Beth Holloway, holding a photograph of her daughter, Natalee Holloway.
In the dark of early morning, the mother and daughter ran throughNatalee Holloway’s packing list for her much-anticipatedgraduation class trip to Aruba: passport, cash, bathing suit.
“Yes, Mom,”Beth Hollowayrecalls her daughter telling her inthis week’s issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday: “I’m good. I’ve got everything I need.”
Natalee and Beth Holloway.Courtesy Beth Holloway
Courtesy Beth Holloway
A few days later, when Natalee was expected home, Beth instead got a call thather daughter was missing. She contacted the FBI, chartered a private plane and arrived on the Caribbean island before midnight the same day. Running down leads alongside federal agents, within hours Beth soon had the name of a 17-year-old boy —Joran van der Sloot— who had been seen leaving the local bar, Carlos‘N Charlies, in a car with Natalee around 1:30 a.m. May 30, 2005.
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Five years later, after promising to show Beth to Natalee’s remains, he instead made off to Peru with $25,000 of her money. There, within weeks, he brutally killed another student,Stephany Flores Ramírez, five years to the day of Natalee’s disappearance.
But on June 9, 2023, van der Sloot, now 36 — who has beenserving a 28-year murder sentencein Peru since 2012 — wastemporarily extradited to Alabamato face one count each of extortion and wire fraud in connection to his 2010 ploy for Beth’s money in a case that finally gave the grieving mother the answers she had been seeking for so long.
Joran van der Sloot.AP Photo/Martin Mejia
AP Photo/Martin Mejia
Folded into aguilty pleathat allows him to serve 20 years concurrently with his Peruvian murder sentence, van der Sloot confessed to Natalee’s killing, detailing,as first reported in PEOPLE, how he had smashed her face in with a cinder block, then dragged her limp body into the surf.
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“Joran van der Sloot is no longer the suspect in Natalee’s murder, Joran van der Sloot is her killer,” Beth says. “That is the answer that I needed. I am now able to begin to move my life forward.”
Standing outside the Alabama courthouse on the day of van der Sloot’s first hearing in the U.S., Beth watched her son, Matt Holloway, who grew up in the shadow of his sister’s tragedy and is now in his mid-30s, climbing the courthouse steps with a wave and a thumbs up. “And I said, ‘You know what, I’m done,’” Beth recalls thinking. “I got justice for my son.”
Beth Holloway (center) with son, Matt Holloway (left) and lawyer John Q. Kelly (right).Butch Dill/AP
Butch Dill/AP
As Beth had searched for her daughter, Matt, 16 at the time of his sister’s disappearance, “had to become a man,” Beth recalls, noting she never did another load of his laundry. “I was gone pretty much for a year, and he grew up pretty fast and in a hurry.”
Now, the life she imagines for Natalee —as the doctor she dreamed of becoming— exists in parallel to the one she sees in her son, who is a pilot with children of his own.
The two gathered again Oct. 21 for what would have been Natalee’s 37th birthday, celebrating it together for the first time since Natalee went missing. “My heart was happy,” Beth wrote in a text to PEOPLE afterward. “It was time. A victorious time.”
source: people.com
