The question whether Natalee Holloway is buried under the Aruba Marriot hotel is being explored this month, despite doubt and scorn by the international chain’s management.
Owners of the hospitality franchise insist their Aruban resort complex couldn’t possibly be the gravestone of the missing young woman, who vanished without a trace on the island a decade ago, because in that timeframe construction hadn’t even begun there yet.
However, detectives recently discovered there’s just one problem with that assertion: It isn’t quite true.
Satellite pictures taken by Google Earth at the time of Holloway’s disappearance in late spring of 2005 distinctly show the fuzzy outlines of what seems to be the beginning stages of Aruba Marriot’s excavation, including foundation forms and similar building materials.
Moreover, the missing Alabama student’s own father remembered seeing as much on the day after his daughter disappeared.
"I can tell you for a fact. I was there on June first, and there was definitely construction in that area," he says, adding that he recalled learning that the project was actually started in February of that same year.
The controversy over Holloway’s fate and the whereabouts of her remains was reignited this month on persistent claims by a Dutch ex convict that he witnessed her being pursued by a young man onto the future-Marriot’s worksite, and carried away by the same attacker, unconscious.
He says that individual then dragged Holloway’s limp body by the ankles and stuffed it into a small crawlspace of the newly-poured foundation, a feature long since obscured by the completed hotel structure and landscaping.
The eyewitness to this alleged event says he failed to immediately report the youth’s suspicious actions because he himself was involved in drug-related offenses at the time which he hoped to keep concealed.
By 2008 he went public, though, after viewing a televised interview in which prime suspect Joran Van der Sloot “lied” that Natalee Holloway perished during a night of partying with him and two buddies, and that once the trio realized she was dead, they dumped her into the ocean.
Holloway, 18, was on a high school graduation trip when she vanished, and the two teen brothers and Van der Sloot are known to be the last to have had contact with her.
Only two years after Van der Sloot’s allegedly phony admission about Holloway’s accidental demise and cover up that evening, he was arrested for the vicious beating and strangulation death of yet another young female vacationer, Stephany Flores.
He pleaded guilty to that girl’s murder for which he’s now serving a 28-year sentence, but has never been charged with, nor confessed to, the unsolved disappearance of Natalee Holloway.
By this year’s tenth anniversary of Holloway’s cold case, the still missing young woman is presumed -- and most likely -- dead.
