Van der Sloot admits killing Natalee Holloway in 2023 plea, is serving time in Peru

In a U.S. federal courtroom in Alabama in 2023, Joran van der Sloot pleaded guilty to extortion and wire fraud charges. As part of that plea, he admitted to killing Natalee Holloway, the 18-year-old American high school graduate whose 2005 disappearance in Aruba became an international obsession. He said she died of a beating and that her body was disposed of in the ocean. He was not charged with her murder; the statute of limitations had expired, and he could not be tried twice for the same conduct in Aruba.

Holloway, from Mountain Brook, Alabama, was on a senior trip to Aruba when she vanished on May 30, 2005. She was last seen leaving Carlos'n Charlie's, a bar and nightclub in Oranjestad, with three men: van der Sloot, a Dutch student, and two brothers from Suriname, Deepak and Satish Kalpoe. Her friends reported her missing the next morning when she failed to return to their hotel.