So far, there has not been a shred of forensic evidence found in the van der Sloot house, the Kalpoe car, or anywhere else on the island.
Source: 48 Hours
One thing is beyond dispute in the Holloway case - there is almost no material evidence at all, and the little there is seems definite, but is far from conclusive.
Some people have adopted a lynch-mob mentality and posted some really vile and utterly baseless allegations that say more about their own sexual phobias than the case. These hysterics aren't interested in justice or finding the real truth, only that Joran must swing for changing his story.
Let's kidnap and bring Joran, Deepak, Satish, Paul and Steve Croes to Guantanamo Bay X-ray camp and interrogate and torture them till they confess or really tell the world what they know.
Posted by: reggaeton
It does not seem to occur to these good folk that Joran may be less than forthcoming because of some other liability that has little or nothing to do with Holloway. That his “perfect ignorance” is because he doesn't actually know what happened to her.
Consider this; the three youths can only be sure of what they did themselves, and what they did with the others. None of them can be sure what the others did at other times. So each may be thinking “I know that I didn't do anything, but can I be sure about the others?”.
The very fact that they have conflicting and changing stories over a period of time, so far without incriminating themselves as causing any harm to Natalee, becomes an interesting factor in itself.
These guys are not criminal masterminds but kids ducking and weaving, extemporising, trying to get their arses out of a bad sling. These are not the guys to commit the perfect crime, then cover it up so totally forensically and under interrogation.
It can't even be ruled out that Joran did as he said and left Natalee sitting on the beach, and that an unknown third-party actor enters the picture. Or that she committed suicide. Or that she went for an innocent last swim and got into difficulties and drowned.
It is frustrating to these people that what little forensic evidence there is shows no sign of foul play whatsoever. In fact reading theories advanced in various blogs and web pages on the case it is obvious that very few of these commentators have actually bothered to study any of the evidence at all.
Much has been made of the statement “No body, no case” when it is in fact a legal truism. Convictions have been obtained in cases where no body could be found, but are generally much more difficult and depend on a strong trail of forensic evidence.
There is a basic rule of journalism that goes; “when forced to choose between a conspiracy and a stuff-up, go for the stuff-up every time because they are far easier to organise” - accident is much more common than malice.
An in-depth rational discussion of why Joran lied can be found at Scrux.
Beth's Theory
It would be inhuman not to have sympathy for Beth Twitty in her loss.
But it would be less than honest to ignore the fact that her hystrionic media crusade has been unhelpful to the search from the start, the heavy-handed amateur detective actions of the 'Alabama crew', or “Fabulous Seven” as they dub themselves, muddied the waters; or that she has made some gross misrepresentations of fact to suit her needs.
Twitty claims that Joran was clear with the police about one thing - that he had sex with her daughter the night she disappeared.
“I had access to several statements, and in one of Joran's statements he's describing Natalie as she's falling asleep and waking up, falling asleep and waking up repeatedly. And, as she's doing this, he is explaining, he's very sexually explicit, graphically detailing what he is doing to Natalie. OK?” Twitty said.
Twitty and her attorney would not share those documents with 48 Hours. In spite of her claim, Dompig says there is no proof of sexual assault.
Asked if Joran van der Sloot ever confessed to being sexually intimate with Natalee, Dompig says he never did. ... “The only thing he admitted to was that he was fondling [her] sexually, like kissing, touching her. And there was no sexual in terms of penetration or whatever, really having sex with her.”
Source: 48 Hours
To date no statement or other evidence has been produced to support Beth Twitty's accusations.
In the week following Natalee's disappearance Beth presented her daughter as an ideal, as we might expect; virginal, hard-working, and well-behaved.
But she also seems to have formed a very strong and fixed opinion that her daughter had been drugged, pack-raped, and murdered on that evening, and that Joran, Deepak and Satish were responsible. This view has since dominated all disscussion of the case.
The basic problem with Beth's scenario is that it runs deductive reasoning backwards, starting by jumping to a conclusion about what happened, then working backwards trying to construct the facts to arrive at that conclusion.
This process is typical of politics and bad police work which is often the cause of convictions later found to be wrongful (Mickleburg, Chamberlain, et al), although sometimes such intuitive leaps by an experienced detective can be correct.
But a wrong guess can be recognised by having to introduce ever more complexity, people, actions, conspiracy, to get the jigsaw of facts to fit.
One example is Beth's apparent inability to accept her eighteen-year-old daughter was a sexual being, and that she could have willingly chosen to go with a near-stranger for bit of a private drunken sexual fondle.
Beth's Natalee would never drink to excess, get in a car with three strange youths, nor would she willingly engage in any sexual activity, so therefore she must have been drugged.
And nor would she willingly experiment with a drug, so she must have had her drink spiked.
Since she was drugged she was not able to consent to any sexual activity, so anything that happened, touching, was ramped up by stages to gang rape.
And so on, each embellishment required to keep a creakinginly illogical structure going, until no assertion is too crazy or far-fetched. During the infamous episode of the Dr Phil Show which screened the bogus Skeeters tape Beth is in the studio and makes several assertions, including;
- She has received a strange voicemail that has Natalee's voice in the background saying only a cryptic “I don't know these people”, but attesting as a professional speech therapist that it was Natalee's voice.
- That she was “certain” Natalee was “alive through June, July, August”.
Dr Phil quizzed her on both points and she clearly reasserted both. The theme of the show was that Natalee had been abducted to some sort of white slave trade, asserted widespread official knowledge of and complicity in the activity, and that this justified a boycott of Aruba.
According to Beth Natalee is not sober enough to fight back and be overpowered, or drunk or drugged enough to be out cold and insensible; rather Beth maximises her suffering by having Natalee aware but powerless. This is a stock theme of the horror movie genre.
Beth's “touched without her consent” and “slipping in and out of consciousness” because of her “intoxication at the hands of Joran”, all seek to objectify and absolve Natalee, and by implication Beth herself, from any responsibility for her actions, and read more like a bodice-ripper from Mill's and Boon than a serious law suit. Again a stock theme is to play on the female anxiety of being sexually violated having lost the capacity to resist, by bondage, fear, drugs, or “romance”.
The definition of what (if anything) Joran was doing to her breasts, as welcome fondling or unwelcome assault, rests entirely with Natalee during those periods Beth has her lapsing back into consciousness. And only Natalee knows that.
Beth implicitly invites us to accept that as Natalee's mother she would know her mind, yet Beth's disjoint on other matters concerning Natalee, particularly her drinking, casts doubt on Beth's interpretation of how Natalee would have reacted to such attention.
At the bottom line Beth's construction of her semi-comatose daughter being “triple spit-roasted” is a rather nasty pornographic fantasy unsupported by any evidence at all other than “black guys, white woman (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)”. It is a very attention-grabbing image, but even at best a gross overstatement unsupported by the available evidence. At worst a dispicable fabrication.
Some of this, at least, must be excused a parent in extremis.
Not so some elements of the media, and others, who have commodified this tragic event for their own commercial gain, and a ratings vehicle for sundry toxic personalities. For them no slander is too extreme in the race for ratings.
It's hard to think straight when someone is yelling in your ear.
