{"id":24492,"date":"2019-05-30T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-30T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/b1044894"},"modified":"2019-05-30T04:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-30T10:00:00","slug":"one-letdown-after-another-natalee-holloways-unsolved-disappearance-and-all-the-twists-that-went-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/music-news\/one-letdown-after-another-natalee-holloways-unsolved-disappearance-and-all-the-twists-that-went-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"One Letdown After Another: Natalee Holloway&#8217;s Unsolved Disappearance and All the Twists That Went Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/akns-images.eonline.com\/eol_images\/Entire_Site\/2019428\/rs_600x600-190528160141-600-natalee-holloway.cl.052819.jpg?fit=around|600:467&amp;crop=600:467;center,top&amp;output-quality=90\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\"><\/div>\n<p>Paul van der Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack in February 2010, leaving his son adrift. According to Holloway family attorney John Kelly, a desperate Van der Sloot emailed him&nbsp;that&nbsp;March, writing, as Kelly told <em>Dateline<\/em>,&nbsp;&#8220;&#8216;I want to come clean. My father&#8217;s dead now. I have nothing to hide. I want to help Natalee&#8217;s family, but at a price, you know, for a quarter million dollars&#8230;I will tell you what happened to Natalee, where she is now so you can help Beth bring her home.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>With Beth&#8217;s permission, Kelly met with Van der Sloot in Aruba, promising to start with $25,000. The young man said he knew where the body was; Kelly asked what would happen if they didn&#8217;t pay him. Van der Sloot allegedly replied, &#8220;&#8216;Beth can wait another five years.'&#8221;&nbsp;The family then turned to the FBI, which helped orchestrate a plan to make Van der Sloot think he&#8217;d be getting paid in order to catch him committing wire fraud, which would at least be something to hold him on.<\/p>\n<p>Kelly and Van der Sloot met again, and this time Kelly wired&nbsp;him a total of $25,000. In turn, Van der Sloot led Kelly to a house near the Aruba Racquet Club,&nbsp;where he claimed he had stashed Holloway&#8217;s remains in what was then a freshly poured foundation, before the house was built. Kelly <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/id\/37650865\/ns\/dateline_nbc-crime_reports\/t\/deadly-connection\/#.XO11pUhKiUk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">said on&nbsp;<em>Dateline<\/em><\/a> that Van der Sloot claimed he had been on the beach with Natalee, he wanted to go, she resisted, and then he &#8220;got angry and actually threw her. He actually made the gesture in the car, on video, showing me how he threw her in anger, because she wouldn&#8217;t leave at that point. And according to him, she hit the back of her head, lots of blood and she was dead.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Kelly said he was skeptical of Van der Sloot&#8217;s&nbsp;overall story, which was that he first hid Natalee&#8217;s body at the beach with his father&#8217;s help, and then the next day they buried her.&nbsp;But he still hoped they had shaken something loose.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When I got on the plane May 11 [2010], I thought it was a done deal,&#8221; Kelly said. &#8220;And he was going to be arrested at some point. That he&#8217;d be talking at some point, and we&#8217;d get some closure at some point.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But the house Van der Sloot pointed to hadn&#8217;t been under construction in 2010, according to the authorities who&nbsp;said they didn&#8217;t find his story credible enough to make an arrest. He wasn&#8217;t even arrested for wire fraud.<\/p>\n<p>Kelly said that Van der Sloot remained in touch with him up until May 25, claiming he would turn himself in. Instead, he flew to Peru.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.eonline.com\/news\/1044894\/one-letdown-after-another-natalee-holloway-s-unsolved-disappearance-and-all-the-twists-that-went-wrong?cmpid=rss-000000-rssfeed-365-topstories&#038;utm_source=eonline&#038;utm_medium=rssfeeds&#038;utm_campaign=rss_topstories\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">via:: E! Online<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul van der Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack in February 2010, leaving his son adrift. According to Holloway family attorney John Kelly, a desperate Van der Sloot emailed him&nbsp;that&nbsp;March, writing, as Kelly told Dateline,&nbsp;&#8220;&#8216;I want to come clean. My father&#8217;s dead now. I have nothing to hide. I want to help Natalee&#8217;s family, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-24492","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-13 02:28:27","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KIFT - The LIFT FM","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}