Guest Commentary: Will Natalee Holloway Receive Justice?
It’s bad enough that your child is dead, but when you have to spend the rest of your life speculating what happened to her without knowing for certain, it could end up ruining your peace of mind for good. That’s exactly how Natalee Holloway’s mom must be feeling for the past four years, with no real news about what happened to her teenage daughter when she went on a trip with classmates to the Caribbean island of Aruba in 2005. When Natalee did not show up to board the flight back home, a massive manhunt was launched for her, to no avail though.
Investigators and law enforcement personnel on the island have spent the last four years trying to find out what happened to Natalee. She was last seen in the company of local boy Joran van der Sloot and his two friends Satish Kalpoe and Deepak Kalpoe. The trio claimed that they had dropped off Natalee in front of her hotel the night she went missing. Police arrested the trio three times and let them go for lack of evidence. No amount of searching revealed any information of the whereabouts of her body or any trace of foul play.
With no further leads, the case was closed – the investigation had yielded nothing. It was reopened again following a secret video of van der Sloot telling a local businessman Patrick van der Eem that he had a friend dump Natalee’s body in the ocean. According to the video, van der Sloot tells van der Eem that Natalee stopped moving when they were having sex, and he called a friend who owned a boat, and the friend took her body out into the ocean and dumped it in.
But, in spite of this “confession”, a local court refused to issue a warrant for van der Sloot and the case still remains “unsolved”. Is it a case of the island’s bureaucracy conspiring to keep one of their own out of prison as Holloway’s friends and family claim? Or is it a case of a young girl who drank and partied too much and did not know where to stop?
Whatever the reasons that led to the death of Natalee Holloway, the criminal investigation that followed was not conducted with the maximum efficiency. It failed to take into consideration all the factors and was hindered by the reticence of the local law enforcement officers and the judiciary. Perhaps the fact that Holloway was a foreigner played a role in the shoddiness of the investigation, or perhaps the fact that the main suspect, Joran van der Sloot, is the son of a local judge kept him safe from too much harassment and too intense questioning. The end fact remains that justice has definitely not been served.
This article is written by Kat Sanders, who regularly blogs on the topic of forensic science technician at her blog Forensic Scientist Blog. She welcomes your comments and questions at her email address: katsanders25@gmail.com.
