Birmingham, Ala (WIAT) After six and a half years of grief for her family and constantly shifting stories from prime suspect Joran van der Sloot there is poetic justice in the role Natalee Holloway played in the murder trial of van der Sloot in Peru this morning.
We may never know what really happened to Natalee Holloway in May 2010 when the Mountain Brook teen disappeared on a graduation trip to Aruba.
We do know she was last seen leaving an Oranjestad bar with local Joran van der Sloot and two of his friends. We do know that despite being questioned several times, van der Sloot was never charged in connection with her disappearance.
We do know that a cottage industry of books, movies and television shows have spun out of the Natalee case and that van der Sloot has been a kind of creepy celebrity on several continents ever since…telling a variety of versions of the story that were proven false. He has even described himself as a “pathological liar.”
Van der Sloot is also under a federal indictment here in Birmingham for allegedly taking money from Natalee’s mother Beth in exchange for promises of information about where to find Natalee’s body. The feds say he took the money and told another false tail. They indicted him for wire fraud and extortion.
But before the FBI could have him arrested he surfaced in another international crime story, this time in Peru. The body of Stephany Flores was found in his Lima hotel room five years to the day of Natalee’s disappearance. He confessed he killed her after she found material relating to Natalee on laptop claiming he was in a fit of rage.
In court today, after van der Sloot’s guilty plea, his attorney Jose Luis Jimenez argued that his client had suffered from post traumatic stress disorder from the constant barrage of accusations and hounding by the media concerning the death of Natalee Holloway.
"It was five years after the disappearance of this American citizen and all media pointed out my client without having any evidence that he was in fact a monster," Jimenez said, noting that films and books spoke of his client as actually guilty of the teen's disappearance.
"This is all part of the baggage that my client carried with him that fateful morning and which definitely affected him in a substantial matter," Jimenez told the court. "I must then briefly address the concept of what traumatic stress disorder means."
When the prosecution objected to bringing the Holloway case into the Flores murder, Jimenez argued that spoke to his client's state of mind at the time of the murder.
So, six and a half years later, the man her family thinks his responsible for the loss of their daughter invoked Natalee Holloway as an explanation why he robbed a family in Peru of the life of their daughter.
Sentencing by the three judge panel, ironically all women, will be Friday. "Qualified murder" has a minimum sentence duration of seven years in prison. However, Jimenez, says he expects his client to get more time than the minimum seven years but that the plea of guilty was hoped to garner leniency from the judges in the form of a reduced sentence far below the 30-year maximum as well.
Meanwhile the U.S. Attorney here in Birmingham…and Natalee’s family and friends…wait their turn.
