For his part, van der Sloot took pen to paper in 2007. He detailed his account of what happened the night Natalee vanished. He went into detail about meeting the American teen. This prompted a new search of his residence.
Police dug up his yard looking for traces of the teen’s body. They took his computers and searched through his journals but no new evidence about Natalee’s disappearance was found.
Once the search of van der Sloot’s house and that of his two friends was finished, the three were taken back into custody. Van der Sloot was not in Aruba at the time but back in the Netherlands. Despite extensive questioning, no new evidence was garnered from the interrogations.
Two and a half years after she vanished, the case of Natalee Holloway’s disappearance was officially closed.
Not long after closing the Natalee Holloway case, a man stepped forward with what looked to be new, convincing evidence linking van der Sloot to her disappearance. A crime reporter claimed he had a video confession. “Peter” showed footage that had been taken showing the suspect smoking pot with a friend in a car. In the video, van der Sloot claims that Natalee had died. He claimed that, despite his efforts to revive her, he could not save the American teen.
He then had to call upon his friends to help him get rid of and hide her body. When the police took the video to the court, their request to have van der Sloot arrested was denied. The court did not believe that the video was enough to detain the young man another time.
Over the course of the next 24 months, van der Sloot would make a number of statements about the case and his involvement with Natalee’s disappearance. In one recording, he said that he had sold Natalee to man in Venezuela. The man was going to use the American teen as a sex slave. He asserted that his father was aware of everything he had done.
He said that his father had gone as far as to try to bribe the police in Aruba to stop investigating the case. This interview was later discounted as not being authentic.
Five years after her disappearance, van der Sloot contacted the Holloway family. He said that if they gave him $25,000, he would help them find their daughter’s body. The family immediately contacted law enforcement.
A monitored wire transfer was made into van der Sloot’s bank account and the phones for the location of the body were tapped. When they went to the spot, nothing was found and van der Sloot was charged with both fraud extortion. The police arrested him soon after.
