http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/blunders_L9qEDENTmAqV3V1PQobyYI/2Blunders of hunt for Natalee HollowayBy MAUREEN CALLAHAN
Last Updated: 8:13 AM, June 6, 2010
Posted: 2:45 AM, June 6, 2010
It was 11 a.m. on the morning of May 30, 2005, when Natalee Holloway failed to show up in the lobby of the Holiday Inn on Aruba, where she'd been on a class trip with 123 of her fellow high-school seniors from Birmingham, Ala.
Her mother, Beth Twitty, got a call from one of the chaperones a few minutes after 11. She called her husband -- Natalee's stepfather, Jug -- her son Matt, then 16, and the FBI. By 10 that night, she and Jug had landed in Aruba, and began searching for Natalee.
They quickly zeroed in on a well-to-do 17-year-old named Joran van der Sloot. Some of Natalee's classmates told Beth they had last seen her with van der Sloot at a bar.
Beth became convinced that van der Sloot murdered her daughter, whose body has never been found. Beth has since kept up her public campaign against him -- and the Aruban authorities she feels botched the investigation.
Now, with van der Sloot's arrest last week in a 21-year-old Peruvian woman's murder, the question Beth Twitty has been asking for five years is being asked by another family: How could this have happened?VAN der Sloot was never charged in Natalee's disappearance. Even more incredibly, after his arrest in Chile on Thursday, US authorities announced they were charging van der Sloot with extortion and fraud. He had allegedly told Beth that he would reveal the location of Natalee's body in exchange for $250,000.
The answer lies in Aruba's attitude toward missing persons and assaults on foreign women and its approach to criminal law. And a family that, in its grief, unwittingly hurt an investigation and alienated a nation.
"If anyone reported that they'd been assaulted, it was a long, drawn-out process," ex-FBI profiler Clinton van Zandt told The Post.
A victimized tourist would "have to fly back and forth to Aruba several times -- it was, like, 'You should consider yourself lucky [to be alive] and get yourself home on the next boat or plane.' "Van der Sloot, he added, was well-known among authorities for "hanging out in bars and casinos, targeting foreigners for sex, stalking young women. It was almost a laughing matter to police."The same night that Beth and Jug Twitty arrived in Aruba, they went with the cops to van der Sloot's house. Eventually, cops interrogated van der Sloot in his driveway as the Twittys and his father, an Aruban attorney named Paulus, looked on.
This was one of the first mistakes investigators made -- allowing a suspect to be interrogated in the presence of a victim's family.
"That's completely off the wall," said former NYPD Detective Vernon Geberth, author of "The Practical Homicide Investigation," known to cops as the bible of murder-investigation techniques.
It would be very rare to have outside people present at an interrogation, and under no circumstances should relatives of the victim be involved, Geberth said.
Julia Renfro, the editor in chief of the Aruba Daily who became close to Beth during the search for Natalee, said Beth had told her of the interrogation.
"Beth herself said to me that Joran was talking, that everything was going smoothly," Renfro recalled.
But while van der Sloot was giving the cops his version of events -- at first insisting he didn't know who Natalee was, then admitting he had met her at a nightclub -- Jug suddenly laced into van der Sloot, shutting him up.
Beth, Renfro said, knew van der Sloot was lying, but she felt the cops were getting somewhere, that maybe they could get even more from him.
But, Renfro told The Post, "Jug got really loud and rowdy, cursing."
Van der Sloot's father ended the interrogation and was later reported to have advised his son, "No body, no case."
NATALEE'S mother and stepfather were also horrified to learn that Aruban authorities had a 48-hour waiting period before declaring a person missing.
Beth began going on American TV the first day she was there and kept at it nightly. She complained about the slow pace of the investigation and the laissez faire attitude displayed by authorities.
Van der Sloot, along with Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, two brothers who had been with him the night Natalee disappeared, were arrested two days later.
Under Aruban law, suspects can be jailed for up to 146 days without any evidence or even any charges. Van der Sloot spent the maximum time allowed in prison, but investigators turned up nothing incriminating.
"Nothing pointed to him," Joe Tacopina, a New York attorney who represented van der Sloot, told The Post. "They turned over every grain of sand looking for her. They dug the earth under his house. They came in with a bulldozer and ripped apart the family pool."
Meanwhile, Beth had been on American television daily, giving updates on the search for Natalee and venting her frustration with Aruban authorities.
"The nightly rants on TV were hard," Renfro said, "but people accepted it."
Upon van der Sloot's release, Aruban authorities continued to watch him and the Kalpoes, tapping their cellphones and computers. They found nothing.
Beth, said Renfro, ramped up her public attacks on Aruban authorities.
"In the beginning, she wanted to make the world aware that Natalee was missing -- there were 30 to 40 thousand tourists on that island," Renfro said. "Then it started to be, 'Aruba's corrupt; Aruba's incompetent.' "
Beth hired a private investigator, the Georgia-based T.J. Ward, to conduct his own search. Renfro said he was the one who poisoned Beth against the Arubans.
"A lot of his information was incorrect," Renfro said. "He'd go back and say, 'The father's a big judge with a lot of money,' but he wasn't anything special. It was very upsetting."
Beth, Ward and Renfro "jumped on" every tip that came in and couldn't understand why police weren't doing the same.
In hindsight, Renfro said, the cops were right not to follow what were clearly dozens of false leads. But Beth's frustration and panic was exacerbated, Renfro said, by the way Aruban authorities deal with victims' family members. In short: They don't.
"The Dutch system is not transparent at all," Renfro said. "It's not corrupt; it's just different, and that can be very frustrating. The relatives have to sit and wait."
In November 2005, Beth scheduled a press conference in Aruba, her biggest yet. She invited members of the foreign press but kept out local journalists, and called for a boycott of Aruba, which was later endorsed by TV host "Dr. Phil" McGraw.
That, said Renfro, was the moment Beth and her family lost the sympathies of Arubans.
"She told the world that Aruba allows criminals to walk on the beach with tourists, and to close their borders to the subjects who harmed her daughter," Renfro said.
"It was quite harmful, not just financially, but emotionally. Tourism is the main source of income for the island, and these were the people who spent days and nights searching and praying for Natalee. She really tarnished the image of the people. That's when Arubans turned on her."
The authorities, how ever, persisted in their attempt to prove van der Sloot's guilt.
In Aruba, prosecutors must present new evidence in order to re-arrest a suspect. They didn't have it, but in 2007 they told a three-judge tribunal they were going to present old evidence that had been examined using new technology. It was widely viewed as a flimsy premise, but the court granted the motion.
Prosecutors also made one last attempt at eliciting a confession: Authorities arrested all three boys on the same day and at the same time in three different countries.
Continued surveillance had shown that the brothers hadn't spoken to van der Sloot in a year and a half and that they hadn't discussed Holloway.
With no DNA evidence, no body and no crime scene, prosecutors thought their best chance was in pitting each boy against the others and flipping someone.
"Nobody broke," Renfro said. "They all told the same story."
The three suspects all admitted to having met Holloway at a casino two days prior to her disappearance.
Van der Sloot and the Kalpoes told police that on the night she vanished, they ran into her at a popular restaurant and from there took her to the beach.
She and van der Sloot were kissing in the back of the car. The three young men initially said they dropped Holloway at her hotel about 2 a.m.
Later, van der Sloot changed his story, saying he and Holloway were dropped off at a beach and walked together for a while. He claimed he left her there alone because she wasn't ready to leave when he was.
After his 2007 arrest, van der Sloot spent seven days in jail.
According to Tacopina, van der Sloot's former attorney, "The judges said, 'This is over. There's never going to be any credible evidence.' "
Although van der Sloot was caught on tape in 2008 telling an undercover journalist that a friend of his dumped Natalee's body after she had convulsed and died, his statements were ruled inadmissible.
NOT only was van der Sloot openly smoking pot on the tape, he never incriminated himself in her death or disappearance. He'd also gone to the cops voluntarily and said that the journalist had paid him in exchange for the conversation and that everything he had said was a lie.
Last week, FBI officials in Alabama charged van der Sloot with trying to extort $250,000 from an unnamed person.
"He extorted, or attempted to extort someone, an individual, in exchange for the location of Natalee Holloway's remains and information about her death," said Peggy Sanford, spokeswoman for the US Attorney's Office in Birmingham, where Holloway's mother lives.
According to the federal complaint, van der Sloot, 22, had been wired $15,000 on May 10. The money had been sent to a Netherlands bank.
Officials say any information he gave was bogus.
