Beth Holloway waited 18 years to hear Joran van der Sloot confess to killing her daughter. Netflix’s 3-part Taken: Natalee Holloway, which premiered November 4, follows the search that led to that confession, with Beth’s account and previously unreleased footage from a 2010 FBI operation.
Natalee was 18 when she disappeared during a graduation trip to Aruba in May 2005. The Mountain Brook, Alabama, graduate had a full academic scholarship to the University of Alabama and hoped to become a doctor. Her friends called her “Hootie.”
Early on May 30, she was last seen leaving Carlos’n Charlie’s in Oranjestad with van der Sloot, then 17, and brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe. She never returned to her hotel and missed her flight home.
Beth flew to Aruba and confronted van der Sloot at his family’s home within hours of arriving. He claimed Natalee had been taken back to her hotel, but video later contradicted that account. Former Aruban deputy police chief Gerold Dompig estimates that van der Sloot changed his story about 40 times.
Police arrested van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers about 10 days after Natalee disappeared. They were released by early September 2005 because there wasn’t enough evidence. Searches, reported sightings and years of tips failed to locate her remains.
In 2010, van der Sloot offered Beth’s attorney, John Kelly, information about where Natalee’s body was in exchange for $250,000. The FBI investigated the demand as extortion and wire fraud. After receiving a partial payment, he gave a false account that placed her remains beneath a house’s foundation, then fled to Peru.
The murder of 21-year-old student Stephany Flores RamÃrez took place in a Lima hotel room on May 30, 2010, when he killed her exactly 5 years after Natalee disappeared. His later guilty plea led to a prison sentence of 28 years in Peru.
Peru temporarily extradited him to the United States in 2023 to face the extortion and wire fraud charges. As part of his plea agreement, he confessed to killing Natalee after she rejected his advances. He said he beat her, struck her with a cinder block and carried her body into the ocean.
The U.S. case resulted in a sentence running concurrently with his Peruvian term. It did not result in a murder conviction for Natalee’s death. He remains imprisoned in Peru, and her remains have never been recovered.
Directed by Dani Sloane and Matthew Galkin and produced by Story Syndicate, the series brings together Beth, Natalee’s friends, Kelly, retired FBI agents and Dompig, who discusses the case publicly for the first time in about 20 years. Beth has described it as the first comprehensive account of the full story following the confession.
