On June 9, 2005, it was announced that all the evidence the police had collected indicated that the American teen had been killed. The minister of justice announced that all of the evidence that had been collected indicated that Natalee was dead. This was a statement that he was forced to walk back a few days later.
He then said that he had received the wrong information and that the case very very much still “open.” Local law enforcement said that they were working as hard as ever to find Natalee. They were working as hard as they could to find as much as they could about van der Sloot and his friends.
By this time, the people working on the case of Natalee’s disappearance were becoming desperate. They started arresting a number of people whom they suspected of being involved in the case. Anyone they thought might have any information about Natalee’s disappearance of her last night one the island.
While they were in custody, van der Sloot’s two friends changed their story of what happened the night hey met Natalee. Rather than just dropping the girl at the Holiday Inn, they now claimed they had left both the girl and van der Sloot at the hotel. The pair then left and returned to their homes. For his part, van der Sloot said he did nothing to hurt Natalee that night. The authorities were not convinced.
Van der Sloot was kept in custody for at least two months but nothing linking him to Natalee’s disappearance was found. The Dutch government put a lot of resources into the search for the girl and still had found nothing to indicate what had happened the night she went missing.
They even went as far as to deploy planes with infrared sensors to look for her body in the waters around the island the search proved fruitless.
The judge overseeing the case thought van der Sloot was holding something back but ordered the release of his two friends. The local police refocused their search on the spot where the two claimed they dropped Natalee and van der Sloot off on the night she vanished.
Two people decided to come forward to give new evidence from the fateful night. A local gardener said that he witnessed van der Sloot at some point between 2:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. He claimed the high school student was still with his two friends and they were leaving the beach at the Marriott Hotel.
Another person claimed to see several men burying the body of a woman in a landfill. He had seen this while he was jogging. Both areas were searched by police but nothing was found.
