Man who claimed he buried Natalee Holloway fatally stabbed in foiled Florida kidnapping
ST. PETERSBURG, FLA. — A man who claimed on a TV series that he helped burn and bury the remains of a missing Alabama teen in Aruba has died after police say he was stabbed with his own knife during a foiled kidnapping of a woman in Florida.
John Christopher Ludwick tried to kidnap a woman Wednesday as she exited her driveway in North Port. Ludwick and the woman knew each other, said a police spokesperson in North Port, a small city south of the Tampa Bay area.
“They were roommates at one point. He apparently became kind of infatuated with her. She was doing everything in her power to distance herself from him,” spokesperson Josh Taylor said.
Police said she fought back, and Ludwick was stabbed in the struggle with his own knife.
According to a police report, the victim said she felt that Ludwick was stalking her in person and on social media.
He ran, but officers found him in a wooded area. He died at a hospital.
Ludwick was a friend of Joran van der Sloot, the prime suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway. Van der Sloot is in prison now for an unrelated murder in Peru.
Ludwick claimed van der Sloot paid him $1,500 to dig up her body in 2010, five years after the 18-year-old vanished on the Dutch Caribbean island. “The idea was to crush everything to the point where it wasn’t recognizable as her bones or skull or anything like that,” Ludwick said in the video. He purported that Holloway’s skull was burned to eliminate any remaining hair fibres, saying: “It was doused in gasoline in a fire pit in a cave.”
Ludwick and his allegations were the centre of the TV program about Holloway’s disappearance.