Beth Holloway finally has answers about what happened to her daughter, Natalee Holloway, who went missing on a high school graduation trip to Aruba in 2005.
Back then, Beth came face-to-face with Joran van der Sloot — except she didn't know he would be the one to murder her little girl.
“I want my daughter back,” Beth told him when he approached her car after her daughter was nowhere to be found, but van der Sloot just smirked.
“What do you want me to do?” he replied.
“He had this power over me,” Beth told People in a new interview. “Because he had all the answers, and I had none.”
As OK! previously reported, Joran later revealed how he killed Natalee, who had rejected his sexual advances. According to transcripts and interviews, he kicked her in the face and smashed a cinder block into her head so that her face "collapsed in." He then walked her body out to the sea.
"You didn't get what you wanted from Natalee, your sexual satisfaction, so you brutally killed her," Beth said in a court statement recently, claiming that Joran "terminated her dreams, her potential, [and] her possibilities" with her death.
After entering his guilty plea, U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco sentenced Joran to serve 20 years behind bars.
"I have considered the factual statements about extortion, and wire fraud but also considered your confession to the brutal murder of Natalee Holloway," the judge said at the time.
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Now, Beth feels at peace knowing what happened to her daughter despite the terrible outcome.
“Even though knowing the answer from such a brutal confession can just blister and burn your soul, I needed to know what happened,” Beth said. “The not knowing is more tortuous than knowing.”
Joran pled guilty to charges of extortion and wire fraud in connection with Natalee's death. He tried to sell information about her remains to her family in 2010 in exchange for $250,000.
"My never-ending nightmare is over,” Beth said after 18 years of trying to find a conclusion. “All those never-ending swirling theories and scammers and informants — no, it's over. Everyone has their own wishes and desires: mine was answers.”
“I've been desperately seeking those answers for so long. It was a huge victory to finally have them," she added.
