[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
This week, after nearly 20 years, we finally a real resolution in the Natalee Holloway case. In a Wednesday hearing, the confession of murder suspect Joran van der Sloot was played in court and officially accepted by a judge.
As Natalee’s bother Beth said outside the courtroom after the hearing:
“Joran van der Sloot is no longer the suspect in my daughter’s murder. He is the killer.”
It must have been a huge moment of comfort for the family, finally knowing. And yet, at the same time, we’ve now seen the details of the confession and “comfort” is not the word we’d use.
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In a partial transcript obtained by People, van der Sloot explains exactly what happened that night on the beach in Aruba back in 2005. Speaking to his lawyer earlier this month for a taped confession, part of a new plea agreement, he says the teens were making out on the beach, consensually at first:
“I lay her down — we lay down together — in the sand and, uh, we start kissing each other.”
Van der Sloot — who was just 17 years old at the time, a year younger than Natalee — confesses he was trying to take things further than she wanted, and she rebuffed him:
“She tells me ‘no.’ She tells me she doesn’t want me to — to feel her up. Uh, I insist. I keep feeling her up either way.”
The fight escalated as Holloway couldn’t get her attacker off of her. Eventually she kneed him in the crotch amid the struggle. In response he kicked her “extremely hard” in the face. He says from that kick, she was laying there “unconscious, possibly even uh, even dead, but definitely unconscious.”
She was just trying to fight him off. She was just trying to say NO. Dammit.
After already resorting to violence, van der Sloot decided to make sure she was dead. He spotted “a huge” cinder block in the sand “right next to her.” The confession was taped in prison — van der Sloot noted the cinder block was the “exact same” as the ones his walls were made of. But that’s how he killed her:
“I take this and uh, yeah, I- I- I smash her head in with it completely. Uh, yeah, her face basically, you know, uh collapses in.”
The fact this man can even say these words… We know it’s necessary for the confession, but it’s just… we can’t even fathom how someone could do this.
After the murder, he was confused, he says:
“I don’t know what to do.”
He was cognizant enough to try to get rid of the evidence of his crime. He dragged Natalee’s body to the water:
“I half, uh, half pull and half walk with her into the ocean… to about my knees… I push her off into- into the- into the- into the sea.”
Afterward, he just left.
“I get out. I- I walk home.”
And that was it. Like it never happened. Natalee couldn’t ever go home again. He saw to that.
Like we said, not exactly comforting. But at least the family no longer has to wonder what happened in those missing final hours of Natalee’s life. Hear more from the confession in van der Sloot’s own voice (below):
[Image via GMA/YouTube/Policia Nacional del Peru.]
