Joran van der Sloot biography

Armed with a new confession, Deepak and Satish told investigators that they left van der Sloot and Holloway at a fisherman's hut on a nearby beach, at Hollway's insistence. The brothers said they didn't hear from either teen for the rest of the evening.

Van der Sloot told a different story to the police. He said that after he and Natalee were dropped off, they walked down the shoreline and became intimate. But Holloway didn't want to go back to the hotel. Tired,

van der Sloot left Holloway on the beach and called the Kalpoes to pick him up. Later evidence, including text messages and Internet chat logs, reveal that van der Sloot's testimony was inaccurate.

As Joran's story became suspicious, police made van der Sloot their prime suspect. They also arrested van der Sloot's father, believing that he may have helped his son hide the body and had aided in the boys' testimonies to police. Without enough evidence to detain either member of the van der Sloot family, and with their special legal connections, police let both father and son go. The van der Sloot family returned to Holland at the end of the summer, and Natalee's body was never found.

Hidden Camera Confession

Van der Sloot headed to Arnhem in the Netherlands to study engineering in 2006. But in 2007 he was arrested a second time when Aruba's then-chief prosecutor, Hans Mos, said he received new evidence in the case. Clues included an Internet chat log in which van der Sloot declared Holloway dead on the same day she disappeared. Van der Sloot was brought back to Aruba for trial, but judges ruled the new evidence was not enough to indict the student.

Dutch journalist Peter de Vries pulled van der Sloot back into the spotlight in 2008, after he managed to get a taped confession from the 22-year-old using a hidden camera. In the tape, a man named Patrick van der Eem, who posed as a drug dealer and criminal to become van der Sloot's friend, pulled an entirely new story from Joran. Van der Sloot said that, after the couple had sexual intercourse, they took a walk on the beach. Holloway, heavily intoxicated, began having a seizure. Scared, van der Sloot watched as the girl died in his arms. He then called a friend, who put the body on a boat and dumped it in the ocean. They determined that if a body didn't appear, there was no proof of a murder.

According to van der Eem, Joran would tell this same story over and over, admitting that he was there at the time of Holloway's death. The taped evidence aired on television, and helped push for a new investigation into the Holloway disappearance. But the video didn't hold up legally; Aruba police deemed the tape to be more bragging, and not actually a true confession. Van der Sloot also insisted that he only told the story to seem tough to van der Eem, who he thought was a professional drug dealer.

Extortion

On February 11, 2010, van der Sloot's father, Paulus, died of a heart attack at the age of 57 while playing tennis. Many still believe that the elder van der Sloot had political pull in the country that kept his son from going to jail.