Beth Holloway recalls the moment she came face to face with daughter Natalee’s killer in 2005: ‘He knows’

Every morning before she leaves for work, Beth Holloway makes sure to kiss the senior portrait of her late daughter, Natalee Holloway, to give her thanks for the strength she still provides her on a daily basis. Beth Holloway spoke with NBC News correspondent Sam Brock for a segment that aired on TODAY Nov. 9 about what her life is like now that she finally received the answers she desperately sought for nearly two decades about her daughter’s disappearance and death in Aruba. “The weight of the world has been lifted off me,” she said. “I spent 18 years in the dark. I just couldn’t see it. I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t hear it, and so I’d waited 18 years, and it’s horrible that that’s the news I get. Families need to know the answers, no matter how brutal they are.” The grandmother of two has resumed her work as a speech pathologist at an Alabama public school after taking nine years off to pursue the truth about her daughter’s death. “I was determined by hope, and I was driven by love, and the love for my daughter, and to find out the answers to what happened to her, and I was acting on faith,” Beth Holloway said. “And when you do those three things, you can accomplish a lot.” Her relentless quest to find out what happened to her 18-year-old daughter during an Aruba vacation in 2005 is detailed in the new three-part Netflix docuseries, “Taken: Natalee Holloway.” In 2023, Dutch citizen Joran van der Sloot confessed to killing the Alabama teen on a beach in Aruba in 2005 and pushing her body out to sea when he was 17 years old.’ “I finally have a conclusion,” Beth Holloway said about doing the documentary, in which she was featured. “There’s a finale. It took me 18 years to get the answers, but justice takes a lot of work, and I felt like now’s the time to tell, for the first time, a comprehensive and conclusive story of what happened to Natalee and her journey of 20 years.” Natalee Holloway met van der Sloot for the first time within hours after she arrived in Aruba in 2005 when Natalee went missing. She described their first meeting to Brock. “My initial interaction with Joran was another moment of, ‘He knows. He knows what happened to her,’” Beth Holloway said. She is hoping viewers of the docuseries can take away two things from it. “I’d like for them to see the capacity of faith to carry you through the most difficult times,” she said. “You have to be determined by hope.” The other message she wants to deliver is people minding their safety while traveling. Natalee was seen by friends and on surveillance footage leaving a bar in Aruba late at night in a car with van der Sloot and two brothers and then was never seen again. “I want to make sure that they’re also seeing why they do need to be mindful and make a plan, because that’s why I spent the last 18 to 20 years pounding the podiums, because we can never have too many safety reminders,” Beth Holloway said. When he confessed in 2023 to killing Natalee Holloway, van der Sloot was already in the midst of a 28-year prison sentence in Peru after being convicted of murdering 21-year-old Peruvian woman Stephany Flores in 2010. He made the confession in 2023 as part of a proffer agreement in a separate wire fraud and extortion case in Alabama after he was extradited from Peru. “That day was a long time coming,” Beth Holloway said. “The torturous part is the not knowing, and as shocking and as torturous as it is to hear this, it is finally a relief to know that’s what I had been searching for for 18 years. I had to know, no matter how brutal it was. I needed to know what happened.” Beth Holloway’s attorney, John Q. Kelly, says in the Netflix documentary that van der Sloot contacted him in 2010 in a bid to extort $250,000 from the Holloway family in exchange for information about where they could find Natalee Holloway’s body. Previously unseen FBI surveillance footage of van der Sloot meeting in Aruba with Kelly to arrange a $25,000 down payment is shown in the docuseries. Once van der Sloot’s information about where Natalee Holloway’s body was located turned out to be bogus, prosecutors said, Beth Holloway sued him for wire fraud and extortion in an Alabama court. As part of the proffer agreement, his 20-year sentence for the Alabama charges was allowed to be served concurrently with his prison sentence in Peru, where he is currently incarcerated. Van der Sloot, who is now 39, is eligible for parole in Peru in 2045, but Beth Holloway told Brock she is not done pursuing justice against him for her daughter. She said she is working with Netherlands attorneys Royce de Vries and Annemiek van Spanje to file a murder complaint against van der Sloot with Dutch prosecutors in the Netherlands. Her hope is he could be extradited to the Netherlands at the end of his sentence in Peru, face trial on charges of Natalee Holloway’s murder and potentially serve a sentence in a Dutch prison. Nearly three years after hearing van der Sloot confess to killing her daughter, Beth Holloway says she feels “so much of Natalee” in her family. “I’m constantly calling my grandchildren Natalee and Matt, constantly the wrong names, and that’s probably more common than not,” she says, adding that she feels her daughter’s life “realigning” with her children. “It’s a great sense of peace,” she said. She also says she’s able to spend time with her daughter’s friends, which is a “blessing.” “The one silver lining though in that fight is, and what I wish everyone could realize is, you’re on a healing path, and you don’t even know it,” she added. “And as hard as it is, it would be more painful not to get on that path than to look back 20 years and have regrets. I live my life with no regrets, no step wasted.” She makes sure to give her daughter’s photo a kiss before work to let her know she’s not forgotten. “She’s thought of every single day,” Beth Holloway said.