Joran van der Sloot’s whirlwind plea deal: ‘He won the game,’ but family accepts closure
Joran van der Sloot, the Dutch national who killed Alabama teen Natalee Holloway on an Aruba beach in 2005 and then a Peruvian business student in her father’s casino exactly five years later, is being sent back to the South American country to finish sentences connected to both deaths.
Van der Sloot pleaded guilty to the murder of 21-year-old Stephany Flores in 2021, but he kept mum on what happened to Holloway for years until he finally admitted this month that he crushed her skull with a cinder block – after she turned him down for sex – in a confession that became public during a hearing Wednesday.
Van der Sloot finally stood before a U.S. judge this year to face extortion and wire fraud charges for selling fake information about Holloway’s whereabouts to her mother.
“He is evil personified,” Dave Holloway, the victim’s father, told the judge in a victim’s impact statement as he rejected van der Sloot’s in-court apology.
COURT RELEASES RECORDING OF JORAN VAN DER SLOOT’S NATALEE HOLLOWAY CONFESSION
The government in Peru had agreed to extradite van der Sloot in 2014, according to court documents, but not until his sentence there was completed. The two governments reached a new deal earlier this year that sent him to Alabama, where he pleaded guilty.
“We were robbed of a promising future together with our beautiful, talented Natalee.”
“He received a sentence of 240 months, which runs concurrent to his sentence for the murder of a woman in Peru,” said David Gelman, a Philadelphia-area criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor. “He will never see the inside of a federal prison.”
JORAN VAN DER SLOOT HAS CONFESSED TO KILLING NATALEE HOLLOWAY
Under the terms of a plea deal, van der Sloot goes back to Peru where his sentences will run concurrently. After his sentence there ends, he will remain locked up in the mountaintop Peruvian prison for another five years, serving his U.S. sentence there. Van der Sloot hates the Challapalca prison, according to his Lima-based lawyer, Maximo Altez, who calls it “hell.”
While some legal experts, like Gelman, have called the plea deal too lenient, others say that prosecutors would have had an uphill battle convicting him at trial and gaining a stiffer sentence and that the confession finally provides answers to Holloway’s family, 18 years after they last saw her.
GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING: Listen to Joran van der Sloot’s confession
“Given his callous, narcissistic past acts and attitudes, no one is surprised at his brutality, but the details are still jarring to hear,” Dr. Katherine Ramsland, a DeSales University expert on forensic psychology who has interviewed some of the most extreme offenders, told Fox News Digital. “It seems like his confession is an act of bragging, to show how little he thinks of women. It’s a pose of superiority. Since there’s no accountability, he wants to show that he won the game, at least in his mind. He also wants to minimize his victims.”
There’s also an issue with van der Sloot’s credibility. He’s lied repeatedly about what happened that night in the past, alternately claiming that Holloway hit her head on a rock, his father helped him hide her body, and that he’d sold her to human traffickers.
TIMELINE OF ALABAMA TEEN NATALEE HOLLOWAY’S DEATH
While Holloway’s family has many reasons not to trust van der Sloot’s word, her mother, Beth Holloway, told Fox News on Wednesday that in addition to the taped confession, the FBI has been able to corroborate his claims.
WATCH: Beth Holloway speaks out after Joran van der Sloot confesses to Natalee Holloway murder
“We had our Miami FBI team, we had our Birmingham FBI team, we have the prosecutors. We have a comprehensive – it was a comprehensive approach to getting the answers,” Holloway said. “And then not only that, everything was corroborated and done by comprehensive – that we had a polygrapher come in from the Miami division, and I was even able to meet with him. So, I’ve met with all these people, and we feel really good.”
Holloway’s father, in an impact statement, also said he accepted the confession.
“Having seen and heard him confess to the brutal murder of our daughter, I believe him,” he told the judge. “We are satisfied that our daughter died at his hands and that he acted alone.”
But he added that “questions will forever remain about the extent to which others participated in depriving us of the opportunity to return Natalee’s remains to Alabama.”
Some parts of van der Sloot’s confession have experts remaining skeptical.
“Since there’s no accountability, he wants to show that he won the game, at least in his mind.”
“My feeling is that we’ve probably gotten the story of her killing, but maybe not the full story of the cover-up,” said Paul Mauro, a retired NYPD inspector.
Dumped bodies tend to float to the surface and wash ashore, he said, making van der Sloot’s claim that he dragged Holloway to shallow water and went home “far-fetched.”
That part of the story also piqued the ears of John Kelly, a criminal profiler and the president of STALK Inc., who said killers typically try to “minimize” the extent of their brutality when confessing.
“The rule of thumb we’ve always followed is that if you throw a body in the water, some of it’s going to surface, if not all of it,” he told Fox News Digital. “It’s only a matter of time.”
In a federal courtroom in Alabama on Wednesday, Judge Anna Manasco called the extortion and fraud charges “heinous” because the killer gave false hope to the family that Holloway’s remains might be found. They never were.
“You have brutally murdered, in separate incidents, years apart, two young women who refused your sexual advances,” Manasco told van der Sloot in court, referencing the 2010 bludgeoning of Stephany Flores as van der Sloot pleaded guilty to conning Holloway’s mother out of $25,000.
However, despite his admission that he killed Holloway, the terms of the plea deal state that his confession won’t be used to pursue murder charges.
In his confession, van der Sloot also said that two friends who were with him on the night of Holloway’s death had gone home before the murder.
Satish and Deepak Kalpoe, along with van der Sloot, were arrested and released multiple times as Aruba authorities investigated the case. Island police also questioned Paulus van der Sloot, the killer’s father, who was a prominent judge until he died in 2010.
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“It goes without saying that the promise not to prosecute van der Sloot was given in exchange for his confession – without which this case would remain unsolved,” said Lara Yeretsian, a Los Angeles defense lawyer whose clients have included Scott Peterson and Michael Jackson. “Is that justice? Justice comes in many forms.”
Van der Sloot will serve 46 years in total for the murder of Flores and the extortion of Holloway’s parents, she said.
“The alternative would have been the imposition of a long sentence without any closure on Holloway’s murder,” she said. “The choice was clear.”
For the family, the guilty plea brings closure just days before Holloway would have turned 37.
“After 18 years, Natalee’s case has been solved,” Holloway’s mother told reporters outside the courthouse immediately after the hearing. “Joran van der Sloot is the killer.”
Fox News’ Adam Sabes contributed to this report.
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