By Canadian Press

Natalee Holloway’s confessed killer returns to Peru to serve out sentence in another murder

Oct 31, 2023 | 4:14 PM

LIMA, Peru (AP) — A Dutchman who recently confessed to killing American high school student Natalee Holloway in 2005 in Aruba was returned to Peru on Tuesday to serve the remainder of his prison sentence for murdering a Peruvian woman.

Joran van der Sloot arrived in Lima in the custody of law enforcement. The South American country’s government agreed in June to temporarily extradite him to the U.S. to face trial on extortion and wire fraud charges.

Van der Sloot was long the chief suspect in Holloway’s disappearance in Aruba, though authorities in the Dutch Caribbean island never prosecuted him. Then in an interview with his attorney conducted in the U.S. after his extradition, he admitted to beating the young woman to death on a beach after she refused his advances. He said he dumped her body into the sea.

Van der Sloot, 36, was charged in the U.S. for seeking a quarter of a million dollars to tell Holloway’s family the location of her remains. A plea deal in exchange for a 20-year sentence required him to provide all the information he knew about Holloway’s disappearance, allow her parents to hear in real time his discussion with law enforcement and take a polygraph test.

His sentence for extortion will run concurrently with prison time he is serving for murder in Peru, where he pleaded guilty in 2012 to killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a prominent Peruvian family. She was killed in 2010 five years to the day after Holloway’s disappearance.

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Van der Sloot has been transferred among Peruvian prisons while serving his 28-year sentence in response to reports that he enjoyed privileges such as television, internet access and a cellphone and accusations that he threatened to kill a warden. Before he was extradited to the U.S., he was housed in a prison in a remote area of the Andes, called Challapalca, at 4,600 meters (about 15,090 feet) above sea level.

Holloway went missing during a high school graduation trip. She was last seen May 30, 2005, leaving a bar with van der Sloot. A judge eventually declared her dead, but her body was never found.

The Holloway family has long sought answers about her disappearance, and van der Sloot has given shifting accounts over the years. At one point, he said Holloway was buried in gravel under the foundation of a house but later admitted that was untrue.

Five years after the killing, an FBI sting recorded the extortion attempt in which van der Sloot asked Beth Holloway to pay him $250,000 so he would tell her where to find her daughter’s body. He agreed to accept $25,000 to disclose the location and asked for the other $225,000 once the remains were recovered.

Before he could be arrested in the extortion case, van der Sloot slipped away by moving from Aruba to Peru.

After his recent confession to killing Holloway became public, prosecutors in Aruba asked the U.S. Justice Department for documents to determine if any measures will be taken against van der Sloot.

The Associated Press