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Natalee Holloway 16

Here is another of those post-in-a-thousand, this time from nomdeguerre on Freedom of Blog.
Again the post text is complete and verbatum, while the formatting, highlighting, and links are mine.

There is also an interesting discussion by nomdeguerre of why innocent people lie to the police appended to page 2.

nomdeguerre's summary

New: 2/5/07

Posted: Sun Apr 1st, 2007 01:50 pm

nomdeguerre wrote:

As I have posted before, I am a retired federal law enforcement officer.

One of the most important things you can do in any investigation, in my opinion, is avoid judgments that rely on the impossible for validity or fly in the face of common sense.

I have been to Aruba several times, but unlike some of you, I have never met the Van der Sloots and would not know Joran from Adam's off ox.

I do not think Joran killed Natalee Holloway, not because he's a nice young man who would be incapable of doing it (though that may well be the case), but because he didn't have any way to get rid of the BODY!!!!!


Let's look at the events of May 30.

Assume for a moment that Natalee did die in Joran's presence in the early morning hours of May 30. (She had a reaction to a combination of alcohol and prescription medication, they were doing a little recreational weed and she went into a coma, he was playfully chasing her when she fell and hit her head, whatever.)

In any event, Joran, to his horror, suddenly finds himself with a dead body on his hands.
What's he going to do with it?

I can think of several possibilities:

I think that about covers the possibilities.
Let's look at them.

#1 and #2 are almost surely eliminated by the lack of tools and the time line.

What was Joran supposed to use to dig a grave? His missing shoe? Don't think so.

Natalee was a small person, but digging a grave that would hold even a 5'4" woman is a much more time-consuming process than you would think.

I once spent most of a morning working in my family's cemetery plot while two men dug my cousin's grave in preparation for a burial that was to occur that afternoon. It took two of them, with shovels and pickaxes, more than four hours of back-breaking labor to do it.

There just wasn't time for Joran to dig a grave, not to mention that anything near the beach would have filled up with water as fast as he could dig (remember what happened when they tried to drain the pond), so forget that.

I think #3 can also be eliminated by two things: the number of tourists and fishermen who frequent the beach area, and the fact that it would be difficult even for a trained athlete to carry 110 pounds of dead weight very far.

There's just no place near the beach, even in the mangrove thicket, where you could leave a body with any kind of confidence that it wouldn't be discovered sometime during the day.

#4 would have required a car and is made highly unlikely by the fact that triangulation of Joran's cell phone calls places him in the vicinity of his home at 3:00, and examination of his computer indicates he was on line at approximately 3:30.

Isolated places where you could just dump a body in the ocean with any likelihood that it wouldn't be seen at first light are located all the way across the island from the Marriott beach. [see Island Currents]

#5, 6, and 8 would require cooperation and assistance from one or more other people but are not negated by the time line and therefore require some thought and, yes, speculation about what others might do if faced with the situation.

I think #6 can be eliminated pretty readily. I doubt that Deepak or anyone else would have been willing to help Joran out to the extent of carrying a corpse around in the trunk of his car for 18 hours or so, knowing what would happen to a dead body in Aruba's heat.

According to press reports, the two vehicles seized from the Van der Sloot family were an SUV and a jeep; the interiors of both are visible from the outside. Stowing a dead body in full rigor mortis in one of those would not be a good idea unless you were planning to make an insanity defense.

Re: #5 - he could have taken her home. Again, though, this would have required the assistance of someone with wheels.

Joran's cell phone does not indicate that he made any calls in the early hours of May 30 except to Deepak, so that eliminates other people who might have helped him.

The phone call indicates that, if Joran needed help in disposing of a body, Deepak was not at the beach and therefore probably had nothing to do with Natalee's death.

Friendship might extend to lying to provide an alibi for a friend, but helping to dispose of a dead body is of a whole different order of magnitude in terms of involvement. Would Deepak, who had known Joran for only a few months and wasn't one of his best friends, been willing to have become involved to this extent?

Plus, there is the fact that examination of Deepak's computer indicates he was on line during the 2:30-3:30 time frame.

Could someone have signed on using Deepak's password? Satish possibly, but dream on if you think that Nadia Ramirez or the family's granny was on line pretending to be Deepak.

Could Deepak, after receiving a call from Joran, have sent Satish to help him and stayed on line to establish an alibi for himself? Would Deepak have sent his kid brother off in his cherished car on such a mission? Highly unlikely.

You cannot completely eliminate some complicated ruse, such as that after receiving a call from Joran, Deepak might have driven to a pay phone somewhere and placed a call to another of Joran's friends, such as Freddie Zedan, who arrived in a vehicle and helped him move the body, but presumably the police could have checked the cell phones of people like Freddie, too, and how likely would a bunch of drunk, bumbling teenagers have been to think of something like that in the middle of the night?

#8 poses all the difficulties of #5, plus you have the additional fact that the dump was searched twice in the early days of the investigation, once by the Aruban police accompanied by volunteers, and again by the FBI with a cadaver dog.

A body thrown in the pond would have floated unless you had weighed it down somehow. If Joran's shirt was missing instead of his shoes, one might think that he could have somehow tied some rocks up in it and used it to weight down Natalee's body, but tennis shoes wouldn't get it done.

That leaves us with #7 and poses another problem: The Van der Sloots, as we all know by now, don't own a boat. Joran certainly didn't have access to one in the early hours of May 30, so he would have had to do something with the body until he could find somebody with a boat to help him. (See above.)

The “statement” of Sander Bottenbos indicates that Sander was planning to take the Gottenbos family's boat out on the evening of May 30 and asked Joran if he wanted to come along.

We don't know if these “statements” are real or not, but in any event, Sander says Joran didn't come because he was planning to play in a poker tournament, and Joran says he was at a casino by 8:00, which I presume has been verified from security cameras.

It gets dark in Aruba in late May about 7:30, which means that if Joran got Sander to help him take the body out to sea before going to the casino, they did it in broad daylight, and no one saw two teenagers with a boat containing a dead body tooling down the road, putting the boat in, going out to sea, taking the boat out, or returning it.

Plus, where was Natalee's body between 3:00 a.m. and at least late afternoon on May 30, and how did they transport it to where the boat was parked?

It just doesn't add up.

In my opinion, it is much more likely that Joran did leave Natalee on the beach, and that before she could get back to the Holiday Inn she was intercepted by someone who had access to a boat (or maybe just a jet ski) and did away with her that very night.

The Aruban police say that their radar can “account” for all the boats that were moving in the vicinity of the island that night, but what does that mean?

If they picked up a boat on radar moving away from the island at 3:30 a.m., there's no way they can tell whether it was someone who had been to the Soul Beach concert, hung around to party and was taking some friends for a moonlight boat ride, or whether it was someone who had enticed or forced Natalee onto his boat and was taking her out to sea to dump her when he was through with her.

Tragically, if someone with access to a boat dumped Natalee's body at sea that night, I don't think we'll ever know what happened to her. You don't have to get very far off the western shore of Aruba before something dumped in the water would be picked up by the currents and carried into the Panama-Colombia gyre, a circular current in the western Caribbean.

Just my thoughts . . .

. . . and a very welcome contribution of expert commonsense.

Commentry

Just about every point nomdegarre makes continues to be argued in various blogs with great force and a little logic, but the overall argument that Joran, Deepak and Satish lacked the opportunity, the time, required to dispose of a body is consistant with the known facts of the case.

Many fantasies have been advanced and argued as to how Beth's script could have been carried out. The vast majority of these violate the known constraints of the cellphone calls, computer ISP login's, and keycard swipe times.

Even those few remaining typically introduce some other wildcard factor, some additional assumption, that goes against Ockham's Razor - explanation should not be complicated beyond necessity. In the first instance the simplest scenario that satisfies the known facts and material evidence is the model that all competing models must be measured against.

Thus blogger Deech's assertion of a conspiracy between ALE and FBI to hide the truth requires so many blue sky, fantastic and unlikely assumptions as to be totally ignorable.

Similarly scenarios of multiple burial, and the tragi-comic photogrammetry of Carpe Nocterm at Scared Monkeys blog perporting to show Natalee's decomposed corpse (from the Arubay Video, “painting rocks”) are just insane death-loving drivel.

Some additional points

The presumption of a fatal accident must also include the possibility of scenarios where Natalee may have drowned.

The most obvious of these is the watershock scenario first mentioned on Hy Science by Harry Tho; where Natalee was actually in the water for some reason and collapsed due to intoxication - alcohol, or some combination of intoxicants, medications, fatigue, and sunstroke.

And sad as it is, there are some reasons to suspect, and none to rule out, suicide.

Equally Natalee may have drowned after swimming to sea to escape an attacker on the beach, either Joran or some unknown third party. This could also provide a reason for why she went out too far and couldn't return.

However both drowning and being attacked by a third party are wild cards for which there is no practical evidence.

Indeed, two years since Natalee Holloway apparently vanished into thin air in the early hours of that morning, there is still no trace of her, dead or alive. Even the “fact” of her death is still a presumption.

Gut feelings

Because if the lack of hard evidence in this case, gut feelings have run rampant.

For the most part these are purely derivative of the media diet being consumed and are more like tape recordings replaying what has been heard with little or no application of critical thinking or evaluation of statements and motives of commentators and sources.

My personal experience of gut feeling, or intuition, is that when an individual has enough experience collected in their head, expertese, the brain becomes capable of computing a huge number of variables and memories very rapidly without having to actually consciously think about it; that after only a cursory examination of the situation some sort of answer jumps to mind already well-formed.

How good that intuititive jump is depends on the richness of the experience available, but distorted by local conditions.

A clear example in this case is the initial assumption by Beth and the Fab-7 that Natalee had absconded. The “Please call me Hootie” poster leaves no doubt.

If the first assumption had instead been that Natalee vanished while swimming at 3am, then the initial response may have been to mount an extensive sea-air search at first light. I don't think this would have made any difference, but it may have been the only chance she had.

A Caution

The TV programme Air Crash Investigation contains an interview with the lead FBI detective into the explosion and crash of TWA flight 800 into the sea only minutes out of New York.

One of the remarks he makes is that from the outset he formed the idea, had the gut feeling, that the crash was due to terrorism. And for the next couple of months the experienced experts of the NTSB were sidelined in a politicised investigation led by the FBI.

When calm finally returns it turns out to be a post-9/11 wild goose chase. (the distortion of intuition by local conditions)

The real basic cause turned out to be cracked wiring insulation, and over 7000 aircraft had to be retrofitted with wiring that was designed-in, never to be changed in the lifetime of the aircraft.

No bomb. No terrorist or friendly-fire missile. No bad guy, just plastic that didn't age as well in practice as it did in theory.

So gut feelings or intuition, what you “know”, can be very powerful and useful, but it can also lead you very badly astray.

Wrongful convictions are often based in not wanting mere facts to get in the way of a good theory.

Finding the keycard

The short answer pro tem.

New: 3/5/07

The web entity Splat! has been one of the more thoughtful posters on this case [lies - page 2, drowning - page 8] asked on FoB for my opinion on finding the keycard using metal detection techniques.

As it happens I spent several years designing and building industrial metal detection equipment.

To answer this we need to know;

If it's any sort of card with a metalised layer then it will represent a target of that material, generally aluminium whatever the colour, the size of the card.

Being flat it's orientation may be important, it's an Angelfish-like target that may vanish edge-on. But generally speaking, face-on it would be a good target for conventional treasure-locator technology.

(a conductive loop looks to the detector like a solid disk of the same diameter.)

Assuming; IF it's a common plain hard-plastic three-track magnetic swipecard. (not gold contact-type Smartcard or RFID).

Then the only metallic bit is the black magnetic stripe itself across the back of the card.

This stripe is like a bit of video tape and consists of a finely divided coating of magnetic particles. These may be ferric oxide (rust) or more likely some formulation using crome compounds, but even more finely divided.

Being carefully made so the coating particles don't touch each other, this (for reasons I won't go in to) makes one lousy target for a metal detector.

Perhaps someone with a treasure-locator will do some actual tests on their swipe cards.

BUT... there may be another way.

It is quite possible to home-build a proton-resonance magnetometer. This gizmo can be tuned to look for the signature of a particular target, and given a sample card to compare to, you end up with a detector that is effectively tuned to respond to only room keycards, with the general characteristics of a treasure-locator type thingy.

But equally terahertz ground radar may do an even better job looking for such a finely-particulated target.

I think this may be the way to go (but I may be seeing the benefits of a technology I haven't worked with, compared to the shortcomings of the one I have. ;)

Given the technology, all you have to do then is run it like a dustbuster over a carpet showroom.

Underwater.

(8,000 sq miles down to several hundred metres - but I'm sure the Safe Travels Foundation will fund it ;)

Some links from Splat!;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_stripe_card
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercivity
http://www.kellycodetectors.com/how-metaldetectors-work.htm

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