“I do not see how you’re going to make it. You are a killer and I want you to remember that every time that jail door slams,” Natalee Holloway’s mother, Beth, told van der Sloot.
Nearly two decades after Alabama teen Natalee Holloway went missing in Aruba, her mother learned what she always suspected.
The primary suspect in Holloway’s 2005 disappearance, Joren van der Sloot, revealed what happened to Holloway as part of a plea deal in which he pled guilty to extortion and wire fraud. Van der Sloot said Holloway was bludgeoned to death.
“He finally confessed that he killed Natalee. He described when and how he killed her,” Holloway’s mother, Beth, said.
Van der Sloot struck a plea deal with federal prosecutors in Alabama that required him to reveal what happened the night 18-year-old Natalee vanished 18 years ago.
In a transcript of a recorded interview which was submitted to the court and released Wednesday, van der Sloot gave a detailed narrative of what he says happened after he left a bar in Aruba with Natalee.
“I’m with Natalee walking along the beach, we start kissing each other, she tells me ‘no.’ She tells me she doesn't want me to. I insist. She ends up kneeing me in the crotch. I get up and I kick her extremely hard in the face. Right next to her there’s a cinder block. I smash her head in with it completely,” van der Sloot said. “I half pull, and half walk with her in the ocean. I walk up to about my knees into the ocean and I push her off into the sea.”
Van der Sloot wore an orange prison jumpsuit with his hands shackled to a chain around his waist when he entered the courtroom in Birmingham. Van der Sloot issued an apology to the Holloway family and said he hoped his statement confessing to her murder would give the family some closure.
Beth faced van der Sloot in court and did not hold back.
“You look like hell,” Beth told van der Sloot in court. “I do not see how you’re going to make it. You are a killer and I want you to remember that every time that jail door slams.”
In June, van der Sloot was extradited to the U.S. on charges of trying to extort $250,000 from Beth to reveal the whereabouts of Natalee’s remains.
“I got the answer I’ve been searching for for the past 18 years,” Beth says.
Beth tells Inside Edition she acknowledges her daughter’s body will never be found.
