Holloway’s Grandmother: Pictures restart emotional rollercoaster
Last Update: 6:01 am
Rocks or remains?
Tonight, Natalee Holloway’s grandmother says she is not sure.
Ann Reynolds spoke exclusively with Sandra Kirk, a reporter from CBS 21’s sister station in Little Rock, Arkansas, About the pictures, taken by a Lancaster County couple that some believe is her missing granddaughter.
Reynolds: “It doesn’t look like anything to me. I’ve looked at it, I don’t know how many times, every time they show it. They say it looks like a skull. Beth says it looks like a rock to her. She’s bitter. You know she’s had so many ups and downs, she refuses to get up.”
The roller coaster of emotions is familiar ro Ann Reynolds, after her 18 year old granddaughter disappeared in Aruba five years ago.
Reynolds: “It was hard, it’s been real hard.” “I have to believe she is in the hands of God.”
because Holloway’s disappearance is still a mystery.
Reporter: What is it like to not know what happened? Reynolds: I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t know how to tell you what its like. If you can imagine it, it’s one of the worst things in the world that I ever thought I would have to live through.
But she is. Reynolds has watched as investigators detained Joran Van Der Sloot several times, letting him go each time. Holloway was last seen leaving a bar with Van Der Sloot.
Reporter: “Do you think Van Der Sloot killed Natalee? Reynolds: I think he did. I have no doubt about it what’s so ever.”
But Reynolds says faith, friends and memories have helped her find peace.
Reynolds: “I love all those stages of her life. I think about the funny things she used to do…that’s how I keep her alive.”
It is unclear when divers will start diving again to search for the possible remains. Authorities are trying to find the tour guide that took the Lancaster County Couple out to sea.
Aruban divers find little in first look for possible Natalee Holloway skeleton
By Toraine Norris — The Birmingham News
March 20, 2010, 8:15PM
The lead investigator for Aruban police said Saturday night that divers will resume searching Sunday in an area where a couple snorkeling took an underwater picture they believe may be the skeleton of missing Mountain Brook teen Natalee Holloway.
Deputy Police Chief Adolpho Richardson told The Birmingham News that nothing was found in the area searched Saturday.
“The FBI is helping Aruban authorities by conducting more interviews with the Pennsylvania couple who took pictures,” Richardson said. Also being interviewed are members of the group on the snorkeling trip, he said.
“We are trying to narrow down the search area,” Richardson said. “We have an idea of where it could have been but we are just guessing based on the information we have. The moment we have more accurate information, you can conduct a more thorough search.”
The search is the latest of many that authorities have launched since Holloway disappeared in Aruba in 2005 while on a school trip. The 18-year-old was last seen leaving a bar with Joran van der Sloot on the final night of a high school graduation trip.
Richardson said the dive team will remain on the scene as long as it takes.
“The FBI has been in contact with the Holloway family,” he said.
Efforts to reach Holloway’s parents, Dave Holloway of Mississippi and Beth Twitty of Mountain Brook, were unsuccessful Saturday.
Larry Garrison, who has been a spokesman for Dave Hollway, said Natalie’s father has received similar pictures in the past only to find out they are rock formations.
“He is more or less dismissing this,” Garrison said Saturday. “I think they’ve found the same thing other people have found in the past, rock formations.”
Aruban spokeswoman Ann Angela told the Associated Press it is too early to say whether the Pennsylvania ouple’s underwater photo is more viable than other tips authorities have received.
“It could be a skull, it could be a stone, it could be anything,” she said. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”
The couple cannot pinpoint the exact location, but an Aruba resident believes he can find the spot, Angela said.
“We are a very small island with lots of people diving or snorkeling, so it’s not unusual for one of us to see an underwater picture and recognize the location.”
John and Patti Muldowney made the pictures while vacationing in Aruba in early October 2009. John Muldowney, who appeared on CNN’s Nancy Grace show Friday night, said his wife took the pictures in about 15 feet of water.
He said the film was not developed until December. Fearing the photos may be remains of Holloway, Muldowney said he turned the pictures over to the FBI.
Natalee Holloway’s Remains? Aruba Divers to Examine Area
Snorkeling Couple Believe They Might Have Photographed Missing Teen’s Skeleton off Aruba
By CHRISTINE BROUWER and RUSSELL GOLDMAN
March 20, 2010—
Aruban authorities are dispatching a dive team to investigate a Pennsylvania couple’s underwater photograph that may show skeletal remains of Natalee Holloway, an Alabama high school student who went missing on the Caribbean island five years ago.
Ann Angela, a spokeswoman for the public prosecutor’s office in Aruba, said she was not authorized to say when or where the dive would take place, except that it will happen “in the very near future.” Officials likely will have the results of the preliminary investigation by Sunday or Monday.
The underwater photograph of the sea floor depicts a rough outline that the couple believes resembles a human skeleton, according to the Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era, which first published the photo on Thursday.
Patti Muldowney, 62, of Rapho Township, Pa., took the photo while snorkeling off the Caribbean island but “only discovered it after we got the film developed,” she told the paper of the body-shaped image in the picture.
“We have received the photo,” Angela said. “The problem is that the couple cannot say exactly where they took the picture. They cannot point to the exact location. But someone has now come forward who believes that they know the spot. So we are going to do a preliminary investigation, which means a dive team will be dispatched to that location.”
Angela couldn’t reveal the identity of the person who recognized the underwater location of the photo — but said it’s likely a local who dives often and knows the waters around the island well.
Angela previously said evidence found during any dive to investigate the photo would be sent to the Dutch Forensic Institute in The Hague.
She added that it was not uncommon for human remains to be found off the coast and cautioned that even if a body was discovered it might not be Holloway.
Muldowney and her husband John initially showed the photograph to local police and forwarded it to FBI, which told them it would investigate.
“It just seems so strange that that girl never showed up, and here we are right off the shoreline, right where she disappeared, and there’s a body lying there,” John Muldowney said.
“I hate to say I wish it was her, but it would give that family some closure,” he said.
Calls to the couple by ABC News were not immediately returned. Holloway went missing in May 2005 during a high school graduation trip to Aruba. Her disappearance became an international cause celebre.
Much of the speculation about Holloway’s disappearance has focused on Dutch national Joran van Der Sloot, who seemingly admitted to reporters twice in recent years that he knew how and where Holloway died but who has never faced charges in her murder.
Dutch National Jordan Van Der Sloot’s Name Still Comes Up
In February, van Der Sloot told a Dutch television station that Holloway fell to her death from a balcony following a night of drinking and drug use.
“We looked down and saw her lying there. Yes, there was blood. I think she fell on the ground with her head first,” van Der Sloot told Dutch television station RTL 5.
“It’s a story that in and of itself does fit in terms of timing,” Peter Blanken, Aruba’s chief prosecutor told ABC News in February. “But all the other things that could be investigated, and that means the story about the witnesses … the house, the height of the balcony, all those types of things don’t add up in Joran van der Sloot’s statement.”
The alleged confession came almost two years after undercover tapes were released by Dutch crime reporter Peter R. de Vries, in which van der Sloot appeared to admit he was present when Holloway died and that he helped dump her body in the ocean.
Couple Snaps Skeleton Pic in Aruba: Natalee Holloway?
A Pennsylvania couple thinks they may have found Natalee Holloway’s skeleton on a vacation to Aruba.
Patti and John Muldowney want investigators to take a good look at a picture they took while snorkeling.
It shows what they think is a skeleton on the bottom of the ocean.
Patti didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary when she snapped the photo last November. No one noticed until mid January when they met up with a couple that was on the same cruise, to compare vacation photos.
“They came over and discovered it when they were looking through our photos,” John Muldowney told NBC Philadelphia .
“You can see a fish. You can see some rocks. And then you can see this body lying on its back, facing up,” John, 78, said in an interview with the Intelligencer Journal.
They showed the photo to friends, police, even a doctor and everyone agreed it looked like a human skeleton. John wondered if it could be the remains of Natalee Holloway, 18, who disappeared in 2005 during a high school graduation trip.
The Natalee Holloway case has yet to be solved. Joran van der Sloot, the son of a Dutch diplomat, was allegedly the last person to see Holloway, and he told authorities that Holloway died and he dumped her body in the ocean. He later said he sold Holloway as a sex slave. Van der Sloot’s stories could not be confirmed by police and he was never charged in the case because Aruban prosecutors said they didn’t have enough evidence.
John thought it couldn’t hurt to send the photo to Holloway’s family and investigators. He mailed a copy to her biological father and says he hasn’t heard back.
John’s efforts to get the picture to the right people connected to the case have been frustrating.
“I’ve called Quantico so much the receptionist said, ‘We’ve got to stop meeting like this,’ ” he told the Intelligencer.
John sent the photo to the FBI in Philadelphia.
“We did receive that photo, and it was sent to the lead agent down in Miami who handles that area in the Caribbean,” Special Agent Frank Burton Jr. told the Intelligencer.
“I didn’t hear nothing for a month,” said John.
John called the FBI again after hearing that van der Sloot’s dad had died of a heart attack and that the case was being reopened after van der Sloot told a TV reporter another story, in which he disposed of her body in a swamp after she accidentally fell from a balcony.
“This time they told me, ‘John, we’re not allowed to tell you what we’re doing with it,’” he said.
“The thing is, they haven’t found her yet,” Patti told the Intelligencer. “So, for the parents’ sake, I would hope that this picture does help.”
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Dutch RTL5 Show… Joran Speaks, Again!
Hat Tip: Bastibro
