Holloway case, Transcript & Video of Confession

How a sensational hidden camera operation solved the Natalee Holloway case Almost half a year ago Peter R. de Vries, crime reporter, met Patrick van der Eem. Patrick was born on Curacao and is nowadays a successful entrepreneur in the east of Holland. He met Joran van der Sloot by complete coincidence in the casino. The two of them started talking and seemed to ‘click’. What followed were more meetings and soon Patrick noticed that Joran looked up to him and started to trust him. This is strengthened by the fact that Patrick pretends not to be interested in the Holloway-case.

- PATRICK: JORAN’S ‘BEST FRIEND’ - When Joran returns to the Netherlands in 2006 he is overwhelmed by so-called friends and the press, who question him constantly about the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. Patrick at least is someone who doesn’t ask or so it seems. It becomes obvious that Joran likes to smoke large amounts of weed. This is why Patrick decides to pose as an experienced weed cultivator which makes Joran look up to him even more. But Patrick is interested and suspects that Joran is involved with the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. He gets this from the innuendos the 20 year old makes. Patrick doesn’t respond to these, but does approach our show with this story. Together with Peter R. de Vries they develop a strategy to get Joran talking about the case in front of the camera. From the start it is clear that Patrick is indeed Jorans best friend. There are numerous complimentary text messages and a couple of phone calls, made in our company, to confirm that. Our plan is to use a car prepared with hidden cameras to create a relaxed environment for Joran to talk. In the second half of November everything is ready to go. Patrick will pick up Joran in a tricked out Range Rover to go and cruise around and of course to talk. - ARREST RUINS PLAN – But then, a day before we would start, the ministry of Justice ruins our plans. On the 21st of November 2007 Joran is arrested and brought back to Aruba. There are a couple of new facts in the judicial investigation, but Joran keeps his mouth shut and on the 7th of December he is a free man again and officially not a suspect anymore. Out of everyone, our insider Patrick is one of the first people he calls from Aruba. Patrick tapes the conversation. Joran boasts that he was too clever for the police and that soon he will be back in the Netherlands. On the 9th of January he arrives at Schiphol airport and one day later he meets up with Patrick to see his new Range Rover, the car that has been prepared with three hidden cameras. - THE WINE INCIDENT - On the 10th of January 2008 we start our undercover operation. An advantage of the recent arrest is that Patrick can now bring up the subject naturally. During their first drive it becomes apparent that joran has a low opinion of the public prosecutor and the department of justice.  He declares that he wants to claim damages from everyone and is invited to speak on the Pauw & Witteman show. As luck would have it Peter R. de Vries will also be there. After the show Joran throws a glass of red wine in Peters face. Two day’s after the famous wine-incident Joran gets into Patricks Range Rover again. Our cameras capture Joran talking for the first time in detail about Natalee Holloway. He confirms she’s dead and will never be found because ‘the ocean is big’. He also declares that he can never be caught because he was lucky. Furthermore he relates that he was helped in the disposal of the body. Who this is or who these people are (Joran talks often in the plural), he won’t tell yet. What follows are four long drives in which our hidden cameras tape 15 hours of conversation. - COMPLETE CONFESSION - At last Joran gives a complete confession, in which he reconstructs in detail what happened on the fatal night of the 29th onto the 30th of May 2005 on Aruba. He and Natalee were dropped off that night by the Surinam brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe in their silver-gray Honda Civic nearby the Mariott Hotel on Palm Beach.  This is more than 100 meters away from the so-called Fisherman’s Huts, of which Joran talked about to the police. After that he and Natalee were making love on the beach, when all of the sudden Natalee started to shake and seemed to have died. Joran dragged her body to some bushes that grow alongside the beach and walked up to a payphone near the swimming pool of the Marriot Hotel to call a friend. - THE FRIEND WITH THE BOAT - Joran phones a person named ‘Daury’ who is half Dutch and half Aruban. A couple of other times Joran talks about the fact that he was helped by several other people that night.  Daury has a boat docked in front of the hotel in which he takes cruise tourists on ‘tubes’ and ‘bananas’.  Daury came instantly to Joran and together they quickly declared that Natalee was in fact dead. Together they carried the girl from the beach into Daury’s boat. Daury tells Joran to walk home. He, the friend, takes off onto the ocean where he throws Natalee’s body out of the boat into the sea. After that he visits Joran at his home, he has an apartment in the garden of his parent’s house, to talk about what happened. Joran tells Daury he walked back home and  hid his shoes in a storm drain. Later on he sat some time behind his computer and the following morning he went to school as usual. The next night he went to the casino ‘just to be recorded on camera’.  In a cold premeditated manner he leaves behind traces which could clarify that he didn’t have time to kill Natalee. Very clever for a seventeen-year-old, but Joran is of course the son of a judge-to-be. - HEARTLESS - Joran shows no emotion towards Patrick when he tells him that he didn’t sleep one night less because of the whole situation. He also tells him that Natalee’s death was in fact quite fortunate for him. “Now I can abuse the whole situation”, he says indicating the book he has written. Jorans friends Deepak and Satish, who have been arrested for this case several times, are completely innocent. Joran declares with pride that he has abused them to create an alibi for himself. He calls them “very stupid boys’”.

February 4, 2008 -- In surveillance recordings airing on a Dutch TV special this evening, Joran van der Sloot, a former suspect in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, says the American teen appeared lifeless on an Aruban beach three years ago during a romantic tryst, and "she'll never be found."

He said he called a friend who dumped her body in the ocean.

"I know what happened to that girl," van der Sloot says in a secretly recorded conversation, according to a partial transcript of the Dutch TV show by crime reporter Peter R. de Vries.

"We're on the beach over there," he says in the recordings. "Suddenly, she wasn't moving any more."

"I've never discussed it with anyone. ... It isn't easy, either, not even now," van der Sloot says at another point. He adds that he was pressing for financial compensation from the Aruban government for his ordeal as a suspect in the case.

Since Holloway disappeared on May 30, 2005, according to the show, van der Sloot has lied to authorities, laughed at police and prosecutors, thrown a glass of wine in DeVries' face and boasted about his antics and alleged deceptions in conversations he thought were private.

Van der Sloot has said he was lying in his secretly conversations with Patrick van der Eem, a person he thought was a friend, but who was secretly working undercover for de Vries.

"It is true I told someone. Everybody will see it Sunday," van der Sloot said over the telephone on the Dutch television show "Pauw & Witteman."

"That is what he wanted to hear, so I told him what he wanted to hear," Van der Sloot said, adding that he never fully trusted the man to whom he'd described his encounter with Natalee Holloway.

"It is so stupid, it is so stupid, it is really stupid," Van der Sloot said, his voice cracking.

Based on de Vries evidence, the chief prosecutor in Aruba announced Thursday that he is reopening the case.

De Vries also showed his findings to Holloway's mother, Beth Twitty.

"She told me she kind of knew it already that Natalee wasn't alive anymore, but when you get this message it's still, yeah, a kind of relief," de Vries told ABC News.

Twitty admitted as much to ABC News' Chris Cuomo.

"Now, with the knowing," she said, "it lets you put some things to rest. And that finally, finally, finally it's over."

According to the DeVries Dutch TV special, De Vries built his case against van der Sloot with the help of van der Eem, an Antillian who spent his youth in Curacao and Aruba but who has lived in the Netherlands for many years.

Van der Eem says he met van der Sloot at a poker table in a casino, and they talked about starting a marijuana-growing business. The two later would talk about and smoke marijuana during lengthy conversations.

But van der Eem said he wanted to bring van der Sloot down and decided to set a trap. Soon, he approached de Vries, the famous Dutch crime reporter, about working undercover, and de Vries hired him.

"I knew what I was doing," van der Eem said. "I had no emotions for this kid. The mother deserves an honest answer for what happened to his daughter."

The mystery behind the disappearance of the blond teenager has eluded efforts by the Aruba police and even the FBI for more than two years.

De Vries showed some of the key pieces of videotape to the Office of the Public Prosecutor of Aruba Jan. 24. Thursday, the island's chief prosecutor, Hans Mos, announced he has "intensified [the] investigation of Natalee Holloway due to recently received information."

Mos had announced publicly last month that he had closed the investigation after an exhausting and often frustrating two-year probe.

"This information may shed a new light on the mode of which Natalee Holloway has died and the method by which her body disappeared," Mos said.

He credited de Vries with uncovering the leads and said, "This information may help considerably in the solution of the mystery of Natalee's disappearance."

De Vries said that he and his team had been conducting an undercover operation for five months.

Earlier this week de Vries released a conversation between himself and Mos after he showed police the evidence he had collected.

"Am I sitting opposite a happy man now?" de Vries asked Mos. The prosecutor is shown answering, "Now at least the truth is surfacing, and with that we can at least wrap up this case."

The Alabama teenager disappeared after a boozy night in an Aruban nightclub during a high school graduation trip. She was last seen outside Carols 'n Charlies bar with Joran van der Sloot, who is from the Netherlands, and the brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, from Aruba. They have twice been arrested and released because of a lack of evidence. They have all denied any involvement in her disappearance.

According to the transcript of de Vries TV special, Van der Eem said he rarely pressed van der Sloot on the Holloway case early on  but van der Sloot occasionally talked about it anyway.

Following his arrest and release in December, the next month a hidden camera caught van der Sloot ridiculing the Aruban authorities that had just closed the Holloway case.

"They have nothing," van der Sloot told van der Eem. "I laughed at them, those investigators. & I didn't say a word. & I invoked my right to remain silent."

In January, De Vries' team launched a more ambitious surveillance plan involving a Range Rover outfitted with three hidden cameras and a tracking device, as well as several unmarked surveillance cars to observe van der Sloot and van der Eem as they rode around in the Range Rover.

And with the case dropped, it turned out, van der Sloot seemed to open up more about Holloway.

"Will they ever find her, do you think?" van der Eem asked, in one conversation.

"No," van der Sloot said.

"The only thing I still want is a big fat compensation check" for treatment by authorities in Aruba, van der Sloot added. "But before I have it, it'll be 10 years."

"But where & is she, Joran?" van der Eem asked.

"She'll never be found," van der Sloot said.

The day after that conversation, according to the transcript of de Vries special, van der Sloot and de Vries appeared together on a Dutch TV show, "Pauw & Witteman," on which de Vries offered theories on van der Sloot's involvement in the Holloway case, and van der Sloot, as he always has, publicly denied involvement.

"If it was proved that you were wrong, would you apologize to me?" Van der Sloot asked de Vries on the show. "Are you man enough to do so?"

"What do you think?" de Vries asked.

"I don't think so," van der Sloot said.

The anger escalated until the end of the show, when van der Sloot famously through a glass of wine in de Vries' face.

"The program was over and I'd just shaken his hand," van der Sloot told van der Eem on Jan. 13, according to the de Vries' transcript. "I look him in the face, and I shake that Pauw and Witteman's hands. & I see him looking my way, and I pick up that glass of wine & and I just throw it in his face. & And he goes, 'Ouch! My eyes! It stings!' And I was so cool. And then you see me going, calmly, like, 'Yeah, I thought you deserved it, you know.'"

De Vries offered another take on the incident.

"I was annoying him. I had questions and I was asking for answers, and he wasn't able to give me answers," de Vries said.

"He doesn't have complete control over his behavior," de Vries said of van der Sloot

Associated Press - February 4, 2008 3:13 PM ET

ORANJESTAD, Aruba (AP) - Aruba's chief prosecutor says he's taking a hidden-camera interview about the disappearance of Natalee Holloway "very seriously" and believes it would be admissible in court.

The tape, broadcast yesterday on Dutch television, shows Joran Van der Sloot (YOHR'-uhn VAN'-dur-sloht) saying he was with the American teen when she collapsed on a beach in Aruba. He is recorded saying he thought she was dead and that he asked a friend to dump her body in the sea.