(NewsNation) — Last week, Beth Holloway heard Joran van der Sloot confess to killing her daughter Natalee, the Alabama teen slain while on a high school trip to Aruba in 2005.
While she said it was “shocking” to hear the confession, Holloway said in an interview with NewsNation that not knowing was “more torturous” than knowing what happened to her daughter.
“The knowing, it’s shocking, it’s painful, you have to brace yourself for what’s about to come, but we have to know answers,” Holloway said Monday on “CUOMO.” “We can’t change the outcome, but we need to know what happened.”
Van der Sloot, long considered the main suspect in Holloway’s disappearance, offered a confession as part of a plea deal in a separate case where he pleaded guilty to extorting the Holloway family out of $250,000 in 2010 to reveal the alleged location of Natalee Holloway’s remains.
Holloway went missing during a high school graduation trip to Aruba with classmates from Mountain Brook High School in 2005. She was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot. He was questioned in the disappearance but was never prosecuted. A judge declared Holloway dead, but her body has never been found.
Van der Sloot was extradited to the United States earlier this year from Peru, where he was serving a 28-year prison sentence for killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores in 2010. The 20-year extortion sentence will be served concurrently with the Peru sentence.
Beth Holloway says she believes van der Sloot’s confession based on the “parallels” in van der Sloot’s killings of both Natalee Holloway and Flores.
“That really didn’t come to light with me until I was able to hear the answers, and then it slams you back in 2005 and he was actually giving some of those elements, half of the truth, in amongst all of his lies,” Holloway said. “The parallels are there, the answer is there.”
Prior to getting the answer she had been waiting 18 years for, Holloway said she had been struggling on “how to move forward” coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it changed when lawyer and TV news anchor Greta Van Susteren — who had been chasing down Natalee’s killer herself — helped reignite a fire within Beth.
“I felt like I was beginning to kind of lose that engine drive and it was just kind of the perfect timing, the perfect storm, you know? Greta’s been with me all the way, but Greta kind of swooped in strong and just kind of helped fire back up that engine,” Holloway said. “It just launched this next phase, this … two and a half year journey that we really begin hitting it hard and how we were going to bring these answers.”
