Black & White City Paper – The Three Big Birmingham Stories of 2005 – Natalee Holloway
Natalee Holloway’s mysterious disappearance in Aruba during a high school graduation trip drew unprecedented attention from the national media. While fresh news is now rare, a newly published article by Bryan Burroughs in Vanity Fair provides the most recent account of what happened on the island during the weeks following Holloway’s disappearance. The article provides few new facts, but more sensationally it points a finger at the Twitty family for being heavy-handed with the police. Burroughs proposes that their approach hindered the investigation, but the Vanity Fair article gives an incomplete account of what the Twittys and the Holloways endured in the search for their daughter. Moreover, two of Burroughs’ primary sources should be challenged.
Gerald Dompig, the island’s deputy chief of police, characterizes the Twittys and their American friends as unnecessarily aggressive and unruly during the early weeks of the search.
However, I visited the Twittys on the island two weeks after Natalee’s disappearance, and the family’s temperament was much calmer than I had expected. A tense situation was made worse by a series of tips and leads that sent the family and friends in dozens of different directions while police remained remarkably unfazed. The family complied with island officials for weeks and turned to the international media only after concluding that continued silence about their frustrations was a losing proposition. Unfortunately, Vanity Fair did not report the full extent of the family’s travails.
