‘His Story Goes On’: Director of Joran van der Sloot Doc Unravels New Details in Natalee Holloway Case
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Developments around the 2005 disappearance of high school teen Natalee Holloway, which led to a media frenzy captivating families across the globe, remained stagnant for more than a decade. Despite the family officially declaring the Alabama teen dead in 2012, her disappearance fueled the cultural canon with true-crime TV programming, a Lifetime movie, and more books on Amazon than you care to count.
But it wasn’t until Joran van der Sloot, the primary suspect in her death, was extradited from Peru on extortion charges in 2023 and confessed to Holloway’s killing, that the cold case captured one director’s attention.
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“We saw this as an opportunity to tell a retrospective that looks back at the entire case,” says Chris Cassel, the director behind Peacock’s Pathological: The Lies of Joran van der Sloot. “There’s so many twists and turns and a lot of them happened after the Natalee story disappeared from the headlines that really reveal the monster that this guy was.”
Peacock’s Pathological: The Lies of Joran van der Sloot, released Feb. 27, reexamines the death of Holloway and Stephany Flores, who was found dead in a hotel room after meeting van der Sloot in a casino, and the pursuit of incriminating evidence, using archival footage and interviews with the victim’s family and friends. The true crime documentary also dissects van der Sloot’s pattern of physical violence, cover ups, and incessant lying with the help of a mental health professional.
Cassel says he attempted to interview van der Sloot by sending a letter to an Alabama prison and reaching out to his public defender, but both methods proved inconclusive. In the end, Cassel says, he’s relieved van der Sloot refused their requests to talk.
“You do hear from him and other snippets,” Caseel says, “but he doesn’t control the narrative.”
After about 100 students and chaperones headed to Aruba to celebrate their high school graduation in May 2005, Holloway vanished. Holloway, who had a full scholarship to the University of Alabama, was last seen leaving in a car with van der Sloot and two of his friends. A massive search involving citizen detectives, the FBI, and the Dutch army quickly ensued around the island, followed by fabricated confessions to journalists. Van der Sloot tells Dutch journalist Peter de Vries in 2008, in a car rigged with hidden cameras, that Holloway began convulsing on the beach and later became unresponsive, leading to him and a friend dumping her body out to sea. And in an interview with Fox News that summer, the documentary notes, van der Sloot provides falsified details around Holloway’s disappearance in order to pocket $25,000, feeding his gambling addiction.
One of van der Sloot’s most consistent income streams originated from selling Holloway’s story to the press, Cassel says, as they were drawn to the “tragedy in paradise” storyline.
“That innocent girl goes on a trip with all her friends for graduation and this horrible, unthinkable thing happens,” Cassel says. “And another part of it is Joran himself, the way he carried himself, his denials, his lies, his charm, kept it on the front pages.”
Cable programming also flocked to adapt the case, with Law & Order episodes along with Lifetime’s Natalee Holloway, Justice for Natalee Holloway, and Vanished with Beth Holloway projects. Holloway, a white, young woman from a suburban Birmingham neighborhood, received massive media attention, receiving outsized attention when compared to criminal cases involving marginalized children from lower class families.
Following the death of his father in 2010, van der Sloot returned to Aruba and allegedly called Natalee Holloway’s mother, Beth Holloway, to disclose the location of her remains in exchange for $250,000, the documentary details. They agreed to an upfront payment of $25,000. Beth Holloway’s attorney John Q. Kelly then partnered with the FBI and headed to Aruba with the first $10,000 — Beth Holloway wired the remaining $15,000, but after they identified the home they realized it was another dead end.
After telling another false story, van der Sloot took a flight to Peru to participate in a poker tournament, where he met and later killed 21-year-old Flores. Flores’ beaten body was found in a hotel room in May 2010. By 2012, he was convicted of her murder and was booked in a maximum security prison in Peru.
“I felt like I had blood on my hands,” Kelly said in the documentary.
After van der Sloot was extradited from Peru last June, it made sense to make him the protagonist, Cassel says. In Peru, he was serving a 28-year sentence for the murder of Flores along with another for drug trafficking charges. When arriving in Alabama, he faced extortion and wire fraud charges after demanding a quarter million from the Holloway family. In exchange for a 20-year sentence, van der Sloot agreed to detailing the gruesome details of Holloway’s death.
“His story goes on and his story continues to have new layers that are peeled back,” Cassel adds. “Given the timing of this coming right after this decision in Alabama, it’s again the retrospective of that entire 18-year crusade to bring him to justice.”
In his October confession, which is presented in the documentary, van der Sloot said the two began kissing on the beach, when Holloway then denied his sexual advances. As he persisted, Holloway kneed him in the crotch. Van der Sloot then kicked Holloway “extremely hard” in the face. He later grabbed a cinder block to “smash her head in with it completely,” according to the statement van der Sloot gave his lawyer in Oct. 2023, before pushing her body into the water.
Cassel says they didn’t take the bait on his latest confession, due to his history of exaggerated stories, and his attempt to “play the media” and the Holloway family. On the other hand, Cassel believes there’s value in exposing his lies, raising awareness on the monster he is, and alerting media outlets on how to document such criminal cases.
“What I didn’t want this to do is glorify him,” Cassel says. “We made a conscious decision at the end of the film to not buy into his latest confession. It would have been a nice way to wrap up the story in a bow like, ‘oh, we finally know the truth,’ and I don’t believe that personally.”
To punctuate the documentary, producers spoke with Beth Holloway, who, following van der Sloot’s confession, says she’s finally received justice for her daughter.
“It really was important for us to hear from her at the end because her peace is what matters,” Cassel says, adding that Beth supported the project.
Although Pathological: The Lies of Joran van der Sloot examines a murder’s successful efforts to con the media, Cassel says his documentary doesn’t sympathize with him, and instead exposes van der Sloot’s corrupt behavior, while paying tribute to the victim’s families.
“We saw this as an opportunity to tell the story comprehensively in a way that’s never been told, but also to use Joran as an example of the extreme vulnerability that women in the situations that Natalie and Stephany were in can face at the hands of somebody like him,” Cassel says. “These guys are out there, so it’s just a chilling case study of psychopathy.”
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