The Most Disturbing Things Joran Van Der Sloot Has Said

Even before Joran van der Sloot murdered two young women, the Dutch national who grew up in Aruba was known as a liar, narcissist, and gambling addict. He called himself a "pathological liar" and said if he were an animal he'd be a snake, according to the Associated Press. The lies he spun around the killings of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway and Peruvian business student Stephany Flores, the first in Aruba in 2005, and the second five years later in Peru, were beyond the pale.

Van der Sloot told police in Aruba multiple versions of what happened the night Holloway disappeared, none of them true. He gave a fabrication-filled Fox News interview for a cash payday and then extorted her mother. This slew of lies only compounded the pain his brutal acts had inflicted on the victims' families. It was all part of Joran van der Sloot's dark life. But more gruesome than the lies were his eventual confessions to the two murders that he told seemingly without feeling, describing the ghastly details to authorities in frank terms.

In the early hours of May 30, 2005, Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old on a high school graduation trip to Aruba, disappeared. She was last seen with Joran van der Sloot and two of his friends. Van der Sloot was arrested twice by police but never charged because of a lack of evidence. He would tell more than 20 different versions of the night's events. The first was that he and his friends dropped Holloway at her hotel and that he saw two security guards approach her as they drove off. This lie led to the arrests of the hotel guards, who were completely innocent (they were later exonerated).

Van der Sloot even took Beth Holloway, Natalee's mother, to the hotel to show her exactly where he had allegedly dropped Natalee off. "Nobody asked Joran to create this lie," Beth told Jane Velez-Mitchell for her book "Secrets Can be Murder: What America's Most Sensational Crimes Tell Us About Ourselves." He later said he had left Holloway on the beach after she refused to leave with him.

By 2008, Joran van der Sloot was living in Thailand and operating a coffee shop when he reached out to the Fox News show "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren." He promised an exclusive interview for $25,000, which Fox paid. In the talk, van der Sloot told Van Susteren that he'd sold Natalee Holloway to a Venezuelan man for $10,000 and made the exchange on the beach the night she went missing, walking her onto the man's boat.

This story made it seem like Holloway might still be alive, giving false hope to her family. But even before the interview aired on Fox, van der Sloot did a 180 and disavowed everything he'd said in a text to Van Susteren. "Everything I told you was a lie," he wrote (via "Portrait of a Monster: Joran Van Der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery"). "I did it just for the money. I'm sorry." Fox aired the interview anyway.

Two years after Joran van der Sloot's lie-filled Fox interview, he contacted attorney John Q. Kelly, who was representing Natalee Holloway's mother, Beth. He offered to tell them what really happened that night in 2005 and where they could find Natalee's body, for a price: $250,000. Beth Holloway gave van der Sloot $25,000 up front, and he spun yet another lie about her daughter's death. In this version, he alleged that he and Natalee argued because he wanted to leave and she wanted to stay at the beach. He pushed her, and she hit her head and died. Van der Sloot claimed he told his father, Paulus, who went to the beach and dragged Holloway's body into nearby brush.

Paulus then supposedly went back a day or two later and dumped Holloway's body in a house that was still being built. The body, van der Sloot claimed, was in the concrete foundation. The FBI were involved by this point, but Van Der Sloot wasn't arrested at the time. Paulus had also conveniently died that same year shortly before his son reached out the Kelly, so the family couldn't verify the killer's story. After van der Sloot received his payment, he told the family in an email that the information he gave them was "worthless," per CBS News. 

Joran van der Sloot used the extortion money to pay for a gambling trip to Peru, where he killed again. "It's probably the most horrific, unanticipated nightmarish ending for Beth that you could ever imagine," her attorney John Kelly told NBC News in 2010. "That her money may have financed his trip to Peru." On May 30, 2010 — five years to the day of Holloway's killing — Joran van der Sloot brutally murdered Stephany Flores, a 21-year-old from a prominent Peruvian family, in his hotel room in Lima, Peru.

When he was eventually arrested in the neighboring country of Chile, he initially told Chilean police that he and Flores had been robbed at gun and knifepoint by two men, and that one of the intruders had hit Flores in the face. Van der Sloot eventually confessed to the killing, and the description he gave Peruvian authorities was gruesome. He claimed he and Flores were playing online poker on his laptop when she learned who he was and reacted by hitting him. He then choked and beat Flores and used his shirt to suffocate her. Police and prosecutors believe van der Sloot's true motive was to rob Flores. He admitted taking the equivalent of $300 from her after the murder.

A Peruvian court sentenced Joran van der Sloot to 28 years in prison for killing Stephany Flores after he pleaded guilty to murder in hopes of receiving a reduced sentence. Then, in October 2023, after being extradited to the U.S. on federal extortion and wire fraud charges for the 2010 scheme involving Beth Holloway, van der Sloot admitted killing Natalee Holloway. As part of the plea deal for a concurrent 20-year prison sentence with his prison time in Peru, he confessed to the murder. The truth of how and why Holloway died was finally revealed. When she rebuffed van der Sloot's sexual advances while they were on the beach, he became enraged.

"I kick her extremely hard in the face," van der Sloot confessed to his attorney, according to an interview transcript from the court case. "She's laying down unconscious, possibly even dead, but definitely unconscious." He then described picking up a cinder block he found nearby. "I take this and  I smash her head in with it completely ... her face basically, you know, collapses in," he said. "Even though it's dark, I can see her face is collapsed in." Van der Sloot then dumped her body in the ocean and walked home. The 36-year-old is currently serving his sentence in a notorious Peruvian prison high in the Andes mountains.

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