Here's How Joran Van Der Sloot Was Finally Caught

The following article includes graphic descriptions of murder.

Joran van der Sloot is currently behind bars in Challapalca, a notorious Peruvian prison tucked away in the Andes at the top of a mountain. In 2012, he was sentenced to 28 years for the 2010 murder of 21-year-old Stephany Flores in Lima, Peru. The pair reportedly met at a casino and headed back to his Hotel TAC room at 5 a.m. on May 30. Peruvian officials pegged him as the suspect after surveillance video showed him entering the room with Flores and leaving alone with his luggage at approximately 9 a.m. He was arrested in Chile just four days later.

At the time of his capture, he was already a suspect in the disappearance of American Natalee Holloway, who vanished five years earlier in 2005. Holloway, 18 years old at the time, went missing while visiting Aruba with her classmates after her high school graduation. In June 2010, while behind bars for the Flores murder, van der Sloot was hit with charges of extortion and wire fraud for extorting Holloway's family for money in exchange for the location of their child's body. He pled guilty to the crimes in 2023 and was sentenced to another 20 years in prison in Alabama. As part of his plea deal, he admitted to killing Holloway, and he will likely serve his second prison term in America after finishing the Flores murder sentence in Peru.

[Featured image by ProtoMarcus via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]

As mentioned, Joran van der Sloot was tangled in a criminal case regarding the then-unsolved disappearance of Natalee Holloway (above right) before he murdered Stephany Flores. She was last seen on May 30, 2005, leaving the Carlos 'N Charlie's restaurant and nightclub in Aruba with van der Sloot and brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe. The three were arrested and questioned in the same year, but a lack of evidence let them off the hook. In 2007, they were arrested again, and this time they were charged. As reported by CNN, Aruban prosecutors accused them of "involvement in the voluntary manslaughter of Natalee Holloway or causing serious bodily harm to Natalee Holloway, resulting in her death." Again, a lack of evidence let them go free.

It wasn't until van der Sloot killed Flores that his fate was finally set into motion. He was arrested in Chile on June 3, 2010, and sent to Peru to face murder charges. But the story took another turn: Van der Sloot was accused of telling Beth Holloway (above left) he knew where her daughter's remains were shortly before he murdered Flores. He would tell her where, he said — if she gave him $25,000 upfront, and another $250,000 after she found the body. 

Van der Sloot later admitted the information he ultimately gave her was "worthless," per the U.S. Department of Justice. The indictment reportedly said he contacted Beth through her lawyer sometime between March and May 2010. On June 30 the same year, an Alabama grand jury indicted him on charges of extortion and wire fraud, and in 2023 he pled guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Under his plea agreement, he had to provide "full, complete, accurate, and truthful information" regarding Holloway's disappearance.

Joran van der Sloot is currently behind bars at one of Peru's most infamous prisons: Challapalca. The mountaintop facility has been the target of Amnesty International, which said inmates are subject to "conditions which may amount to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment." Before Challapalca, the Dutch national was first held at Miguel Castro-Castro prison in San Juan de Lurigancho, Lima, then Piedras Gordas in the Ancon district of the same city. He also spent time in Alabama's Hoover City Jail amid sentencing for the extortion and fraud charges related to the Natalee Holloway case.

Per 1819 News, his attorney's called the conditions of Peruvian prisons "horrific." The same word has been used to describe van der Sloot's murders. In his confession, he claimed to have killed Holloway after she rejected his advances by smashing her in the head with a cinderblock. His confession of murdering Stephany Flores was no less gruesome. He said he choked her and beat her before smothering her with his blood-smeared shirt. He ruthlessly took her life after she saw a message on his computer indicating his involvement in Holloway's disappearance. 

"It is shocking and it is horrific to hear, a killer that describing the brutal things that he did to my daughter," Holloway's mother, Beth, said in court (per WBRC). In a letter to the judge presiding over the case, Natalee's father, Dave Holloway, said van der Sloot is unrepentant. "He expresses no remorse, regret, or even compassion for committing the horrific crime that violently ended Natalee's life and irreparably changed the trajectory of all of ours," he said, per AL.com.