Desperate for any information about their daughter, Beth and George Twitty put of a $50,000 reward for anyone who could tell them where to find their daughter. This was increased to $1 million when no one came forward offering any new information about the case or where to find Natalee.
For their part, the local police had done everything they possibly could to get new information from van der Sloot’s friends. They had gone as far as to detain some of their friends but no new evidence came from that. They were still at square one with the search and the investigation.
The police in Aruba had a lot of questions that they wanted answered in order to track down the girl. The first and most obvious question was: where did Natalee go after she was last seen? To find out her fate, police looked at the places she went to on the night before she vanished. Who was she was with and who might have been the last person to see her?
Despite the full police investigation efforts and plenty of media attention on the small Caribbean island, it has taken more than a decade to uncover any real evidence with the potential to offer any clues into what happened to the sweet teenage girl on that fateful night. First, it is important to know why Natalee was on vacation in Aruba in the first place.
With no tangible evidence connecting van der Sloot to Natalee’s vanishing, the authorities had no choice but to let him go. The judge in the case told the suspect to remain available to law enforcement should they have more questions.
While the high school student was relieved to be out of jail, he was not out of the woods. More trouble awaited the Dutch teen.
All the press wanted to talk to van der Sloot after he got out of jail. He was interviewed by Fox News and he said that Natalee wanted to sleep with him but he declined her advances because he did not have any condoms with him that night. He claimed that it was he who wanted to get home because he had to go to school.
He claimed to ask his friend to pick him up but Satish, his friend, said this is not what happened. Satish said that after dropping van der Sloot and Natalee off at the beach, he went home and went to bed.
The local Aruban police still thought it was possible to find Natalee’s body. They enlisted the help of the FBI. They searched the beaches, the dunes, the waters around the island but no trace of Natalee could be found.
The FBI speculated that the teen could have could have suffered from a drug or alcohol overdose, which can be fatal. Natalee’s family was adamant that she never took any illegal drugs. The Aruban police had spent nearly $3 million on their search for Natalee and the investigations into her whereabouts. Frustration was mounting.
