Ala. judge officially declares Holloway dead 6 years later

BIRMINGHAM — The parents of Natalee Holloway looked on somberly as a judge declared Natalee Holloway dead on Thursday, more than six years after the teenager vanished during a high school graduation trip to Aruba.

“We’ve been dealing with her death for the last six and a half years,” Dave Holloway said after a brief hearing. He said the judge’s order closes one chapter in a long ordeal, but added: “We’ve still got a long way to go to get justice.

Natalee Holloway disappeared in Aruba on May 30, 2005. The 18-year- old was last seen leaving a bar early that morning with a young Dutchman, Joran van der Sloot. Her body was never found and the ensuing searches reaped intense media scrutiny and worldwide attention.

Thursday’s hearing was scheduled long before van der Sloot — a suspect questioned in Holloway’s disappearance — pleaded guilty Wednesday in Peru to the 2010 murder of a woman he met at a casino in Lima. Stephany Flores, 21, was killed five years to the day Natalee Holloway after Holloway, from the wealthy Birmingham suburb of Mountain Brook, disappeared.

Shortly after Flores’ death on May 30, 2010, van der Sloot told police he killed the woman in Peru in a fit of rage after she discovered on his laptop his connection to the disappearance of Holloway. Police forensic experts disputed the claim.

Dave Holloway told the judge in September he believed his daughter had died and he wanted to stop payments on her medical insurance and use her $2,000 college fund to help her younger brother.

Holloway was born in Memphis and spent her earliest years in Southaven.