Birmingham, Ala (WIAT)  Joran van der Sloot is due back in a courtroom in Peru Wednesday morning to enter a plea on murder charges.  But as anyone knows who has followed the strange van der Sloot saga in the six and a half years since he walked out of an Oranjestad bar with Natalee Holloway....the van der Sloot story rarely follows a predictable plot.

Wednesday's hearing comes after van der Sloot told a three judge panel on Friday that he wasn't quite ready to enter a plea on charges he killed 21 year Stephany Flores.  He has admitted he killed the college student he met in a casino after she found material regarding Holloway on his laptop.  Flores corpse was found in van der Sloot's Lima hotel room on the fifth year anniversary of the night she vanished while on a graduation trip to Aruba.

Van der Sloot has told a wide range of tales about what happened that night in Aruba in 2005 but, unlike in the Flores case, he's never admitted guilt.

The wrangling over the terms of his plea in the Peruvian case basically come down to how much time he'll have to serve.  He claims it was a crime of passion and wants to plead to charges that could have him out of prison in as little as two years.  The prosecutors want charges that would result in a 30 year sentence saying evidence shows he killed Flores for money she had won in the casino.

And the ghost of Mountain Brook High grad Natalee Holloway is still hovering over van der Sloot in the form of a federal indictment for wire fraud and extortion.  Basically, the feds say he took money from the Holloway family and promised to tell them where to find her body.  He took the money...but gave the family another false trail.  The Justice Department says is has asked Interpol to pick up van der Sloot for trial if and when he's released in Peru.