moment that Joran posed any danger to her friend she would have pulled Natalee from the bar. There were plenty of other people still milling about, and they knew Lee, their other roommate, had also stayed and figured that the two would return to the hotel together. Besides, Joran seemed harmless. That night as they pulled away from Carlos’n Charlie’s in the taxi, the teens from Alabama, filled as they were with such glee, could never have imagined that this would be the last time they would see Natalee alive.

THREE

MONDAY, MAY 31, 2010
LIMA, PERU

Unable to sit idly, Ricardo Flores started working his contacts. More than twenty-four hours had elapsed since he’d heard from his daughter. A call to his decades-old friend Rafael Rey, the head of Peru’s Ministry of Defense, resulted in a personal visit from the government official. Flores had dabbled in politics a decade earlier and Rey, a former political crony, would become a constant presence at the Floreses’ home, sitting vigil into the early morning hours. But there were very few leads. Both were operating under the assumption that Stephany’s disappearance was a kidnapping. Under these circumstances, the best course of action for the family was to sit by the phone and wait for the ransom call. But the call was not coming.

By Tuesday, the Flores family feared the worst. In addition to Rey, there were police officers in the house. If this wasn’t a kidnapping, there must be some other explanation. Police began questioning Ricardo about his relationship with his daughter. Had he and Stephany been fighting? Could she have simply run away?

“Perhaps she left home?” the investigators suggested.

“We have a solid friendship,” Ricardo told them. “We fight like anybody fights.”

Ricardo Flores was a realist. He understood that the questions, while uncomfortable, were necessary. However, he thought that the officers were running down a blind alley. Stephany had no reason to run away.
She has a good life here,
Ricardo thought. He was getting nowhere sitting by the phone. He needed to get personally involved.

He knew from friends that Stephany had been frequenting the casinos of Miraflores lately, and he thought they were as good a place as any to start. Perhaps she’d gotten caught up in the hype surrounding the Latin American Poker Tour going on at the Atlantic City Casino? This was the first time the tour had hosted a tournament in Peru and it was getting lots of publicity in the local press. The tour’s previously scheduled stop in Viña del Mar, Chile, had been canceled after a devastating earthquake shook the country in March and Lima had been substituted as a replacement city. In the days leading up to the event in Lima, players had been arriving from around the world. The players were “pokerworld” celebrities in their own right and it stood to reason that Stephany would want to meet them.

The Atlantic City Casino was the largest of the eight casinos in Miraflores and a favorite of the Flores family because they were friends of the owner. This was a logical place for the desperate father to start his search.

Darkness had already arrived when Ricardo and his two adult sons, Ricardo Jr. and Enrique, and Enrique’s young bride, Carolina, pulled into the parking garage of the Atlantic City Casino. They were hoping to find Stephany sitting at a gaming table. People were known to lose track of time in the artificial perpetual daylight of a windowless casino. Like most casinos there were no clocks on the walls that might remind gamblers when it was time to call it a night. However, forty-eight hours had passed since they’d last heard from her.

Striding into the Atlantic City’s ornate marble lobby, the three men were instantly recognized by casino staff. Ricardo Flores and casino owner Omar Macchi were close friends. Ricardo had known Omar’s father for decades. When the elder Macchi died eight years earlier, Ricardo stayed in close touch with Omar, the heir and new proprietor of the casino. Omar and Riflo were both popular figures in Lima’s tabloid press. The flamboyant young casino owner was often photographed on the town, decked out in gold lamé designer shirts, with a supermodel on each arm. The moment Omar learned that Ricardo Flores was downstairs asking about his daughter, he dropped everything to offer his support. Omar had essentially grown up with Stephany and thought of her as family.

The distraught father wanted to review the casino’s surveillance tapes, hoping to find an image of his missing daughter. Normally, Macchi would not entertain such a request without a court order, but this was a friend. There would be no objections, no red tape.

“Anything you need, my friend,” Omar said, putting his arm around Ricardo. “Don’t worry, we’ll find her.”

Omar immediately directed members of his staff to begin reviewing the casino’s video footage, beginning early Sunday morning when Stephany’s trail went cold. Despite playing host to the Latin American Poker Tour, Omar excused himself from the excitement and sat with the Flores family screening the tapes. Two hours passed before they spotted an image of Stephany’s black Jeep pulling into space number four of the casino’s parking lot.

“Freeze the frame,” Omar directed, noting the time and date stamp in the lower right hand corner. It was 2:54
A.M.
on Sunday, May 30. Having isolated a time, Macchi instructed a member of his staff to cut to the camera covering the casino entrance for that same time period. Seconds later, Stephany’s image appeared on the screen. From there it was simply a matter of following her movements from camera to camera as she walked through the casino. It was 2:57
A.M.
when Stephany was seen heading for the poker tables, taking a seat next to Joran van der Sloot.

For Ricardo Flores, the experience of watching his daughter sitting at a poker table at three in the morning with a stranger was distressing. However, the young man did not appear to be a threat. He looked like a tourist, a gringo on vacation. As the sequence of videotapes progressed, Ricardo viewed his daughter calling it quits around 5:00
A.M.
and heading to the cashier’s window to cash in her remaining poker chips. Another video clip showed her leaving the casino parking lot with the young stranger in Stephany’s Jeep around 5:15
A.M.
, turning left onto Avenida Benavides, and driving off in a southerly direction.

In a tragic irony, at that moment, Ricardo also worried about the stranger, thinking that they both had been abducted. His daughter’s companion was someone’s child, and Ricardo hoped that both children could be rescued unharmed and returned to their panicked families. He wondered if anyone even realized that the young foreigner was missing.

Video footage before Stephany’s arrival that night revealed Van der Sloot arriving at 2:06
A.M.
, less than an hour before Stephany, wearing a beige long-sleeved shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Further review of video recordings from earlier in the week showed that the two had met before. Ricardo Flores observed his daughter with this same man at another gaming table that past Friday. That was the same night he had given Stephany U.S.$1,000—supposedly to buy a laptop computer.

Stephany’s friend Carola Sanguinetti would later tell police that Stephany told her that she’d spent about an hour that Friday evening playing poker with a Dutchman at the Atlantic City Casino before coming to meet her for a night out.

Because the two arrived at the casino within an hour of one another, Ricardo speculated that perhaps their meeting had been prearranged and that Stephany had intended to go to the casino after dropping off her friends early Sunday morning.

Omar provided his friend with a still image of the unidentified male that Ricardo planned on distributing to the media. It was around 11:00
P.M.
when he was ready to head home. Standing in the parking garage, Ricardo realized he had left his cell phone upstairs in the casino and went to retrieve it.

Once upstairs, he was approached by a hostess with more information that Omar had been able to garner. “We have the guy’s name and passport number,” the young woman said.

Every night the casino sponsored a raffle, which was open to gamblers who’d won even small amounts of money at slot machines and gaming tables. Sometimes the prizes were large sums of cash or even cars.

A casino employee remembered that the man in the video had won a small prize and was quick to find his winning ticket. Joran van der Sloot had put his name and passport number on the prize receipt.

Now Ricardo Flores and police had an identity to go with the photographic image. One of the hostesses remembered seeing Van der Sloot with Ricardo’s daughter days before, and said they had been conversing in English. It didn’t surprise Flores. Stephany had studied English and knew it well. “Yeah, Stephany was with this guy,” one of the casino employees confirmed. “He seemed nice. He looked like Brad Pitt.”

Those poor kids, Ricardo thought, looking down at the picture.

With a name and photograph, Ricardo sped home to tell the family he now had a lead. But his sense of excitement was soon replaced with a sense of horror.

Curious about the unidentified stranger, and knowing the resources of the Internet, Carolina, the wife of Ricardo’s son Enrique, went upstairs to Stephany’s room and powered up her computer. She had been with Ricardo at the casino and wanted to see if there was any information on Joran van der Sloot online. Specifically, she was thinking there might be a posting about him being a missing person.

For a moment Stephany’s sister-in-law sat stunned as the search engine turned up page after page of links to news articles connecting Van der Sloot to a possible murder of another young woman, also someone he had met in a casino, five years earlier. There had been security footage of the two sitting at a blackjack table, Carolina read, as she thought about the video Omar had just shown them.

The rest of the Flores family was downstairs when they heard Carolina’s anguished screams. Racing up to Stephany’s room, they found their relative seated in front of the monitor, trembling.

Soon, all their eyes were transfixed in horror on the computer screen, tears streaming down their cheeks. They scrolled through article after article detailing the Dutch national’s suspected involvement in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, an eighteen-year-old teen from Alabama vacationing on an island named Aruba. Because Holloway’s body had never been found, no charges had been filed and the suspected murderer had been able to travel the world, legally and unrestricted.

“I can’t believe it,” Enrique wailed. “How could she be with that guy?”

As members of the Flores family struggled to come to terms with the sickening discovery, a similar scene was playing out at the headquarters of the Dirección de Investigación Criminal, Division of Criminal Investigations (DIRINCRI), a monolithic concrete structure at 323 Avenida España in Lima’s gritty downtown.

Because of his connection to the Ministry of Defense, Ricardo Flores had the full attention of the Peruvian police department. Investigators from the kidnapping division had Googled Van der Sloot’s name, as well. Their search produced a five-page news article titled, “El Caso Natalee Holloway.” The article, written by Dutch journalist Willemien Groot in 2008 and translated into Spanish, included a comprehensive chronology that began with Holloway’s disappearance on May 30, 2005, while on holiday in Aruba, and detailed numerous failed attempts to bring her suspected abductor, Joran van der Sloot, to justice. Soon detectives added other key words to the mix, including “Aruba,” “
asesinato,
” “
desaparición,
” “Natalee Holloway,” and “Van der Sloot.” The officers were stunned. How had this supposed killer entered Peru unnoticed? Surely he must have been flagged by Interpol.

Given this new discovery, the theory that Stephany’s disappearance was a ransom-driven abduction seemed less likely. The possibility of homicide could not be denied.

While Natalee’s disappearance had been front-page news in the U.S. and for a time in Holland, the story had not generated any media interest in Peru. At this point, Peruvian officers had never heard of the Alabama teen or her alleged killer, Joran van der Sloot. But it was becoming increasingly apparent that they were now in the middle of a case with international implications. Officers who had been working the case for two solid days were now working overtime, quickly fanning out across Lima, checking hotels, casinos, airports, any place Van der Sloot might be seeking shelter or escape.

Officers stationed at the Floreses’ home braced the family for the worst.