‘Taken: Natalee Holloway’ Director Goes Inside Biggest Bombshells Revealed In Series

The disappearance of Natalee Holloway was one of America’s most high-profile missing-person cases. On Memorial Day weekend in 2005, the 18-year-old was in Aruba with her classmates celebrating their high school graduation. On the final night of the trip, she was last seen leaving a nightclub and getting into a car with three young men, including a local 17-year-old named Joran van der Sloot. The next day, Natalee never showed up at the airport, and her mother, Beth Holloway, was alerted that her daughter was missing. Beth immediately made her way to the island and, within hours of landing, confronted van der Sloot. Beth said that from that first encounter, she suspected he knew exactly what happened to her daughter. Despite the widespread media coverage and exhaustive searches on land and in the water, Natalee was never found, and van der Sloot was never charged with her murder. In 2010, he attempted to extort a quarter of a million dollars from Beth in exchange for disclosing the whereabouts of Natalee’s remains. He provided false information about the location but had already pocketed $25,000. Just months later, five years to the day of Natalee’s disappearance, he killed 21-year-old Stephany Flores in Peru. While he was serving a 28-year prison sentence for that murder, the Peruvian government allowed him to be brought to the U.S. in 2023 to face federal wire fraud and extortion charges stemming from his 2010 ploy. As part of a plea agreement in that case, he confessed to killing Natalee and dumping her body into the ocean. The story of her disappearance—and her mother’s 18-year search for answers—is featured in “Taken: Natalee Holloway,” and one of the directors of the series, Dani Sloane, joins “Forbes True Crime” to discuss.

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