Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Shocking new claims about Natalee Holloway's fate

Episode Date: September 21, 2017

The latest installment in Oxygen's docuseries "The Disappearance of Natalee Holloway" features an interrogation of John Ludwick, the man who claims he helped suspected killer Joran van Der Sloot rebury the Alabama woman's remains after burning and crushing her skull. Investigative reporter Art Harris and forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan join Nancy Grace in a discussion of the revelations. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. February 2004, Mara Murray empties her bank account, drives four hours from school, crashes her car, gets out, and vanishes. Everybody has a theory. Was she murdered? Was it a suicide? Did she run away? Join the search as an investigative reporter and former U.S. Marshal uncover new evidence, interrogate new witnesses, trace down new leads in this riveting new investigative series, The Disappearance of Maura Murray. It starts Saturday, September 23, 8.15 p.m., 7.15 p.m. Central on Oxygen, the new network for crime.

Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on Sirius XM Triumph, Channel 132. 2005, on the small island of Aruba, Natalie Holloway was with friends at a local bar where she was last seen getting a ride with Juran Vandersloat. Natalie's disappearance remains a mystery. Her dad says that he and a private eye found human remains in Aruba. We took those remains and had those remains tested and they just returned last week that they're human remains. Will there be able to be some kind of test, Dave, that will answer once and for all whether this is Natalie's? We're in the process of doing a DNA test. Dave Holloway says that a friend of a man who was once suspected in her

disappearance tipped him off. I know that there's a possibility this could be someone else and I'm just trying to wait and see. The story of Alabama teen, the high school beauty and honor student who already has a scholarship to college goes on and it seems as if with every twist and turn, the news gets worse about the missing girl. I cannot even imagine her parents just before she graduates high school there in the Mountain Brook area of Alabama. She goes on her high school senior trip. They never see her alive again. Thanks to, in my mind, an Aruban judge's son, Jorn Vandersloot. I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories.

Thank you for being with us. The very latest wrinkle is almost too much to believe. And with me is investigative reporter, multiple winner of Emmy Awards, Art Harris, along with forensic expert and professor of forensics at Jacksonville State University, Joe Scott Morgan. Art Harris, the latest is almost more than I can even repeat. Tell me what's happening now, Art Harris. Nancy, the best friend of your and Vander Sloot takes his sources to a place where he says Natalie's skull and bones were crushed and burned to get rid of her hair fibers doused with gasoline in a fire pit in a cave. And then after that, they pounded the bones to reduce them to disposable remains. It's almost more than I can take in with me, Joe Scott Morgan, forensics expert.

Allegations that the skull of this beautiful girl, her skull, the girl who disappeared off her high school senior trip, was burned in a cave in Aruba after Jorn Vandersloot pays the friend to dig up her remains for $1,500, they then go to a cave in Aruba and pound her remains, her bones, into dust and try to burn it, Joe Scott. Is that possible? To a certain degree, it is, Nancy. The thing about burning bone is that it's very difficult to burn. You have to have intense heat, and you have to burn for a protracted period. One of the things they're not taking into account here is what element is contained within the skull

that are not bone and that's human teeth. And so from an evidentiary standpoint for us in forensic science, the teeth are going to be much more valuable than the skull itself. So you're saying that teeth do not burn? They do burn, Nancy, but the amount of heat that it requires is almost increased by a factor of two when compared to bone. Bone is very fragile compared to teeth. So if they can recover teeth in this alleged area where this occurred, that's going to be, it'll be a monumental piece of evidence here. Well, they were crushing, I mean, beating, pounding, decimating her bones. I would be surprised if they didn't destroy her teeth too.

But I think you're right from an anecdotal point of view, Joseph Scott Morgan, because when I first started covering the Stephen Avery case with Teresa Hallbach, the photographer, and this, you know, became famous, not when I covered it as a missing person and then a homicide investigation, but when, was it Netflix or HBO did Making a Murderer? Oh, Jackie's saying Netflix did Making a Murderer. It became famous then. He, Stephen Avery, sat outside and stirred a fire pit himself all through the night.

We now know burning Teresa Hallback's remains. And what cops could find, Joe Scott, were bits of her bones, her teeth, and the studs off the back of her Daisy Fuentes blue jeans. So her teeth survived. I guess you'd have to have a crematory grade heat in order to to burn teeth yeah yeah we we'd be looking at at a sustained heat level of in excess of about uh 1500 degrees uh fahrenheit and that's got to be sustained and it takes um you know even not to get too graphic but when when you think about ceremonial cremations that take place in certain cultures, they have to have people that tend these fires for days and days on end. Now, if you have access to a crematory, which very, very few people do, it would facilitate this a lot quicker. And the level of heat is very intense in this very contained area. This is not what we're talking about. We're talking about going into a hole in the ground

that was big enough for a couple of people to fit in. And then they have to have a fuel source. They have to have, it's not just gas. You know, they're talking about, we poured gas on it to get rid of hair and fiber. Okay, good for you. But did you have like wood to fire this? Did you have kindling to sustain it? Did you think about these things? And in most of these cases, perpetrators do not think of all of the little addenda that go along with these proceeds. What we are learning right now is Art harris investigative reporter has just revealed apparently the skull of an alabama teen girl who vanishes on her high school senior trip to aruba the skull according to a confidential informant was destroyed in the sense that jorn vandersloot the judge's son tried to to destroy all of Natalie Holloway's bones by beating and pulverizing them and then tried to set them on fire.

But according to the informant, quote, the only thing that got burned was the skull, got that to burn, and the hair fibers. It was doused in gasoline in a fire pit in a cave. The only thing that got burned was the skull to burn the hair fibers. Those are his words, not mine. What does that mean, Art Harris? Is he saying that the skull didn't burn, just the hair? What is he trying to say? Yeah, there was hair and skin

apparently that was burned doused with gasoline as you mentioned nancy this is what the informant is saying uh and your aunt and him did together but it means that there are still some bones left over they were able to get enough bone fragments to do this DNA testing that is ongoing and has yet to be revealed. Okay, hold on just a moment. I want you to hear this. Take a listen to former APD, Atlanta Police Department officer T.J. Ward, as he is interrogating the informant, as the informant describes trying to destroy Natalie's bones. Listen. Where did you take it?

Where did you take the remains? To my property. To your aunt's house? Well, originally he had discussed getting it cremated, but at that time it wasn't legal, but apparently some places would do it for pets. And what did you do? The idea was to crush everything to the point where it's not recognizable as arm bones or skull or

anything like that did you do something with remain before you woke him up or did you do something remain after you broke them up did you burn them the only thing that got burned was the skull to burn the hair fibers. It was doused in gasoline in a fire pit in a cave. To Joe Scott Morgan, Joe, let me ask you this. When they're saying the only thing that burned was her hair, that means they had to pulverize the bones. Is that possible manually to pulverize the bones to a point that you can no longer extract DNA? I find that hard to believe.

With the means that they would have at their hand, it wouldn't be possible to completely pulverize the bone. Now, I think the question is, is how degraded the sample would be that they could get out of the burned bone? Would it compromise it to the point where the scientists still couldn't extract DNA from that bone? That again circles back to the idea of the teeth. If those teeth are intact, would it be possible to go into the tooth and go into the layer of what's referred to as the pulp, which is one of the elements of the teeth, and extract the DNA from there? And I think that that's going to be the key in this case. The density of the bone that you have, say, for instance, in the skull is not the same as we have like in a long bone, like in the femur or the humerus, where you have this high concentration of what we refer to as compact bone. That's where we actually get this partial DNA from that we create the strand with

and look for the markers that we have to look for. So, again, I think that it would be really difficult. And in crematories, the public doesn't know this most of the time. After a body is burned, okay, after the body is cremated, it goes down. It actually travels along a track, a conveyor belt, if you will, and it goes through a crusher at the end. That's a large spinning wheel and it crushes the bone, pulpifies it down to a point where it turns into almost particulate dust. It has the consistency. It's not quite as fine as talc, but you can look at it and say more than likely it's consistent with very coarse sand, okay? Once again, our hearts go out to the family of Natalie Holloway. As more words from the despicable Jorn Vandersloot emerge, their wounds being reopened like salt in the wounds,

about claims now from a confidential informant, a friend of Jorn Vandersloot, that following her horrific murder, far away from her family, on a high school senior trip in Aruba, she is then buried, dug up, and her bones, her remains taken to some obscure cave in Aruba where Jorn Vandersloot diabolically tries to crush and destroy her bones, tries to burn them so she can never be recognized. That's what we know now. It's the last week of National Make a Will Month at LegalZoom. There's still time to take control of your family's assets and their future. Sure, there's a lot to

think about, but that's why LegalZoom created an estate planning kit to help you get going. You get an estate plan checklist, an ebook, and other information to help you decide what to do. And you can always get advice from LegalZoom's nationwide network of independent lawyers without being billed by the hour. Since LegalZoom is not a law firm, hurry to LegalZoom.com now for your free estate planning kit. No obligation, just great resources to help you protect what you care about, your family. For special savings, be sure to enter code Nancy, N-A-N-C-Y at checkout, LegalZoom.com. LegalZoom.com. Just as I was thanking our partner, Art Harris says, there's a twist. Okay, what's the twist? Nancy, the bones were not, they were not able to crush them totally and get rid of them.

So the investigators, T.J. Ward and the informant, were able to provide a couple of small pieces that were not crushed to be analyzed, and they've been turned over to a top DNA analyst who's running them in the lab as we speak, and the results have yet to be determined. Let's talk about how they got those tiny bits of bone. How did that happen? Art Harris with me, Emmy Award-winning reporter. Art, how did they manage after all this time to locate basically little more than talcum dust? How did they get it after all this time? Well, this source has revealed the spot

where he and your aunt buried the bones after they crushed what they could and beat what they could into small pieces in a burlap bag that was wrapped in a tarp. The tarp came from Paulus, the father's house. And suddenly they dig this up and they were able to find enough remains there so that it was not just dust that they uh they turned over but they actually all right can you back up a moment everybody's been talking about the fact that they crushed her remains and tried to burn them now hold on say that a little bit more slowly for me art you're saying that after this cave incident where the judge's son, Jorn Vandersloot, tries to actually, he pays somebody $1,500 to go dig up Natalie's body. Right. They bring it to a cave where he tries to crush, I assume there was no soft tissue left.

She was skeletonized. So they try to pulverize the bones and burn them. Now, what happened to the remains then? Say that again for me slowly. Nancy, they were not able to destroy them totally. And the informant was able to identify a spot where enough bone was recovered to be analyzed. The question is how well it was analyzed. Arden Harris, Justice Scott Morgan, and Alan Duke, take a listen.

I want you to hear Dave Holloway, this is Natalie's dad, talking about having handed their findings over to Aruba police. Now, I would not trust Aruba police as far as I can throw them, you know, because they protected this judge's son from the get-go. And police actually call back and claim they're going to the suspected location. This is leading up to the excavation of the remains of Natalie Holloway. Listen. So how do you feel, Dave?

I thought it was a very good meeting and I think they were excited and we're all kind of excited that you know this might go down. And I mean he was real receptive and I mean I felt real good about it. The ball's in their court and we shared with them for three hours this morning and turned that notebook over to them plus all what we've did since we've been here. And we have handed not only the informant, but the parties involved to them on a silver platter in hopes that law enforcement will take action and move quickly with a lot of credible evidence. Yeah.

Can I, can we meet you there? All right, why don't we meet you there at 515 at the big White House? It's right there in that cul-de-sac. Okay. We'll see you in about 45 minutes. All right. Okay. All right.

Thank you, sir. This might be it then. I mean, if they can come in and start excavating. We'll see. So Art, the burlap bag and the tarp, that's what I want to hear about. Where was that and how did we find out about it? The leftover remains, Nancy, were buried by this informant best friend of your hands. And he describes this in an undercover sting with T.J.

Ward and his best friend we see on the Austrian special, leads them to a spot and they turn that information over to the police. The police actually send, as you've said, their own crime scene investigators to excavate the site and recover enough bones from the site to be analyzed by this DNA expert back in the States. So do you understand what he's saying, Joe Scott Morgan, that they actually go to Paul VanderSloot's home and they find the remains in a tarp, in a burlap bag. Is that what you said, Art? Yeah, he led them to where they had left the remains that were not, you know, in the pit or in the spot where they were initially buried. Were they at Paulus's house? We find out that the informant admits to lying about certain things along the way.

Finally, he tells them that they are hidden in Paulus' house, and they go and find part of the remains from the burlap bag at that place. Well, this is what I don't get. Joe Scott Morgan, help me out on this. The mom, I guess, is still living there. I mean, Vandersloot gave his dad, the judge, Paulus Vandersloot, a heart attack. He dropped dead, I think, on a tennis court in the midst of all this. So how do they not know there are some dead girls' bones in the house?

I have no idea. I'm as shocked as anybody by this. As a matter of fact, from a scientific standpoint, I'd be far more interested at this point in these remains that they have allegedly found at the house. Because let's keep in mind, if they are in a protected area, they will not have been exposed to this harsh environment out there. They won't have been buried. I don't know where they found them. They're saying they found them, and I don't know what condition they're in.

But what we could do is have those bones examined and find out who they belong to, at least get some kind of racial profiling of the remains. Wait a minute. We already have some indication of it, but what I'm trying to say, Alan, maybe I'm not being clear. Okay. Alan Duke. They've gotten remains from somewhere, Alan, because there is a renowned doctor on the case, Kulkowski, who worked ground zero at 911 and started a forensics arm, a lab of sorts at a college in New York. He is no idiot. Okay. And he says these remains are of a girl, a lady of Eastern European descent.

So, Joe Scott Morgan, I've been told that it's going to take a long time, several weeks before we've got the answer, because from these destroyed remains, he's got to extract DNA. Does that make sense to you? No, it doesn't. Why? Because it doesn't take that long to examine bone for DNA. What if it's ground up bone and you have to extract the DNA from it? Still not going to take that long. Interesting. This has been repeated over and over and over again. It does not take this long to test bone.

And plus, he's already stated that he has identified these bones as being of European extraction. He already has the information beyond that. You don't stop at that point and then say, well, it's going to take a little while for us to go forward from here. It doesn't take. I have no reason to doubt Kulkowski. Take a listen to this. Nancy, let's listen to a part of your interview recently with Gabriel, the informant, the one who made it all happen, who led T.J. Ward and Dave Holloway

to Aruba and to this source who eventually led them to the grave that is now believed to have been Natalie Holloway's. To Gabriel, who's at the center of all this. Gabriel, what bones do you believe that they are examining? Because it's been made very clear a U.S. expert is looking at bones brought in from Aruba. So if something was cremated, what is there to examine? Like I said, Nancy, he said many stories as we were doing the investigation. And I cannot say because there's a twist to all this. It could be true. It could be a lie.

But there's a twist to everything. So I can't really, I have to keep you guys in suspense. Question to you, Gabriel. From what you learned through John, what have you learned about who is Jorn Vandersloot? What kind of guy is he? He's a sociopath. He's a pathological liar. He basically thinks about himself. And if he could be on TV and be in the spotlight, that's what he wants. What I have learned from John. How do you think he is holding up now? Is he still in connection, in contact with John?

Because he's in Peru now. VanderSloot's in Peru. As far as I know, no. John has not. He said the last time that John wrote him a letter was back in 2000, let's see, 2012, and has not written to him since then because I guess they were watching their letters. Do you believe that Jorn Vandersloot's father, Paulus Vandersloot, the judge who is now dead, was covering up for his son. Oh, definitely.

There is something else that not even the documentary people have of material that how it came to be where Natalie was placed, her place to rest for the very first time. Where was she at? And they don't even have the material. I try to tell them, but they don't listen to me well where where was it i cannot say it right now due to my lawyer i can't i can't disclose that right now i understand i understand put it this way i'm just going to give you a little hint paula's had a best friend in holland that had they had a property. Paulus knew very well that property, very, very well. And that's all I can tell you for now.

What was it like to be working undercover trying to crack this case, Gabriel? Honestly, Nancy, I'm not a cop. I'm not an investigator in none of this. God gave me the will, and it was very, very frustrating. It's like handling a five-year-old child with tantrums day by day. It was very difficult, very, very difficult. Nobody has, I mean, if you were locked in with him, you would probably strangle

him because there's no way. And I had to take all that crap. I had to grow thick skin in order to get the information I needed to solve this. How long did it take you, Gabriel? Approximately almost five years. Because I started in slow to get in him. Once I was in and at the end, I pushed hard and I got what I wanted. I was almost there, almost there when everybody gave up but me. And I said, no, no, I'm not going to let this go. I know she's there and I know, and something remarkable happened. And the second week of April and I went back when everybody gave up, I went back and it was exactly the spot

where I kind of had a general idea and everybody was blown away. The one that was blown away the most, which he had his doubts was Dave Holloway. I remember calling him, and I said, Dave, I found her. He goes, you've got to be kidding me. So he calls. He tells me, call Chief Richardson. So I did. Gives me the number. I called him, and I said, I want to meet you.

I found remains. So he comes and meets me, but when I met him, he goes, you want to know something? I go, what? He goes, TJ Ward called me to put you in jail. I go, for what? he comes and meets me but when i met him he goes you want to know something i go what he goes tj ward called me to put you in jail i go for what he goes for messing with his case he goes but i'm not going to do that can you take me where you where you found remains i go yes so we go back there they check the area out and then they leave and i don't hear nothing, nothing. But I could tell you one thing. When we were outside the hotel, when they seen it, the forensic guy seen it, his own people,

they're like, Keith Richards asked him, is this human? And they looked at it. He goes, yes, this is human. There was a piece of a skull and other pieces, which I don't want to say. According to Dave Holloway and the U.S. medical doctor expert, human remains were found and the doctor is analyzing them and extracting DNA from them. They are human remains belonging to a female. So, Gabriel, how does it work? How could there be bones and this cremation story?

Well, Nancy, it's very simple. If you cremate something, you're not going to have bones. So the other option is it never got cremated. That is simple answer, but it's part of the documentary. I cannot say. It's a big twist. I hear you. I mean, that's what I was just saying, and you said it very succinctly. They can't both be true. Someone may have been mixed with a dog at a crematory. Bones may have been taken and moved, but they can't be the same thing. Now, Art, you have a bobshell. What have you learned

from your sources, Art Harris? Nancy, what I'm learning is that initial tests were inconclusive because the tests came from a mixture of the bones that were pulverized. And to do a better test, you need to test individual bones. And actually, they're doing that now, Nancy. So they're running more tests on more bones that I have learned from a source. So are you saying that there are bones in two locations? Is that what you're saying? Is that the bombshell? There are bones in two locations? What I'm saying, Nancy, is that they had a certain amount of bones to test. Some were crushed and tested together. They have a couple of remaining pieces. They are now testing individually to see if they can get

a more definitive DNA match to be able to say this is Natalie or it isn't. They have narrowed it to a woman of Eastern European descent in that age category, and now they're trying to zero in to give the father the closure. They have more bones to test. They tested initially bones that were mixed together that didn't necessarily give a definitive answer, that would conform to what Joe Scott Morgan is saying, that they had enough time. They did, but they didn't have the best samples to declare that what they are finding or would find is a bona fide and respected result. Natalie Holloway was on her high school trip in Aruba when she went missing, and it was five years to the day that another young woman was murdered by Jorn Vandersloot, Stephanie Tassiano

Flores. He is now behind bars in Peru on that murder, but the reality is that being behind bars has been a cakewalk for Jorn Vandersloot. He has gotten a hold of alcohol, reported drugs, and even fathered a baby from behind prison walls. So with that in mind, Joseph Scott Morgan, if this pans out to be true, would he be returned to Aruba for prosecution? If the Aruban authorities have the will to move forward, my thought is that if this is going to be, this crucial piece of evidence could potentially be used as legal leverage by our U.S. State Department to compel the Aruban authorities to get off of their rear ends and do something about this case, which to this point they've kind of failed to do. We know that the informant Ludwig previously said Vander Sloot paid him $1,500 to dig up Natalie's remains near a residential property in Aruba.

Okay, that's got to be the Paulus Vandersloot home or a friend of Paulus Vandersloot's. Alan Duke, I was also told that the remains were buried on the property of a friend of Paula's Vandersloots. Now, that is inconsistent with finding the remains in Vandersloots' family home. What do we know? I think the problem is that there are sources that cannot be revealed now. There's some confidentiality. It's going to come out, Nancy, that the remains were found near his house at a relative's property. And they are testing now new samples because the first ones came back undetermined and they you know they have confidence that they're going to get a good result from individual pieces of bone that they did not test that way initially you know when you hear that joe scott morgan that they're now going on that's a huge bombshell that they're going on to

another test that the first one was indeterminate because now they have more of a bone. Is that putting the puzzle together for you, Joe Scott? Yeah, it kind of brings it into clear focus. And just let me expand on this just a little bit. When you've got this pulpified bone that has been crushed, albeit probably at a very rudimentary level, it's still going to be what we refer to in forensics as being a commingled sample. That means that, you know, we talked about dog bones and all this other stuff. If they are commingled with these other remains, that's going to be problematic if the thing

is pulpified and commingled. If you think about a bone as an individual little case that's carrying sensitive information, like a briefcase, for instance, and that briefcase has not been broken open, it's still got the sensitive information in it, that's going to have a higher likelihood of containing viable DNA sample as opposed to something that has been put under pressure and crushed. So yeah, I'm going to be real interested if they are in fact running a second test. Another thing that we have to consider here from a legal standpoint is the provenance of the evidence. Where did this come from? Are we talking about a couple of different sites here? Are we talking about somebody that some creep that's holding on to remains of some deceased person and they're storing them back? Or here's a big one. There are other missing people in Aruba.

Nancy, it's not just poor Natalie. It's other people that are missing down there. So this is going to be key to not just this case but to other cases. There's a lot of weight to bear here. I think that a big reveal is in the future, and that's what we're waiting to see. Listen to this from the Oxygen series on Natalie Holloway. Earlier, we heard part of T.J. Ward's interrogation of John, but now let's listen to more of this. This is what you'll hear

toward the end of episode five of The Disappearance of Natalie Holloway on Oxygen. Tell me what you know or what he told you about Natalie Holloway. The first night he ever opened up about it, about the May 30th night, was we were at my house one night and the Lifetime movie came on. So we watched it. And throughout the movie, they're doing different things and stuff, and he started telling me like, that's bull, you know, that's not even true. Like he was picking the movie apart,

telling me, yeah, that's true, that's bogus, that's true, that's bogus. So that's how he started talking to me. Eventually after the movie ended that night, he started talking about it and said, you know, John, I want you to know that bad things happen to good people accidents happen okay where did he take Natalie that night I'm not sure exactly where he took her

but I know that he said I had help and it wasn't it wasn't me backing Satish who helped him he never said Paulus's name but he implied it was his father. So after something happened to her on the beach he called Paulus? Yes. And then what happened? I guess Paulus came and helped him figure out how to get rid of evidence. Where did they take the body after they got her off the beach? His dad got everything disposed of. I believe before sunrise that made- Where'd it take it? There's a cul-de-sac there on the top of the hill that it's designated. Cactuses and thorn bushes and nobody goes up there. At what point in time did he ask you and

tell you about doing something with the remains in Nellie Holloway? And what did he want you to do? Well, he knew I was heavily hooked on heroin at the time and I didn't have the resources to keep it up daily. So he said, I'll give you $1,500 for your help. Did he in fact give you $1,500? Yes, he did. Okay, did you go by yourself?

Under his instruction, I could. Did he go by yourself? Under his instruction. Did he go with you? No, because he... I want you to think about that. Did he go with you to dig the remains out? Yes. Did he go with you? He went with you.

Alright, so y'all went out there and left the remains, okay? And what happened? The burlap sack was wrapped in a loo tarp. So it was kind of like keeping stuff from seeping out, basically. Did you open it up? Did you look in there? Yeah. Okay, what did you see?

Very nasty looking, like blackish brown, dry, like matter. How did you feel? I'm serious. How did you feel when you saw it? Well, I almost threw up right away, just from the gas promoter. It took me back. Where did you take the remnants? To my property. To your aunt's house? Well, originally he had discussed getting it cremated, but at that time it wasn't legal, but apparently some places would do it for pets. And what'd you do? The idea was to crush everything to the point where it's not recognizable as arm bones or

skull or anything like that. Did you do something with the remains before you broke them up? Or did you do something with the remains after you broke them up? Did you burn them? The only thing that got burnt was the skull to burn the hair fibers. It was doused in gasoline in a fire pit in the cave. And where was the fire pit? In the cave.

In the cave? On your rent property? No. It's about 150 yards to the right of where it's supposed to be in the desert. You are hearing sound from Oxygen's special documentary series on the search for Natalie Holloway that starts with her dad, Dave Holloway, along with APD TJ Ward, now private investigator, trying to follow leads and find his daughter. That leads me to our question as to whether Jorn Vandersloot will ever be extradited to the U.S. Art, what do you make of it? Will he be extradited here?

Nancy, the FBI has been reluctant to trust this very questionable friend of VanderSloot's as a witness to get the killer extradited to the state's alleged killer because they need evidence to be able to convict. And so far, all they've got against him is shaking down Natalie's mother for $25,000. That is not enough to get an extradit of the states. If they can get enough solid evidence from the site and Reuben authorities will invite the FBI in for a joint investigation, big if, they could possibly develop extradition material to get him sent to the states to be tried for murder. But there are a lot of things to jump over before that. How do you get him here for murder because it happened in Aruba. Well, the FBI has jurisdiction over Americans killed abroad. And if they can develop a case jointly with the Arubans, it could be tried in the states as well. This must be a nightmare for her parents. It's like it will never end. Never. To Art Harris, Emmy Award winning investigative reporter,

and Joseph Scott Morgan, death investigator, forensics professor at Jacksonville State University, we're on the case. Thank you. Nancy Grace, Crime Stories, signing off. Goodbye, friend. and work alongside experts and fellow crime sleuths to help uncover new leads and theories in the cold cases they adopt.

Their first cold case focuses on the mysterious disappearance of nursing student Mara Murray in 2004, and it's free to join thanks to Oxygen. Sign up now or find more info at club.crimecon.com. That's club.crimecon.com. This is an iHeart Podcast.