Upon arrival it soon became clear that navigating this unfamiliar legal system was going to be nothing like working with police in their own backyard. Stephanie Good and Larry Garrison. Coupled with the franticness of searching for a lost child when the local cops weren't exactly operating with the same urgency, they didn't even realize at first that the whole world had stopped to take notice of their plight, media outlets pouring onto the island and Natalee's name and face leading every newscast.
I know in a couple of weeks it'll have been a situation where they'd call, [we'd ask] 'Anything going on? Soon enough the realization dawned that the answers that seemed so forthcoming early on—Natalee was, after all, seen leaving a crowded bar with three immediately identified local boys who admitted being with her—would prove endlessly elusive.
J Ward , who has worked with the Holloway family since , recalled to E! Sometimes the pilots would join the conversation, too. He first met Beth in , having offered up use of his then-pioneering Layered Voice Analysis technology—which had indicated to him that Joran and his associates were lying through their teeth.
In the course of flying back and forth to Aruba 10 times, he soon met Dave as well. By the time rolled around, Aruban authorities made it clear they no longer considered this a missing-person case—not that her family thought they'd handled any leg of the investigation properly, Dave recalling in his book how early on police had suggested Natalee had just run off and that he and Beth were the ones combing the island with their respective teams looking for her.
In early , a person who identified himself as Marcos sent Dave a message, claiming he knew that drug runners had been paid to get rid of Natalee's body at sea but instead took the remains with them to Nicaragua and hid them on land. Private investigator Tim Miller, as he relayed on Dateline , went to Nicaragua and met with Marcos, who offered to go to the hiding place with a GPS tracker and look for the remains.
When Dave was contacted in by a man named Gabriel , who said he had information about Natalee's remains, Dave asked T. That turned into a situation a little bit bigger than what I'd anticipated.
It led to the enlistment of a production company which, most importantly, would be able to provide resources for the considerable expense involved in returning to Aruba and conducting yet another search.
John also said that Joran told him Natalee died of a bad reaction to a drug he had slipped her, and that Joran's father helped his son carry Natalee's body to the site in question in The show's sixth and final episode notes that Aruban authorities were initially reluctant to let them film the site where John said he helped Joran retrieve the remains, but they eventually got permission to keep going.
Meanwhile, the show's investigatory team was skeptical, considering how inconvenient the spot would've been to dispose of a body, even that of a petite 5-foot-4 young woman, at night. The episode continued with video shot by Gabriel that shows he and John driving while talking about evidence kept as a "trophy," heading into a residential area and then digging up a plastic bag containing a few bone fragments. Gabriel got back in touch with Dave to tell them about their big find.
Aruban police said they were aware of the pair's movements. Dave and T. The bones, the chief added, were "bogus. Not even human bones. The production was able to bring the bones back to the U. A fourth was human, but didn't match Natalee's DNA. News, remembering the realization that Gabriel had seemingly led them astray, "to put a grieving family out there for his own personal gain Toward the end of production on the Oxygen series, the investigator's younger son—who had been recovering at a halfway house with nine months of sobriety behind him—died suddenly.
And I'll never, never not believe that. I made a pledge that I will share everything that I have learned. So, that's what I did. It looks like paradise DebRobertsABC reports. In , van der Sloot pleaded guilty to the murder of Stephany Flores. That's really hard for me—I kind of want the years to stop. I hold on to these dumb little images: the blond hair on her arms. And her bubbly, messy handwriting! She had a crush on this one boy—you could tell because she was all shy around him.
She was particular. I think she was waiting for the perfect boyfriend: a cowboy, a Southern gentleman. She was innocent. We all were. We weren't nerds, but we weren't girls who would experiment with makeup all day either.
And we didn't travel much—going to the beach at the Florida Panhandle was about it. So when the graduation trip to Aruba was planned, Natalee was so excited! Of course I was hysterical cause I was the only one who didn't go! We'd be coming home Sunday night. Natalee and I went snorkeling together. At night everyone got really dressed up to have dinner at the hotel, and afterward people would go to popular hangouts for young people—one was Carlos'n Charlie's. It was your average beach bar; everybody mixed together, American kids and Arubans.
Our hotel had a casino that we all went to the last night of the trip. We found out after Natalee disappeared that Joran was a regular gambler there. Then I left, and Natalee went to Carlos'n Charlie's with some of the others. I was in the hotel lobby at A. But I didn't think, Where's Natalee? The next morning, most of us, rushing to pack our toothbrushes, didn't know Natalee hadn't come home; we were focused on getting to the airport.
But Natalee's roommate and another friend sure did. We didn't know it at the time, but somebody had called Beth, and she talked to the authorities. Although we don't know what they said to her, she had already sensed that something was wrong. As I was boarding the plane to leave Aruba, two of our friends ran up and said, "Natalee's not on the plane! We don't know where she is! I had no panic. But by the time we landed in Atlanta, my dad called me and said, "Bear"—he called me Bear—"things aren't looking good.
I panicked. Kidnapping, I thought. I cried all the way on the bus from Atlanta to Birmingham. I rushed to Claire's house. While the students were returning to Birmingham, Beth had begun gathering information about her daughter. She talked to one of the boys who'd been on the trip and learned that he'd seen Natalee with van der Sloot on the last night. Eight Mountain Brook students gathered at Claire's house.
It was after midnight. We had left Aruba about 14 hours before. We were worried sick. She got the address of Joran's house, and she was standing outside the gates.
She called us and we put her on speakerphone. She said, "Kids, I need more details! We could hear Beth pleading to be let in the house so they could talk face-to-face. Phil stretch his information a little far when he suggested Natalee Holloway may still be alive?
Possibly so, but if you, like Dr. Phil or me, got the chance to sit and talk to Natalee's mom and dad, or Amy's mother and father, or the parents of dozens of other missing children, you too would see something special.
You would see the hope, the small light of hope in their otherwise tired, worn and frightened eyes that someday their child will walk through the kitchen door, and back into their life, safe at last. Who among you can turn out that light and slam the door on their slim grasp on hope?
In most cases, that's all they have, hope and a few pictures of their missing child frozen in history at the time he or she disappeared. Their child is trapped in a time warp and the parents can't reach them, touch them, or talk to them. They can't even bury them.
As a parent, can it really get much worse than this? For information on home, personal, travel and child security issues, see www. He is the founder and president of Inc. Van Zandt and his associates also developed , a Website dedicated "to develop, evaluate, and disseminate information to help prepare and inform individuals concerning personal and family security issues. IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.
Politics Covid U. News World Opinion Business. Share this —. Follow NBC News.
0コメント