NEW WITNESS:
Natalee Holloway Body Found!
Sitting face-to-face with the informant, Dave Holloway hears the graphic details of how daughter Natalee died. “[Joran van der Sloot] tried to kiss her, but she was foaming at the mouth. He panicked, and she choked on her own vomit,” the informant, Gabriel, claims in the new six-part Oxygen series The Disappearance of Natalee Holloway. ( In Touch obtained an advanced screener of the first episode.) “She died, and within two to three hours [Joran, with help from his late father, judge Paul van der Sloot] buried her.” Gabriel reveals that Joran, 30, shared the information with a mutual acquaintance named John Ludwick five
years after the Alabama 18-year-old disappeared without a trace on May 30, 2005, during a graduation trip to Aruba. “You guys were getting close [to finding the body],” Gabriel explains to Dave, so Joran told John, “‘I’ll pay you $1,500 if you go and dig the body up.’ [They] uncovered the body in the national forest, dug it up and took it to the morgue. The body got cremated, and then they threw it in the ocean, low tide. That’s what John told me.”
The cold case that has fascinated the world for more than a decade has been blown wideopen, according to these new claims. “Twelve years and we still have nothing, until now,” Dave says of the exhaustive quest to find out what happened to his daughter. “This is the most credible lead I’ve ever seen.” Upon hearing what Gabriel had to say, Dave and his longtime private investigator, T. J. Ward, launched an 18-month sting operation, which has brought them closer than ever to finding evidence that will lead to Joran’s conviction as well as the closure they so desperately need. “Justice,” Dave tells In Touch, “will be served.”
The tip came out of nowhere. After Gabriel called Dave’s Mississippi insurance agency office in September 2015, Dave asked T. J., who has worked on the case from the beginning, to look into him, which eventually led to the meeting with Gabriel. In their on-camera interview, Gabriel says that John told him Joran spiked Natalee’s drink with date rape drug GHB before she died, then called his father, who “stomped on her legs and folded her over,” so he could stuff her into a burlap sack and bury her. Five years later, John only had to dig down three feet to find her bones, which “were moldy. There was two inches of black lard from the body… and her blond hair,” says Gabriel, adding that John brought Natalee’s remains to the morgue, where a contact of Paul’s cremated them. Together, he and Joran dumped her ashes into the Caribbean.
Even after 12 years, it’s hard for Dave to stomach the horrific details. “I’ve conditioned myself to try not to get emotional and to try to be levelheaded, to put up a wall,” he tells In Touch. “But a lot of those things [we were told were] getting graphic, and you know, it hits the heart. You’re talking about my daughter.” Some of the information was so gut-wrenching, he had to leave the room in tears: “I just couldn’t handle it.”
But he’s determined to find out if it’s the truth. Joran, who is serving 28 years in a Peruvian prison after pleading guilty to an unrelated murder, has taunted the Holloways with conflicting stories for years. He was even charged with extortion and wire fraud in the U. S. after he was caught in a sting operation for taking money from Natalee’s mom, Beth, in exchange for a lie about where he’d buried the body. But he’s never been charged with Natalee’s death. “If you confess to a crime here you might be behind bars for a long time,” Dave tells In Touch. In Aruba, “it has to be in writing and there has to be [supporting] evidence.”
Gabriel’s information has caused an uproar. He has home videos of John, who appeared on Nancy Grace to defend Joran in 2010, passionately declaring his allegiance to the killer. John also told Gabriel the location where Joran and Natalee were last seen together, and Dave believes that information is accurate. Dave and T. J. are also searching for DNA evidence at the burial site and in the car John used. Cameras follow Dave and T. J. as they use sophisticated surveillance and cutting-edge interrogation techniques, leading to a sit-down with John himself, who admits oncamera that he helped dig up the remains. “[Joran] didn’t do it himself; there are some other players out there,” Dave tells In Touch. “It’s just a matter of getting them to the table and proving it.” ◼