Joran van der Sloot has confessed to the murder of teen girl Natalee Holloway and to trying to extort $250,000 from the victim's mother, Beth, nearly 20 years ago.
As a senior trip to Aruba came to a close in May 2005, Holloway, then 18 years old, went missing. She was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot.
Chilling Details Revealed
According to Fox News, a transcript of his confession shows that van der Sloot described the teen's gruesome death. When she rejected his advances, he revealed that he smashed her skull with a cinderblock and carried her to the water on an Aruba beach.
On October 3, he gave an interview in which he detailed how he had been so frustrated by her defiance that he had smashed her skull in with the block, saying, "I smash her head in with it completely."
He added, "Her face basically, you know, collapses in. Even though it's dark, I can see her face is collapsed in."
After that, he claimed to have pulled her into the water until it was up to his knees and then pushed her into the ocean. He then went back to his house, he said.
After apologizing to Holloway's family in court, van der Sloot promised to cooperate with authorities and family members in their investigation of her disappearance and to take a polygraph.
'Joran Van Der Sloot Is the Killer'
Judge Anna Manasco addressed van der Sloot in court, "You have brutally murdered, in separate incidents, years apart, two young women who refused your sexual advances." Manasco was referring to a murder that was unconnected to the current case.
Manasco referred to the extortion and fraud allegations as "heinous" since the murderer was obviously trying to earn money off of false information. She did, however, claim that federal prosecutors had promised not to utilize his confession in any future proceedings.
Natalee Holloway's mother told reporters outside the courtroom after the hearing that her daughter's case has finally been solved after 18 years. "Joran van der Sloot is the killer," she expressed, Fox News reported.
A few minutes earlier, Holloway's mother had delivered a passionate victim impact statement in which she slammed into van der Sloot, alleging that he had ridiculed her family and inflicted unfathomable suffering.
In 2010, 36-year-old Dutch citizen van der Sloot was arrested in the United States on charges of extortion and wire fraud for allegedly attempting to sell the mother information about her daughter's remains.
After arriving in US custody in June, Van der Sloot was given a 20-year jail term, with credit for time already served. The court has agreed to let his present sentence and the one he will serve in Peru run together. On June 9, 2043, he will likely be released from prison.
