Aruban Police Are Embarrassed by Joran van der Sloot Murder Confession: 'We Were Outsmarted by a Teenager' (Exclusive)
'It doesn’t make us look very good,' a law enforcement source on the island tells The Messenger. 'It's embarrassing.' Aruba police officials are embarrassed by Joran van der Sloot's confession to the murder of Natalee Holloway, a teenager who confessed to killing her on a trip to Aruba in 2005. The confession has left the victim's family in pain, but with a sense of closure after the teenager disappeared. Van der Sloots was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his involvement in a fraud and extortion case related to Holloway's disappearance. Despite his confession, he is unlikely to be charged with murder in the Holloway case due to a 12-year statute of limitations on homicide in Aruba. The remains of Holloway have never been found.
Published : 2 years ago by Aaron Parsley, Steve Helling in General
Hearing Joran van der Sloot’s gruesome murder confession has left his victim Natalee Holloway’s family in pain, but with a sense of closure after the American teen disappeared on a senior class trip to Aruba in 2005.
On the Caribbean island, however, officials are coming to terms with the fact that their still-open, 18-year investigation failed to uncover the truth.
“It doesn’t make us look very good,” says a police source in Aruba, “because it means that we were outsmarted by a teenager who killed on impulse. It’s embarrassing.”
Van der Sloot confessed under a plea agreement in a fraud and extortion case connected to the teenager’s disappearance. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years during a hearing on Wednesday.
Holloway was last seen on May 31, 2005, with van der Sloot, who admitted to bludgeoning her to death with a cinderblock on a beach when she refused his sexual advances. Then he dragged her body into the sea, he said in an interview taped Oct. 3 and released by U.S. officials this week.
Van der Sloot has been the prime suspect in Holloway’s missing person case from the start. Aruban police arrested him multiple times but he was never charged in connection with her disappearance.
Her body has never been found, and the teenager was declared legally dead by an Aruban judge in January 2012.
By then van der Sloot had confessed to another murder, pleading guilty in Peruvian court to killing business student Stephany Flores in a Lima hotel in 2010 after she confronted him about his involvement in the Holloway case.
After coming clean about killing Holloway, van der Sloot is expected to return to Peru to finish a 28-year sentence for Flores’ murder and begin serving his concurrent 20-year sentence for targeting the Holloway family in an extortion scheme.
And although his confession has ended an 18-year mystery about what happened to the missing teenager, he won’t likely be charged with murder in the Holloway case due to a 12-year statute of limitations on homicide in Aruba.
Still, a spokesperson for prosecutors there said they’ve requested the records from the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation into van der Sloot’s extortion plot.
“There’s nothing we can do about it now,” the Aruban police source admits. “We will look at the transcript, but it has been too long.”
Topics: Crime, Murder