Why Hasn’t Joran van der Sloot Been Charged in Natalee Holloway’s Murder? Legal Hurdles Explained

ERNESTO BENAVIDES/AFP/GettyImages Tap Here To Add Us Magazine As A Trusted Source Joran van der Sloot admitted to killing Natalee Holloway nearly two decades after he was first named a suspect in her disappearance. He is currently serving time on a U.S. federal extortion charge directly tied to her case, but has never been charged with her murder.

The reason comes down to a single detail of Aruban law: the country enforces a 12-year statute of limitations for homicides, meaning the window to prosecute van der Sloot for Holloway’s death expired years before he finally confessed in 2023.

With Netflix’s Taken: Natalee Holloway docuseries bringing the case back into the spotlight in November 2026, here’s what to know about why the man who admitted to killing the 18-year-old Alabama teen will never face a murder charge for her death.

Aruba’s 12-year statute of limitations for homicide is the central reason van der Sloot has not been charged in Holloway’s case. Because Holloway disappeared on May 30, 2005, the window to prosecute him closed in 2017 — six years before he pleaded guilty to federal extortion charges in the United States and, as part of that plea deal, admitted to killing her.

Even earlier chances to pursue a murder case fell short. Aruban officials reopened the investigation in 2008 after Dutch crime reporter Peter R. de Vries released hidden-camera footage capturing van der Sloot describing Holloway’s death. He was not charged, however, because authorities said they could not corroborate the statements he made in the footage.

Holloway went missing while on a high school graduation trip in Oranjestad, Aruba. The 18-year-old was last seen leaving a nightclub and getting into a car with van der Sloot and brothers Deepak Kalpoe and Satish Kalpoe.

Van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers quickly became suspects. They were arrested in June 2005 on suspicion of kidnapping and murder, but released without charges that September. The trio was arrested a second time in November 2007 and again released roughly one month later after authorities said they lacked the evidence to charge them.

For nearly two decades, the case remained unsolved on paper—even as public suspicion of van der Sloot only grew.

While van der Sloot evaded charges in Aruba, he eventually landed in prison for another killing. In May 2010, five years to the day after Natalee disappeared, he was arrested for the murder of Stephany Flores Ramírez, a 21-year-old business student he met at a casino in Lima, Peru.

He was convicted and sentenced to 28 years for Flores Ramírez’s death in 2012. He has been serving that sentence in Peru ever since, with a brief interruption for his 2023 extradition to the United States.

Van der Sloot’s path to finally admitting he killed Holloway ran through U.S. federal court — not Aruban court.

In March 2010, just months before his arrest in Peru, he met with Natalee’s mother, Beth Holloway, and demanded that she pay him money in exchange for information about her daughter’s disappearance. That meeting led to federal wire fraud and extortion charges in the United States.

Van der Sloot pleaded guilty to the federal extortion charges in 2023 and was sentenced to 20 years, which are running concurrently with his 28-year Peruvian murder sentence. As part of his plea deal, he admitted to killing Natalee and agreed to share information about her death.

But that admission came with no additional criminal consequences for her murder. By 2023, Aruba’s statute of limitations had long since expired.

For Natalee’s mother, the long-delayed confession brought a complicated kind of closure.

“My initial interaction with Joran was another moment of, ‘He knows. He knows what happened to her,’” Beth said during a November 9, 2026, Today show appearance, recalling her first face-to-face encounter with van der Sloot upon her arrival in Aruba in 2005.

Beth said she sensed from the start that van der Sloot was responsible for her daughter’s death. It took almost 20 years for him to confirm it.

“I finally have a conclusion,” she said. “There’s a finale. It took me 18 years to get the answers, but justice takes a lot of work, and I felt like now’s the time to tell, for the first time, a comprehensive and conclusive story of what happened to Natalee and her journey of 20 years.”

She described his confession as a day that “was a long time coming.”

“The torturous part is the not knowing, and as shocking and as torturous as it is to hear this, it is finally a relief to know that’s what I had been searching for for 18 years,” Beth said. “I had to know, no matter how brutal it was. I needed to know what happened.”

Van der Sloot has been serving his sentence in Peru for well over a decade—and built a personal life inside the prison system. He met Leidy Figueroa, a Peruvian accountant, in July 2010 when she was visiting her cousin, an inmate at the facility where he was held. The pair married at the maximum-security Piedras Gordas prison on July 4, 2014, when Figueroa was seven months pregnant with their daughter, Dushy, who was born that September.

Reports surfaced in 2023 that van der Sloot had filed for divorce from Figueroa, though neither has publicly confirmed the current status of their relationship.

This story was compiled with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists.

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