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Natalee Holloway 7

“Just concentrate on the facts Watson.”

Updated: 31/05/06, 6/7/06, 20/8/06, 16/3/07

The Scene


Note the clear channel running roughly centre to upper left.
Correction: there are no shark nets on Palm Beach
Source: Vanity Fair.

Here is a map of the area shown above which will open in a new browser window, allowing you to switch to it at will from your toolbar during the following narrative. The grid is roughly 1 mile squares.

Another excellent aerial photo of the area. The gardener mentioned is the long discredited “Cumpa” or Carlos-I. Source: exposetheleft.com (added: 20/8/06)

Premble

The events of that day.

http://members.aol.com/worldJOURNIER/
On 6-27 a local NBC channel reported about comments from one of NATALEE's friends, JAMIE JUSTICE, on the ARUBA trip,
...
On May 30, Holloway and her friends headed to the beach and pool around 10:00 a.m. for a full day of sun. At 8:30 p.m., they had dinner in the hotel restaurant and then went to the hotel casino where Holloway met [Joran] van der Sloot. At about 11 p.m., Holloway and her friends went to Carlos and Charlie's Bar where they once again ran into van der Sloot. Justice said Holloway spent most the night with her friends, not van der Sloot. However, at about 1:30 a.m. Holloway and van der Sloot left the bar together.


The four roommates. Natalee, left - late Sunday afternoon?

Source: DigitalImage/Google

Aerial plan view of Marriott Beach

In detail

http://wcco.com/national/topstories_story_083110733.html
Police interviews with hotel staff, local bartenders, and her friends reveal that Natalee had spent much of the day with a drink in her hand.

Statement by: Kathrine Madison Whatley 6/2
On Sunday night 05/29/2005 Whatley advised? a group of .... ate dinner. Holloway had a couple of alcoholic drinks ..... Holloway was drinking “red fires” which had “151” in them ......though she had a couple of drinks at dinner, Holloway “was not out of her mind”.

“151” apparently refers to the Proof of the spirit which makes it 75% alcohol and thus the strongest of strong spirits.

Assumption: the following preceeds dinner. The meals were part of the package so would have been in the Holiday Inn, while the Casino is effectively in the building next door. It is of little moment.

__:__ PM (?) = NATALEE and roommate friends return to her room #7114 for packing her bags before the airplane trip returning to the UNITED STATES the next day. She showers, dresses (see her clothes [in pic below]), and freshens-up before going out for the rest of the evening. When she leaves the “Holiday Inn” she leaves her camera, purse (the girls agreed something might happen to their purses) and her cellular phone in the room (even though it had been switched over to enable international calling before the trip, reportedly her phone did not work in ARUBA). She, reportedly, takes with her only her drivers license and $50.

Last seen wearing a denim, above knee-length skirt, brown flip-flops, and a top with a white background imprinted with green and teal green colored designs of stripes and hearts [see pix].
Source: http://members.aol.com/worldJOURNIER/NATALEE/NATALEEtimeline.html

Note: we can assume she also took one of the four room access keycards, but we can be sure it wasn't the one issued in her name.


Natalee with Ruth Mc Vea, Apparently early in the evening.
Note she seems to be wearing dangly metal earrings

The cane furniture matches that at a venue adjacent to the Excelsior Casio and is assumed to be a watering hole during the transition from drinking with dinner to drinking while gambling in the casino.

Natalee's hair is down but she is otherwise dressed as she was when last seen. Ruth has added some jewlery and let her hair down, but is also wearing the same top as the beach picture above.

  
Joran and Natalee gaming at the casino 20:15 hrs
Note drinks, but no purse

The Mountain Brook students have made widely variant statements about how long Natalee had known Joran, ranging from “all week” to “never before”.

Greta Van Susteren: Uh...Which casino was it?
Ruth McVey: The Excelsior, it's in the hotel.
Greta Van Susteren: The Holiday Inn hotel?
Ruth McVey: Yes, mamm
Greta Van Susteren: Do you remember about what time on Sunday May 29th that you went to the casino?
Ruth McVey: It was around ten, nine-thirty, ten..
Source: Scrux

At Carlos & Charlies

http://www.aruba.com/msgbrd/read.php?f=7&i=8055&t=8055
Re: Carlos N Charlies
Author: Joanne (141.150.233.---)
Date: 08-15-03 12:11 where is Carlos N Charlies located I am going in December and have been to Aruba before but there was no Carlos N Charlies, but I was at one in Cancun and loved it. thanks Joanne

Re: Carlos N Charlies
Author: ML (65.193.127.---)
Date: 08-15-03 14:01 It is located on Weststraat #3A in downtown Oranjestaad.... and has been there for a number of years....


Downtown Oranjestad, note the Bus Station and Weststraat, centre.


Natalee dancing
Last known picture
Natalee, left, hair tied back, no earrings, dancing at C&C's
Flushed, grey pallor - bad camera, or a touch of sun-stroke?

C&C's closed at 1am that night and Natalee left C&C's in a car with three youths.

There is an assertion that Natalee returned inside the club for a short time and re-emerged unsteady on her feet. She went to the club with $50 and had several drinks. “No girl would spend her cab fare home” women have told me; but assured of a ride she may have ducked back for a last shot. “A good-looking girl like Natalee would not only get one just after 'closing', she may even be given a double.”

There has been much related supposition about her being slipped a Micky-Finn, a date rape drug such as GHB a.k.a. “GBH” about this time. Rohypnol is another.

Aside from Beth Twitty's speculation there is no objective evidence of this. Moreover while this has emotional appeal it is also illogical because the whole object is that the victim won't remember and avoids any need to kill the victim.

And we need to keep in mind that the number-one date rape drink-spiking drug by far is alcohol. It is enough to note that she had drunk several strong drinks over the evening, and even with dinner and dancing she had a low body mass (110lb), and would now be at least somewhat intoxicated on alcohol alone, no other drugs required.

There is statement and photographic evidence that show the Mountain Brook kids are consistantly heavy drinkers; supported by Dompig's statement that the Holiday Inn had already dis-invited Mountain Brook over excessive behavior during this trip. While there is no evidence that Natalee herself was more than moderately alcohol intoxicated that night it must be seen in the context of someone at the end of a four-day drinking binge.

Anyone who thinks this is a bit harsh needs to ask themselves if it is possible that Beth and Jug Twitty were unaware of the true 'Girls Gone Wild' nature of these graduation trips when they signed the consent forms for a “child” she is widely quoted as describing as “naïve”. The same “child” she sent on cruises (plural) and two trips to Austria and Germany. All the moreso the Mountain Brook parents whos children were only 17 and still underage even in Aruba. Where was their much-vaunted morality parked when they made that decision?
Addendum: apparently Dave Holloway in his book says he was opposed to Natalee making the trip.

Addendum: 6/7/06. Using available witness statements and on-line BAC calculators I have estimated Natalee's Blood Alcohol Level at 1am to be around 0.2, minimum. This is quite drunk.

Looking at the grey pallor under the sunburn on her face, I can't help wondering if heat-stroke may have played a part, combined with the dehydration of alcohol, dancing, and drinking only soft drink in mixers. Collapse from dehydration can be quite sudden.

Greta Van Susteren: What time did you leave Carlos 'n Charlie's?
Student3: Uh.. Closing. Everyone there was leaving. It closed at one, so everyone just got... like went outside all together and and got taxis.
Greta Van Susteren: She drink?
Ruth McVey: (Pause... all students glance at each other).. Yes

Woo Woo Aruba!

The car stopped a short distance away at 'the bus stop' (Weststraat Bus Station?) where another group of clubbers including some fellow-students spoke to Natallee who was apparently in very good spirits and told them she wanted to “go for a drive” rather than returning directly to the hotel with them.

She was in the back with Joran (17), and Satish (18) in front with Deepak (21) driving, around 1.30 am. Natalee was at least somewhat alcohol intoxicated but happy, reportedly yelling (something like) “WooWoo Aruba!” as the car drove off.

After this encounter we can be fairly sure of a few things:

And here, as they say, the plot thickens.
For the next thirty minutes or so we have no material evidence, only a number of alledged statements that vary and are conflicting, mainly via dubious sources.

The Dots - times and distances

As it happens Satish's lawyer has made public some cellphone records covering that morning. There are only a few points but they do tell a couple of stories. The source is notable because these phone records seem to have no impact whatsoever on Satish's position which has always been “I was home in bed asleep”.

(Times and locations: Scrux)

Known times plotted on a sketch map of Aruba (1 mile grid);

The two constraints are;
  1. Joran has to get from C&C's to Palm Beach by 0240 to make his series of calls.
  2. Deepak, more interestingly, has to part with Joran somewhere, and make it back to his home for his 0200 log in.

There are three logical routes from C&C's to the Holiday Inn, the coast road along the hotel strip; the back road behind the hotel strip that is the most direct route to the California lighthouse; and the inland road direct from Oranjestaad to Noord. (see map)

As the car was seen leaving C&C's via the bus station area this suggests they used one of the first two and not the direct Noord road as that would have taken them away from the bus station, not towards it.

Whichever, a side trip to the lighthouse adds about 5 more miles (round trip) from the hotel area, roughly doubling the overall trip, and even without stopping there would leave almost no time out of Deepak's half-hour limit.

Deepak has to make the 5 miles from C&C's to the Fisherman's Huts, with or without another 5 mile side trip to the lighthouse, and back about 6 miles to his home, all in thirty minutes. To do this he has to maintain an average speed a bit over 30 mph. Even if the side trip were not taken this would only free around 12 minutes in the timeline.

Many proposed scenarios fall at this point, unable to explain the 0200 hrs Internet login from Deepak's home only half an hour after departing C&C's. It is most likely that this was in fact Deepak, and that at least at this moment his car is also there at Hooiberg.

But there remain a few different theories that deserve some consideration, such as “went directly to Joran's”, “didn't go to Palm Beach”, “Deepak was dropped off” and “body at Joran's house”.

Where these do actually connect the dots in the required time they generally fail to provide a good reason why a) Deepak was dropped off, and b) how Joran wound up walking home from near Natalee's hotel when he did. Print out the sketch above and try to make your favorite theory fit.

Connect the dots

This abstract route map connects the important places and times that morning. To be conservative, in the following analysis this quite high average speed of 30 mph is assumed. Changing the route and speed move the timings somewhat, but not significantly.

Key

Start at 0130 hrs at C&C's in Oranjestaad at the bottom.

Initial trip to Palm Beach area, light red, arrive 0139 hrs.

(To California lighthouse, red, 0144 hrs, and back to Huts, 0149 hrs).

Deepak goes home to Hooiberg, magenta, and logs in, 0200 hrs

Beach, 0149 to 0240 hrs.

Beach to Joran's home, in Montanja (Noord) cyan, 0240 to 0315 hrs

Cell calls large blue circles, 0240, 0300, 0315

Internet logins, smaller blue circles, 0200, 0320.

Holiday Inn, red, keylogs 0126, 0322, 0336 hrs.

Source: Scrux

The lead in

There are several routes available between C&C's and the Palm Beach/Huts area but they don't differ in distance much, around 5 miles.

The distance from Palm Beach to the lighthouse is a round trip of another 5 miles total.

So we have either a direct trip taking about 10 minutes at an average speed of 30mph; or non-stop via the lighthouse taking around 20 minutes.

Here is a linearised PERT/CPM Chart form of the journey including the lighthouse (hours AM);


Window of Opportunity - Joran with Natalee at the Huts, yellow

It is obvious from this that the scenario of the group going from C&C's to Palm Beach (l.red), non-stop via the lighthouse (red), and back home (magenta), is a very close fit (0148 overlap is real) to the available time for Deepak. It's actually a bit tight implying that Deepak wasted no time and drove fairly rapidly during the trip.

The lead out

The distance from the Huts to Joran's home is about 2 miles (cyan). Walking speed is about 3 miles per hour, complicated here by Joran apparently having lost at least one of his shoes by this point. A reasonable estimate is 40 minutes.

As it happens Joran uses his cellphone at the start, middle and end of this trip and the time from those calls is 35 minutes. This is in very good agreement with his known positions, our estimated walking time, and his internet login. This is one of the very few things in this case that actually fits so well it's compelling; and such a compelling conclusion requires an equally compelling rebuttal.

On the evidence, Joran walked home from the beach.

Joran's continuing insistance that he was driven home by Satish is clearly contradicted by the cellphone records. Yep, “Joran LIED!”. But moral outrage and dispassionate analysis don't mix well.

I am inclined to think the phone records are trustworthy because they are a two-edged sword, neutral in effect. On the one hand they contradict Joran, and place him near Natalee's hotel during a significant time. But on the other they also show what they did over those hours, like footprints in electronic sand, and provide solid constraints on what scenarios are possible.

Some have contended this walk home is impossible, but as the roads are sealed it is actually quite reasonable. Walking light would also have been available from a roughly half-moon, by then three hours risen.

[16/3/07] in a statement Joran himself says that he walked from his home to the casino/hotel strip at Palm Beach the following evening. No reason has yet been advanced to explain why Dompig was skeptical that he worked home, or why various posters think this walk “impossible”.

7:15 pm: Joran leaves on foot for the Wyndham Hotel. On the way he stops at the Marriott beach to look for his shoes (J 6/14)

Quoted by lila Posted: Thu Mar 15th, 2007 05:08 am on;
http://freedomofblog.com/forum29/4371.html
Quoting Shizaru of 08-19-2006, 11:36 PM (current sysop of Scrux)

While these times and places don't answer some critical questions they are concordant, a very good fit, with one particular sequence of events, viz:

This framework of events still leaves plenty of blanks to fill in.

Can someone bury a body, even on a sandy beach, in around half an hour? This limited time must cast very serious doubts on any theory of burial. It would seem to be very difficult to near-impossible in the available time.

The major variation that presents itself is to omit the side trip to the lighthouse. This would leave the group at the Huts as early as 0142 hrs and provide a roughly 12 minute overlap where all four could be at the huts. This is still constrained by Deepak's 0200 hrs login.

Outside the frame

Now it is certainly possible to connect these dots of time and place in a different way; for example that they all went directly to Joran's place from C&C's, and that Deepak went home from there.

But these other scenarios require more assumed movements, car swapping and so forth, to fit, and in some cases raise questions about later actions that become difficult to reconsile, such as why Joran ends up walking home from Palm Beach minus a shoe.

Addendum: Some assert that the encounter at the bus station took place at 01.15, not 01.30. Knowing how slowly people clear venues and their environs at closing time, and the assertion that Deepak drove around the block three times before the bus station encounter, I tend to favor the later time. If it were earlier however we could assume a lower and more reasonable average speed for the whole trip.

What might have happened between 0200 and 0240 hrs is the subject of part 9.

Thursday, February 23, 2006
Primetime Exclusive
Joran van der Sloot, the Dutch teen seen with American Natalee Holloway the night she disappeared from Aruba in May, said he planned to have sex with her when they left a bar together but because he didn't have a condom, they did not. Van der Sloot said he spent time on a beach with Holloway before leaving her there - the last time he saw her “she was sitting on the sand by the ocean.” When van der Sloot heard that a girl had gone missing on the beach, he said he thought of Holloway.
(ABC)http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1648218&page=1

Between 3:30 and 4:30 in the morning, records reviewed by “Primetime” seem to confirm that van der Sloot was at home and online - he e-mailed Deepak Kalpoe to say he was home, he checked soccer scores, and visited a porn site.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1652101&page=1

The electronic tracks say Joran was at the beach at 2:40am, and that he then walked home.

In logic, whatever passed between Joran and Natalee had to have been completed by the time of the first call, 02:40.

The walk home is the major disparity with other statements, but it seems unlikely this had anything directly to do with Natalee.

This statement disparity can itself be considered to be a different part of the problem to be solved, rather than as evidence. In this case it may break the recursive loop of “Joran lied, therefore...”.

Hotel electronic room key log

Similarly, the hotel room key issued to Natalee was used to access her room at 1:26, 3:22 and 3:36 am. As she was seen outside C&C's at the time of the first use this can easily explained by key-swapping, it still remains that one key should still be missing, presumably the one she had in the pocket of her denim skirt, and this can be identified by matrixing the returned key-log data. This missing serialised card is likely to be still with her which has strong implications for foresic identification.

Keep in mind that we know when and where these various systems operated, but strictly we don't know who operated them, only that somebody had to. We can only assume that Joran's cellphone was being used by him, but we can be sure that Natalee's issued room key was being used by someone else.

Addendum: 6/7/06. With the interview with roommate Lee Broughton we now have all three roommates denying they did the three mystery keycard swipes.

Addendum: 12/3/07. This becomes of particular interest with the later release of Lee Broughton's FBI statement, disscussed on page 13 et seqi.

On balance it would appear that Ruth McVey was the one actually in possession of Natalee's keycard that morning, and that she was actually out and about at exactly the time Natalee was going missing, not asleep in her own bed as she had previously claimed.

It should be noted that this is at the same time Joran is claiming he was driven home when he actually walked, and on a path that would take him very close to where Ruth was.

Timeline

Green = reliable. Yellow = unreliable. Red = unknown.

Beth's scenario

The Kalpoe brothers also told police that Holloway and Van Der Sloot were kissing passionately in the back seat of the car.
Source: Fox/Greta

This is Beth's scenario as described in her law suit against Joran a year later.

These three 'criminal mastermind' youths in the space of 30 minutes or less, or one or two of them in 70 minutes, ravish a drugged-out semi-comatose Natalee, kill her, then without tools or transport dispose of her body so well they create a perfect crime that baffles the FBI and Texas Equuisearch, not to mention the Dutch police and airforce, sniffer dogs and a lot more besides.

Then they calmly go home and log-on as they normally would, just as if nothing had happened.

The most likely explanation for this is not that Joran is a calculating soulless homicidal psychopath rapist, rather, as far as he is concerned at this moment, nothing has yet happened to make this anything other than another slow date night.

The Southern Belle was a hot chick but a virgin and wouldn't come across without a condom, so it's back home to check how his team did and masterbate over some net porno before bed. That's what the vast majority of seventeen year old boys do in this situation, and crushed sexual expectations are frequent.

In one version of events Joran is supposed to have claimed that Natalee performed oral sex on him, but the message in him later looking at Internet pornography is that his sexual desires were not actually consumated that night with Natalee.

The more obvious explanation for the boring teen-normality of Joran and Deepak's cellphone and Internet activities after their encounter with Natalee is that they haven't caused, or even witnessed, her death an hour before.

It has been suggested that with the calls and logins they were building an alibi. Well, until it is undermined by new evidence, this actually is an alibi, of sorts. As alibi's go it's got a few significant holes, but it does represent some firm milestones that must be satisfied by any theory to be credible.

This does not rule out rape, murder, drug death, being swept out to sea, or carried off by pirates. But it does set a tight time-frame for Joran, Deepak, and by implication, Satish to be involved in, or know of, those events.

Statements have been made along the lines of “somebody doesn't disappear without somebody being responsible” and “somebody must know what happened”, based on the premis that Joran is that “somebody” and that an application of thumbscrews will get the truth out of him. This ignores the very real possibility that the “somebody” was actually Natalee herself alone, and that Joran really doesn't know what happened to her.

Joran's inconsistant statements about events between 0200 and 0300 are highly suspicious. But equally there seems nothing to support the assertion that he killed her, or even knew of her fate that morning. All suspects in this position face the paradox that you can't prove a negative, that you didn't know something.

In this case the evidence such as DNA on a body that would prove him guilty or innocent is lacking, and now very unlikely to emerge.

But his variations do suggest he may have set in motion a train of events that unfolded after he departed, and which only Natalee knows. Escape, accident, suicide? We will return to this question.

We must consider that, on the face of it, the first the van der Sloot's know of a problem with Natalee is when they are woken and confronted by the angry Alabama Crew in their driveway at two in the morning. Jug Twitty disputes the words used but agrees that things got heated several times before Joran's father called a halt to the interrogation.

These activities of the Alabama Crew in the first hours and days they were on Aruba set the tone for the investigations that were to follow.

The Cavalry in a China shop

The Alabama Crew arrive in Aruba in force on a private jet about 20 hours after Natalee is last seen by Joran, and easily track him down informally within hours of arrival. As a crime it's really a bit of a bust since everybody seems to know who Natalee left C&C's with.

Several witnesses confirm Deepak's car stopping and them speaking to Natalee in the back with Joran. The three youths could be under no illusion that they had managed to spirit Natalee away without being seen. Reference has also been made to the noisy exhaust on Deepak's car, so they were hardly inconspicuous or hard to find.

By most accounts the Alabaman party could be called “abrasive” towards the Arubans. There is an interesting situational examination of why Joran may have not told the truth in such an apparently incriminating way at various points, particularly confronted by the angry search party in his home drive, at Scrux.

When Joran is confronted by Alabaman's and Police he is seen to be at first concerned and helpful. There is no sense of a seventeen year-old astonished and in panic, totally gob-smacked that his terrible crime of only a few hours before had been so quickly tracked to him.

But the Alabaman's arrive at the van de Sloot residence around 2:30am with their minds apparently already made up, and impatience quickly becomes aggressive and threatening towards the van de Sloots and the police. Later incidents will confirm Jug Twitty as a man with a bad temper and the group as architypical “Ugly Americans”.

Right from the start Beth and Jug Holloway-Twitty took matters into their own hands, locating Joran and the Kalpoes and dragging Aruba uniformed police and a US ex-DEA official to their confrontations with suspects. In that they took initial and in-expert control, they now must carry some personal responsibility for resulting defects in the investigation. They effectively trampled their own crime scene.

Joran's first story of dropping Natalee at the Holiday Inn entrance obviously has no planning or forethought at all, being quickly discounted. At this point he has obviously not given any real thought to what he is going to say, what his story is going to be, when he is found to be the last person (known) to be with Natalee.

Surely, if he had committed a serious crime he would have given at least passing thought to what his story would be. The most obvious reason for such a pathetic lie is that he didn't know he had to think one up beforehand, that he didn't have a reason to. Why he lied is discussed on Scrux.

By any measure a huge effort was put into this search by many different parties, including America's own FBI by invitation of the Aruban government from a very early stage. Accusations against ALE include ineptitude, corruption, cover-up, nepotism, and Mafia connections. These critics are generally silent about the FBI's role.

[add: 12/3/07] Apart from the DEA agent with the Alabama crew 24 hours after Natalee was last seen, at least one FBI agent was on the ground within 48 hours, and a total of 13 by the following weekend - quite a response, notable for its scale.

More FBI agents to join hunt for teen missing in Aruba

ORANJESTAD, Aruba (AP) - Ten more FBI agents headed to Aruba on Saturday to help search for an Alabama teenager whose disappearance on the last day of a high school graduation trip has shaken the quiet Dutch Caribbean island.

Aruba police and Dutch military are leading the search for Natalee Holloway. WBRC-TV FOX 6

Police and volunteers combed beaches and scrubland for a fifth consecutive day, but found no sign of Natalee Holloway, 18, whose mother had tearfully pleaded for more U.S. help in the search. (Related video: Beaches searched)

Ten more FBI agents were joining the three already on the island, said Attorney General Caren Janssen.

“We need more technical assistance,” Janssen said, declining to elaborate.

U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack had said Washington was “making sure that we provide all possible assistance to the family and local authorities.”

http://freedomofblog.com/forum29/4280.html

Despite thirty days of emprisonment with day-long interrogations by Aruban, Dutch authorities and the FBI, and later a falling-out between Joran and the Kalpoes, none of these three has made any statements of any harm coming to Natalee. The much-quoted “something bad happened” statement is unclear as to it's meaning, in context, in Dutch; and to the validity of its origins.

Nor have any of the three yielded to the temptation to strike a deal and incriminate the others.

The Game is this; if you all keep quiet, you all walk. But if anyone cracks it is better to be the first to do so and strike a deal, and also the one with the lesser role.

Even hardened outlaw bikers and career criminals find it hard to keep it together confronted with this situation, but what we have here is an ethnically disparate group of teenagers.

In fact one of the contradictions is that Joran persists that Satish picked him up in Deepak's car, which Satish continues to deny. This is curious because Joran's claim actually undermines his position by confering mobility, and all that implies in disposing of a body. It is also not supported by the cellphone and computer records.

At this point in the sequence of events it seem immaterial to the Holloway case how he got home, and not something worth lying about. He may be simply mistaken and transferring a memory of a different night, or he may be hiding something.

But by the time he is walking home from 2:40 am we already have two pretty clear choices:

What if.

Imagine what if Joran had openly told the Alabama Crew the unvarnished truth first up in the drive, for example; “I hooked up with your daughter who was drunk. We were dropped at a lovers lane near her hotel where she refused me full sex but we did full oral sex. We washed in the shallows and I left her sitting on the beach looking at the stars, and walked home.”

How do you think that Beth, Jug and the Alabama crew would have reacted if this was the real truth? And Joran had just blurted it out? And stuck to it throughout? Would Jug have shot him before Beth could strangle him?

Despite all the tittilating talk of sex crimes there has been little written in defence of Natalee's right, however unwisely, to get rat-faced and do something sexual. The moral outrage that this is met with has to be balanced against the hypocracy of that moral outrage - placing appearance over substance.

Disposal

Any burial needs a hole to be dug and filled in. Even with tools and mobility available there isn't much time to transport a body anywhere and bury it, even crudely. Without tools and transport the task becomes near-impossible, and then only in sand nearby. For these reasons it seems unlikely that she was buried at all.

The alternative to land burial is the surrounding sea. But as a method of disposal of a limp body the dummy tests show it's a very hit and miss proposition. I mention the difference between a dummy and a body and would like to see the test conducted with say a pig carcass under identical conditions of wind and tide, and see what happens. I suspect it would be eaten before it had a chance to return to shore. (see also addendum, below)

And would any of them be content that simply putting a body in the water was a certain way of disposing of it? These guys are locals and the dummy tests suggest not.

But it does not rule out the possibility that Natalee propelled herself out into the water some distance. Why she might do that, we'll come back to.

The time constraint also makes theories about getting a boat and dumping a body off-shore equally unlikely. There is no mention of anyone hearing a boat motor around that time and a boat motor at that time of the morning should have aroused some interest. All boats were checked by Arubam police and coastal radar tapes show no boat movements.

The only realistic prospect of a seaward departure is an out-going current from the beach.


A few minutes stroll back along the beach from the Fisherman's Huts to the HI hotel.
The bushes, left, make the huts beach area slightly secluded.
Source: Riehl World View

Addendum:

Source: Hyscience
Subject: Just Try it!
On May 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 2006 I was in front of the Marriott. I went out about 10 yards and floated. The current took me out toward Columbia. There is no way that all of a sudden I was going to float back to Aruba unless I was dragged.

Nothing against all the experts but I try it! All so if you are at the beach and have to get rid of a body you put it in the water. This is common knowledge in Aruba!
# Posted by the Rib at 05/29/2006 02:31 pm

There was also a posting from a mother and daughter who had tried the same thing at the Huts and got the same result. These tend to confirm that Palm Beach has the same sort of rip currents expected on any other beach.

Perhaps both views are true, that you get carried out, but if you continue to float you will be brought back in. This ignores the possibility of a body sinking, and the case of a boy who vanished in the sea off the south coast a year or so before.

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