Original subtitles

[foreboding music playing]

[Scott] I met Beth Holloway in 2010.

We were discussing a possible operation down in Aruba.

Within the FBI, early on,

we wanted to be more involved in the case.

The FBI just can't storm in there and say,

as we often see in the movies, "Move out of the way. We're taking over."

[Scott] But at the end of the day,

we don't have any authority in any other country.

This was an investigation in Aruba.

However, when we found out about Joran talking to John,

we anticipated that there might be an opportunity for us.

Joran wanted $25,000 up front.

$10,000 would be in cash, $15,000 would be wired to him.

After Joran got the money,

then he would show John where Natalee's remains were.

And then once the information he provided was confirmed,

then the remainder of that money would be given to him.

We didn't know what story we were gonna get. Nobody did.

But if this is another fraud,

is there a potential that we could get an indictment on wire fraud and extortion,

and then extradite him to the United States to stand trial?

I thought, you know what, 25,000 is… is fine with me

because I had a chance to get justice for Natalee. Let's go.

[intense music playing]

[music fades]

The plan was for a meeting to happen between John Kelly and Joran in Aruba.

But we are now asking John Kelly to meet with somebody who is dangerous.

The one concern the FBI had was that, um,

Joran was either himself or he'd enlist others to basically rob me.

Safety and security was our number one objective.

We relied heavily on the Aruban police.

We are in their country.

We are not sworn law enforcement officers there.

We are not carrying weapons in their country.

So that coordination piece had to be really tight.

[John] Got down to Aruba.

When I walked in the room of the hotel,

there was a whole shitload of equipment.

[Scott] We had two technically trained agents from Miami.

They specialize in collecting audio and video and those kind of things.

[Beth] It took a lot of logistics to make this happen.

While John is in Aruba, I'm sitting at Regions Bank in Birmingham

ready to wire $15,000 into Joran's account from stateside.

It was pretty surreal.

[Scott] Two agents were in the hotel. They were monitoring the events real time.

My job was on the outside of the hotel.

We anticipated that there would be movement.

It was part of the contract

that he would have to take John to the location.

So we needed to be prepared to cover a meeting

that would happen in a hotel room, in a vehicle driving around the island,

or even just out on foot walking on the beach.

[John] Once all the equipment's in place and I'm told the room is hot,

it's time to make the call to Joran telling him to come over.

[John] Hey.

Have a seat.

Look, here's the deal.

I've got, uh, two original contracts. And I'll give them to you.

The big thing that I've emphasized, that I've told you in the emails,

like, are you ready to be really specific where Natalee is?

-Ready-- -You absolutely know?

-Yeah, I'm ready-- -You can take me there?

-I can't believe I'm doing it. I'm ready. -Okay.

Can I have a Coke or something?

Yeah, you look pretty hot.

-It's so hot outside. -[John] Yeah.

I had to wait on a cab for like five minutes.

I was sweating my ass off.

[John] And this is…

Well, just look it over.

Is this something that is relatively close by with the car,

that we can take care of while we stop…

It's not more than five minutes from here.

[John] Okay.

I got ten here,

and as soon as we sign the contract,

Beth, I'll just send her a text or call,

and she's going to send the other 15 into that account.

Seven, eight, nine, ten.

To be completely honest, for me, the biggest deal is the 225 afterwards.

Did you put in the contract that that would be paid within a month?

[John] Yeah. I've got it.

So, if you want to sign it, I'll sign it.

[John] Joran signs the agreement.

I had to pretend like I thought this was a binding agreement.

I knew she wasn't going to pay him another 225 grand.

Because, if he disclosed, uh, Natalee's whereabouts,

then he was going to be arrested for it,

and if he didn't disclose what happened to Natalee,

he was going to be arrested anyway for extortion and wire fraud.

[John] Let's just go and get this part taken care of.

[Beth] John Kelly calls me and said, "Transfer the money."

So we're frantically trying to push this money through.

That was a nail-biter day.

[Scott] Once Joran had all the money,

we see them come out of the hotel and get into John's car,

and they start moving around the island.

We have eyes on them.

They get out of the car,

and they're pointing and looking in the direction of a house,

kind of on a cul-de-sac.

[John] Joran's story was that Natalee's body had been taken to a house

that was under construction early, mid-2005.

I pretended like I believed this, of course.

After telling me this story,

he asked me to drop him off at the Radisson,

uh, 'cause he wanted to go gamble, I guess.

In theory, Joran took 25 grand,

had a good laugh and went about his merry way.

It didn't bother me at all, because I knew how it was gonna play out.

[Scott] Joran said Natalee's remains were concealed in the foundation.

If the story was true, there's no wire fraud, no extortion.

So the investigative team,

we have to prove that her body is not in that foundation.

So that's what we set about doing.

We're trying to pull up old satellite imagery,

interviewing the people who were building the house,

and we were able to determine that on the lot he pointed out,

there was no construction going on the day of Natalee's disappearance.

It was just clear ground at that point.

He lied. So that meant we captured Joran committing a crime against Beth,

and we were going to bring legal action against him

for wire fraud and extortion here in the Northern District of Alabama.

[Beth] John Kelly called me to tell me that Joran has lied.

I'll never forget that call, you know, that we're…

we're about to have him.

I thought that was pretty damn good.

[Scott] The same day that we're flying out of Aruba,

we get notified by the Aruban authorities

that Joran has hopped on a commercial airline and left the country.

We were able to track his movements to Peru.

For us, it wasn't a big deal.

We were still feeling confident we were going to be able to extradite him.

Unfortunately, in this case,

nobody could've foreseen what's gonna happen next.

[man in Spanish] I was on duty that Tuesday.

We got a communication to go to the TAC Hotel.

We had been searching for a person that had gone missing a few days ago

called Stephany Flores.

She was a student.

Twenty-one years old.

She was the daughter of a well-known businessman.

And that's who is inside one of the rooms, dead.

[tense music playing]

The death had definitely been violent.

She had been dead for around 24 to 48 hours.

I told the other detectives to find the security cameras.

And from the footage that we sourced,

we were able to ascertain

that Stephany Flores had gone in right behind a Dutch citizen.

[music intensifies]

And he was identified there as Joran van der Sloot.

[ominous music playing]

[in English] The mysterious case of Natalee Holloway has taken a strange turn.

The 22-year-old Dutchman, long suspected but never charged in the case,

is now a suspect in the murder of another woman.

[reporter 1] He was the last person seen with 21-year-old Stephany Flores.

[reporter 2] Flores' body was found five years to the day

that Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway went missing in Aruba in 2005.

[reporter 3] What do you have to say, Joran?

[Beth] It was just devastating. It was devastating.

Another young girl has lost her life

five years to the date that he murdered Natalee.

I mean, it was sickening.

I knew he would kill again. He… He's just a time bomb.

[Juan in Spanish] During the interrogation,

he narrated how he murdered Stephany Flores.

According to what he told me, he came for a poker tournament.

And he said he had been on a losing streak since the 14th.

On the night of the 29th, Joran participated in a poker game

where this girl beat him.

And he was like, "Want me to teach you how to play online poker?"

So he ended up convincing her.

They enter the room.

He opens up the laptop and puts it between them on the bed,

and that's when the Facebook messages start pouring in

accusing him of being a murderer.

They were calling him a murderer

on the occasion of the five-year anniversary of the death of Natalee Holloway.

She got on the computer,

and I saw a news story with…

Uh, it hurt me a lot.

-[officer] A news story that hurt you? -Yes.

About something that happened five years ago.

Five years had passed.

-[officer] Did you hit Stephany Flores? -Yes.

-[officer] Where? -In the head.

[in English] After I found out about Stephany Flores, I remember being angry.

This could have been prevented.

But he'd gotten away with it once,

so I think in his evil, arrogant, narcissistic brain,

he was like, "It doesn't even matter. It's not gonna affect me."

"I'm gonna get away with it again."

[Beth] I did have the opportunity

to have a series of communications with Maria, Stephany's mother.

And I could really feel more of her, you know, hurt and heartache and pain.

[reporter 1] Anita van der Sloot,

who stood by her son for the past five years,

is now wavering in her support.

[reporter 2] She won't even visit her own son in jail.

[reporter reading]

[reporter 3] It is 28 years in prison for Joran van der Sloot, for murder…

[reporter 4] Convicted of the murder of 21-year-old Stephany Flores Ramírez…

[Gerold Dompig] I was shocked when I heard that he killed this girl.

Sadly, the fact that we couldn't find forensic evidence,

and he got away with the Natalee case,

made him more dangerous.

I think if he was not in prison, he would kill again.

[John] I was concerned that was going to be the final chapter of the Joran saga.

He was gonna be locked up, but was gonna be in Peru,

and it was going to be for Stephany Flores' murder.

There was going to be no incentive now for Joran

to ever disclose what really happened to Natalee.

It was a real disappointment to Beth.

A real disappointment.

[Beth] It's hard to process

when you're about to have your daughter's killer arrested

and extradited to Alabama,

and then he murdered another girl.

Didn't see that one coming. Ah.

[sniffles] That one was tough.

Ah.

I felt like it was over.

[Greta Van Susteren] May 30th is the anniversary

of Natalee's disappearance in Aruba.

All these years, I continued to work on that story.

I've continued to make calls, follow leads,

even weekend trips to faraway places like Thailand and Peru.

I've not given up, and I don't intend to.

[Beth] One day, around May of 2021, Greta gave me a call.

She had gotten a WhatsApp chat

from someone who called himself The Fisherman.

And he starts sending her all these pictures and stuff.

I'm thinking there could be some real information here.

Because they were saying all the details, I was just, like, completely sucked in.

So, you know, Greta started paying money in exchange for evidentiary information.

This begins the onslaught.

All different threads. They're all different numbers.

Pictures of bones, the pictures of blouses,

the picture of grave sites, the pictures of teeth, skirts, flip-flops,

all these pictures start surfacing from all these different WhatsApp people.

I didn't know who they were

or how they came about it talking to Greta.

Greta was the lead on that, so she was the one getting the WhatsApp.

She would export it to me by email.

I was buried in it.

It was really hard.

At some point, a blouse was shipped to Greta,

and wow, I just, like, screamed, "My gosh, that's her blouse."

Very distinct blouse with little hearts and spaghetti straps.

I screamed, like, with such pain.

Greta said, "I've never heard you do that."

I just knew that was her blouse.

Greta and I decided to send the blouse to the FBI for analysis,

to extract any DNA possible.

[intriguing music playing]

My name is Alexandra Montilla. I'm a retired FBI agent.

I worked, most of my career, extraterritorial matters,

where we work crimes against US citizens abroad.

I heard about the case when she went missing.

I mean, it was a big case, a lot of media attention.

And then in October of 2021,

Miami FBI gets a call from Greta Van Susteren,

saying that she had the top Natalee was wearing

the day she was murdered.

[Greta] Oh my gosh.

[Alexandra] I was assigned the case.

And I had sent that top to the lab.

I knew Beth had hope.

This was physical evidence, but the lab came back,

patterns are different, there's no DNA match.

It's not her blouse.

I met with Beth and Greta to return that blouse.

And Beth starts looking at the top like, maybe… maybe it is, you know?

It's like that hope, that maybe.

And I said, "No. The… The lab said there was no match,

and the top is not the same pattern as the top Natalee was wearing."

I took a picture of that moment because it broke my heart.

It's that hope, you know? False hopes.

She was exhausted.

People were taking advantage of her horrific situation to earn a buck.

It was too much.

[Beth] Eventually, the FBI lab determined

that all these WhatsApp chat persons could be one person, two at the most.

It was all a scam.

[Alexandra] In one of our many conversations,

Beth says, "By the time Joran finishes his sentence

and he comes to the United States to face the extortion charges,

everybody's gonna be dead."

"We're gonna have no case."

"Why can't we just borrow him from Peru?"

[Beth] At the time, he is in prison in Peru,

but I got the heads-up that he was able to get married,

have a baby.

He had it going on.

[Nancy Grace] How is it that Joran van der Sloot has managed

to have conjugal visits behind bars and get a woman pregnant?

This must make the parents of his two murder victims just furious.

I felt like I could support my reasonings for wanting to extradite him here.

[Alexandra] So I started brainstorming

about asking Peru for this temporary extradition.

The thought was to get Peru to lend Joran to us,

extradite Joran to Birmingham,

and charge him with the extortion and wire fraud charges.

We cannot indict him on charges of murdering Natalee,

but we'll get you on the extortion charges and we'll get you in Natalee's backyard.

Alex Montilla began to try to help facilitate

the extradition of Joran as a loaner prisoner.

A temporary extradition takes a lot of levels of authorization.

I thought Peru was gonna say, "Forget it, that's just impossible."

"This is an extortion case, it's not even a violent crime case."

But we had to give it a chance.

[reporter] Hey, Joran, you wanna be extradited to the States?

When we got the approval, my first thought is "poetic justice,"

because Dina Boluarte, the president of Peru, is a female,

and it was in her hands,

and she agreed and she didn't take that long.

An FBI plane departed the US for Peru today.

That plane will be used to bring Joran van der Sloot to the US tomorrow.

Finally, Joran van der Sloot, he's coming to the United States.

He will eventually be brought to Birmingham

where he'll go before a federal judge on wire fraud and extortion charges.

Myself and two other agents, Tori and Alex, we take a plane,

we fly down, we sign for Joran, and we come right back.

It was a long flight, about seven hours.

He talked a lot.

[Alexandra] Very charismatic, very easy to talk to.

He engages people.

He talked about life in prison in Peru.

He starts telling me that he's allowed to have animals.

He tells me that he has this bunny rabbit that he's had for a while,

and he wanted to show his daughter.

And then he says that the daughter's caressing the bunny rabbit

and he hears like a growling sound,

and that he saw that the bunny rabbit scratched the daughter's face,

and he immediately grabbed the bunny rabbit

and ripped his head off like if nothing.

And then he carried on with other conversations.

I've dealt with a lot of criminals,

and as a female,

I thought this is probably one of the most dangerous ones.

He has this ability to engage people, and people are drawn to him.

He comes off as a very educated man.

[reporter 1] Nearly 20 years after Natalee Holloway disappeared,

the prime suspect has been extradited to the United States.

[Beth] We did it, dragged him out of Peru. I mean, he had to be miserable.

That's a win.

He was immediately taken to a holding facility

and then he was arraigned.

[Scott] Relatively quickly, Joran and his counsel start talking

about a potential plea deal.

[Beth] Joran wants to tell us what happened to Natalee

in exchange for lesser sentencing time.

Initially, I told the FBI agents, Alex and Scott,

"Tell Joran I said, 'Ms. Holloway says, 'fuck you,'

I want you to rot in prison for the rest of your life.'"

I was good with that.

And then as the days passed by, I started thinking, "If he told the truth,

I would have the answers that I've been searching for for 18 years."

But if he's caught lying, then that just adds on more years.

And that began the development of the plea.

In exchange for providing the information about Natalee's death,

the government would recommend to the courts

that the sentence would be concurrent with the sentence he is serving in Peru.

He was going to do no jail time in America if… if it all played out.

Once we found out that the defense and Joran agreed to a plea agreement,

then we went forward with the proffer.

A proffer is when you have a subject volunteering evidence

to the prosecutors and law enforcement.

In this case, we needed a polygrapher

to verify the information that was provided by Joran.

[producer] How do you believe a polygraph from a compulsive liar

who's changed his story countless times?

Because I chose the best polygrapher in the bureau.

My name is Michael Leverock. I'm a retired FBI agent.

For most of my career, I was a polygraph examiner.

A polygraph is based on the autonomic nervous system.

It's based on fight or flight.

When somebody's coming at you physically,

your brain makes a decision

whether that's a threat to your well-being.

Once it determines it's a threat to your well-being,

your heart is gonna start beating faster

to get blood to the extremities to fight or run.

Sweat is gonna come to the surface of the skin to cool the body.

Your breathing will change to help you do that.

You can't control those things. That's what we're looking for.

In Joran's case, the objective was to hear exactly what he did

and what happened to Natalee that night.

Period.

[Beth] The FBI put me in a separate office right across the hallway

to see this proffer given in real time.

I had no idea what he was going to say.

There was more than a decade

where I didn't think we'd ever see Joran being brought to justice.

But Beth always held out hope that she'd get answers.

And it's all worth it if this could finally be put to rest.

He'd already created 22 different lies.

She ran away with a beach bum.

We dropped her off at the Holiday Inn.

Lifted her up to carry her back to her hotel.

Someone offered me $10,000 just to bring them a blonde girl.

She was taken to Venezuela.

Let's see if Joran's telling the truth.

[agent] So, what happens?

[Joran] She asked to go back to her hotel,

but I was just trying to get dropped off

a little bit, uh, further away from her hotel

so we could, uh, walk back to her hotel

and I might still get a chance to… to be with her.

Deepak drops me off at a place known as the fisherman's huts.

I'm with Natalee, walking along the beach.

And we lay down together in the sand.

We start kissing each other.

I start feeling her up again, and she tells me, "No."

Uh, I insist, I keep feeling her up either way.

She ends up kneeing me in the crotch.

I get up and I kick her ex… extremely hard

in the face.

She's laying down unconscious,

possibly even, uh, even dead.

I see, uh, right next to her there's a… there's a huge, uh, cinder block

laying on the beach.

I take this and, uh…

Yeah, I… I… I smash her head in with it completely.

I decide to… to put her into the ocean.

So I walk up, uh, up to about my knees into the ocean,

and I push her off into… into the…

into the… into the sea.

Hearing the horrific and heinous crime he's committed,

at that moment that she died,

that was devastating.

But I knew he was telling the truth.

[Michael] The one part of the story

that everyone had a little bit of a problem with

is that three yards out in the water, you know, it just doesn't sound right.

Generally, you can't just put somebody in the ocean.

They're gonna wash up.

But before the proffer, in early summer of 2023,

I actually went to Aruba.

I'm an avid kite surfer.

And I learned that it just so happens

Aruba has a windward side where it always blows on shore,

and a leeward side where it always blows offshore.

The leeward side is where all the hotels are,

where the fishermen's hut is.

They warn you, it's an offshore wind.

If something happens and you're way out there,

you're not coming back in.

He was telling the truth.

[Beth] Sitting there watching Joran deliver his proffer,

watching him, hearing him in real time,

I remember thinking, "My nightmare is over."

Hard to hear, horrible to hear, but I had to hear it.

The not knowing is the most torturous part.

What a huge day. A conclusion, an answer to the Natalee Holloway mystery.

It's taken nearly two decades,

but today we finally learned what happened to Natalee Holloway.

Joran's statement, it was, uh, it was shocking and jarring.

But on the island, I think there was a sense of relief.

Perhaps this is the end of it.

And we don't have to hear about it anymore.

[Gerold] I hope Aruba decides to reopen the case.

I would feel like a heavy load would get off my back.

'Cause I walked with this load for 20 years.

The last person to see American teenager Natalee Holloway alive in Aruba

is due to face a judge today in Birmingham, Alabama.

This is the courthouse where we expect to see Joran van der Sloot this morning.

[reporter 1] According to the Holloway's attorney,

the court will consider a plea deal.

[Sue Remick] The courtroom was packed with Beth's friends and family,

with media.

It was shocking just to see Joran again.

He stood almost as if he was a proud man.

He pleaded guilty.

When we were in that courtroom, hearing his voice,

I hated that that was the last person she heard.

At that point, Beth got to stand up and give a victim statement.

Okay. "Joran, for 18 years, you denied killing my daughter Natalee."

Hi.

I'm Natalee.

[Beth] "Now, you finally admitted that, in fact, you murdered her."

"Natalee would be 36 years old now."

"She would be married, have children."

"My grandchildren."

Is that the little microphone that picks things up?

[Beth] "But Joran destroyed all of this."

"You terminated her dreams, her possibilities,

when you bludgeoned her to death in 2005."

Isn't she a pretty girl?

That's her, all right.

"You are a killer,

and I want you to remember that every time your jail cell door slams…"

-[girl 1] Hey, Natalee! -[girl 2] Natalee!

"…I will live the rest of my life with my beautiful, wonderful memories

of my young daughter that had her whole life in front of her."

[somber music playing]

[voice breaking] "We did it, honey."

"We did it."

And then I thanked the court.

Yeah.

The only reason Beth got her answers

and there was some closure, was because of Beth.

I don't know how she ever found the energy

or the, uh, stamina or resiliency to do it, but she did it.

You know, God bless her.

Today, I can tell you with certainty that after 18 years,

Natalee's case is solved. As far as I'm concerned…

We had accomplished the unimaginable feat of having Joran face a US court.

I never could have imagined that that would really happen.

Huge day. Huge day.

It's hard to believe it happened. Almost seems surreal.

But we did it.

[laughs] It's done.

[Claire Fierman] When we were in that courtroom,

we heard specifically how Natalee died.

As hard as it was to hear,

I didn't have any more questions anymore.

Having the answers doesn't make it easier, but it does give us justice.

That, like, we finally know, he's finally said it.

I remember we were leaving the courthouse and Beth looks at me and says,

"It's over. It's over. I have answers. My family has answers."

It was worth it. Justice was served.

[music ends]

Please help bring her home.

I will do this every day, as I've done since May 31st.

And I will pursue this with every ounce of energy that I have,

and… and I'm not gonna stop.

You hear the word "closure" a lot

when someone's living with losing a loved one.

And everybody uses a term that fits them best.

For me, it's about "it's over."

And when I say it's over,

it doesn't mean not missing the loss of my daughter, Natalee.

It's not that.

The nightmare is over.

I was at the lowest place the human spirit can fall.

That is when I made a pledge to Natalee

that I would find justice for her

and I would never give up, never.

I think Natalee'd be proud of all of us.

I think Joran tangled with the wrong girl.

[gentle music playing]

[music fades]