…Then There Were Three
First, thank you, Ian. I tip my hat to The Political Teen for setting this up — dude, when I was a teen, I couldn’t even type and computer tapes were reel-to-reel. Excuse me while I feel old.
That said… I’m Steve. I blog about crime at The Dark Side of Planethuff. I also contribute to the Atlanta Metroblog, blogcritics.org, and The Blogger News Network. And yes, in general, even for the other collaborative blogs just named, I still blog about crime. Not politics, and not knitting — though my views on crime might indicate a definite lean to the right, The Dark Side is about the mysteries, the investigations, the victims, suspects, and the families of the victims and sometimes the suspects. I don’t shy away from theorizing there, and I won’t here, though I will certainly be clear as I can about speculation as opposed to reportage.
I tell you about my crime blog because that focus is precisely what brings me to this blog, joining in with Ian, Dan Riehl, and Richard Bingham. The mystery of the disappearance of pretty, 18-year-old Natalee Holloway during the late hours of the night at the end of May, 2005, is the precisely the kind of thing I blog about daily.
However, Natalee’s disappearance has been the first case to which I’ve dedicated an entire archive of the blog — The Vanishing of Natalee Holloway.
For me, as a blogger, it is a choice I made. Not because Natalee is white, or pretty, or young. Not just because her disappearing from Aruba is an anomaly for that island, or because there is something innately intriguing about Aruba — though there is. I blog about Natalee’s disappearance for the same reason I’ve blogged about murders, serial killers, and other, far less well-known mysterious disappearances — I am amazed, and sometimes unwillingly enthralled, completely appalled, by those things that just should not happen, anytime, anywhere, to anyone.
I have been blogging about mysteries and crime in general since I began, under a pseudonym on a blog that no longer exists, 4 years ago. It was incidental at first, but I decided to focus on “true crime” last December, and The Dark Side went live December 29, 2004.
Something about Natalee Holloway’s disappearance has generated a response from other bloggers, like my fellow writers here, folks who have in the past devoted a good chunk of their writing to politics, that is unique in my experience, and a powerful testament to the general interest in the public at large in Natalee’s vanishing from a past-midnight beach.
I think this blog for Natalee is a good idea because I’ve been hearing rumblings for a little while from other bloggers and in editorials in the mainstream media (MSM) that seem to call for the MSM to “get off it, already.”
If the MSM gets the hint and does that, perhaps that is precisely where bloggers can come in, if we choose to do so. Obviously four of us have.
Now we know that the original three arrested, the Kalpoe brothers, Deepak and Satish, and of course dutch teen Joran van der Sloot (pictured on the left), are as of today the only three left in jail. Joran’s father, Paul van der Sloot, whose arrest seemed to be one of the biggest breaks in the case a few days ago, has been released for lack of cause to hold him, as has Steve Croes.
We seem to be back where we started, in a sense. So perhaps that makes the timing of this blog is perfect.
Look at the young man there on the left, clowning on a school trip to Venezuela. Many think he may know precisely what happened to Natalee Holloway that last night in Aruba. Two brothers, formerly his friends, sit in jail saying they lied for him. He might look like a goof in that photo, but does he look like a killer? That’s why I write about things like this — to try and understand. That, and the face of Beth Holloway Twitty, Natalee’s mother, sunburned from her daily traversing of the island, looking for her daughter. Blogging is not a particularly impersonal form of writing, and seeing questions I need to ask about this case, the people involved, and the dedication of parents and friends whose accents are not so different from my own keeps it personal, for me.
14 Responses to “…Then There Were Three”
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