Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He's a Psychopath - The Joran van der Sloot Story

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

Joran van der Sloot whose criminal history includes the 2010 murder of 21-year-old Stephany Flores Ramírez in Lima, Peru- he was convicted and sentenced to 28 years in prison for the crime. He first came to international attention as the prime suspect in the disappearance of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway in Aruba in 2005.

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Now the guy's name is Yaron, and Yaron is 17 when this story starts, and he's a high school student living in Aruba, and bro is apparently a total psychopath. Like when he gets mad, he cannot control himself. And one night in 2005, he's out at a local bar, when he meets this girl, Natalie. And Natalie is 18, and she's visiting Aruba with her classmates for her friends from her and she's visiting Aruba with her classmates for a high school graduation trip. And Yaron thinks Natalie is foin, and I guess she kind of likes him too. And so they have some drinks, and they hit it off, and they start chatting. And when the bar closes, they decide to leave the place together.

And Natalie gets into the car with Yaron and two of his friends, and instead of driving her back to the hotel where she's staying, they drive over to the beach. Then Yaron's friends leave, but Yeran and Natalie hang out. out there on the beach for a bit, and soon enough they start making out. But then, Yaron starts getting a little too friendly with her, and Natalie tells him to stop. But Yaron, he doesn't listen. He just keeps going. And that's not cool. So then, pow, Natalie kicks him right in his junk. And that is when Yaron just snaps. He grabs her and he knees her in the face hard, and this knocks her unconscious. Then he goes and he grabs a cinder block that's nearby, and he lifts it

over his head and he smashes it right on her head. And that, unfortunately, unalives Natalie. And after that, he drags her into the ocean and he just walks home. The next morning, which happens to be the last day of Natalie's school trip, Natalie doesn't show up for her flight home. And so she's reported missing. And pretty quickly, the police get involved and they start investigating. And they question Natalie's friends. And of course Natalie's friends. immediately point to Iran, because they had seen her leaving the bar with him. So police, they find Yaron, and they question him, and they question his two friends, but they all sort of tell the same story. They say that they all went to the beach that night to watch sharks,

and afterwards they dropped Natalie off at her hotel. And that's it. That's the last they ever saw of her. But soon, the news of Natalie's disappearance blows up, and everyone's looking for her. Her disappearance becomes international news. It's on every cable news station in the United States, where she's from. And that's when Natalie's parents decide to take advantage of the situation in order to get the case more attention. And they start appearing on talk shows and they fly to Aruba and they hand out flyers and they help with searches. They do anything they can to get answers on the whereabouts of their daughter. But unfortunately, there's no luck.

No one knows where Natalie is, and police, they don't have any real evidence that Yaron did anything wrong, other than that he's just kind of a shady dude. And so, in 2007, a Rubin police closed the case without officially charging anyone. And while all this is going on, Yaron, he's decided that he kind of likes all this attention he's been getting, even if it's for being a murder suspect. And so he starts doing interviews with the media, and he writes a whole ass book on the case. case, which is really fucked up. He then starts feeding the media fake confessions for whatever reason, probably just to keep himself in the spotlight. But apparently in Aruba, by law, a confession to a crime needs to be signed and in writing.

Otherwise, it's inadmissible. So Iran can verbally confess to the crime with no consequences from Aruban police. Now, in 2008, a Dutch journalist actually catches Yerunan. on hidden camera confessing saying Natalie died of a drug overdose on the beach and that he dumped her body in the ocean and that she'll never be found. It's like a lie, but it's sort of a confession. Yoran then later he goes on a TV show and he backtracks saying that the whole confession was fake. Later that same year, he tells a Fox News reporter that he sold Natalie into a sex trafficking ring for $10,000 only to email them eight hours later saying that he

lied again. Then at another point, he says that he and Natalie were doing cocaine together and that she accidentally fell off a balcony and died and that he then took her body and hit it in a nearby swamp. So yeah, this guy's like super weird. Like he's confessing to all kinds of stuff with just no legal consequences. And Arruban police, they chase some of these false leads, but of course they find nothing because, you know, Iran's a liar. So now, not only is, He was wasting police's time and resources, but he's also tormenting Natalie's family by giving them false hope that she'll be found. But after a while, around 2010, I guess Yaron starts to get tired of all this media attention

and he decides he doesn't like it anymore. And instead of blaming himself for continuing to put himself in the spotlight, instead he blames Natalie's family for it. And he wants to get back at them. So he comes up with this wild plan. He's going to scam Natalie's parents out of a lot of money by pretending that he has information about her disappearance. So he goes and he sends an email to the family's attorney.

And he's like, I'll tell you the truth about Natalie and I'll even point to where her remains are for $250,000. And the attorney agrees. He says he'll give him $25,000 up front and that he'll give him the rest after he delivers the information he's promising. And Yaron agrees to this as well. And so they meet up in Aruba, and the attorney hands Yaron $10,000 in cash, and he wires the other $15,000 to Iran's account. And so then Yuran tells the family that Natalie actually died because they got in a fight, and he threw her to the ground, and she hit her head accidentally on a rock, and that he then

buried her under a house's foundation, and then he gives the family a location of that. house. But of course, this is all a lie because Yaron's a fucking psychopath. The house he named didn't even exist at the time of Natalie's disappearance. And again, he later emails the family's attorney admitting that he made the whole thing up. But what Yaron's dumb ass doesn't know is that the FBI is already involved in this. The family's attorney had tipped them off way before the payment. Plus, you know, the FBI's probably been investigating this for a while now. So, while Yaron thinks he's playing the family, the feds are quietly building a case against him. But Yaron, he doesn't know any of this. He thinks he's going to get away with it.

So he uses the money that the family paid him to fly to Peru, to gamble in some poker tournament there. And that poker tournament is where he meets this woman, Stephanie. And Stephanie, she's 21 and she's, you know, a local Peruvian woman. And Yaron and Stephanie, they meet at the casino and they chat for a while and they hit it off. and they later go back to his hotel room. Now at some point, Yaron steps out of the room to go get some food. And by the time he gets back to the room,

he finds Stephanie using his laptop. And she happens to be reading some news articles about how he's connected to Natalie's disappearance. It seems like she may have recognized him or something and went and looked him up. And Yaron's like, oh shit! And he just loses it. He's like, how dare you invade my privacy?

And so they get into a huge argument. and it escalates. And then, pow, Stephanie slaps him. And so, bam, your on elbows are hard in the face. And that instantly knocks her unconscious. And he eventually takes off his shirt and he suffocates her with it. And that, unfortunately, unalives Stephanie. He then steals all her money and her credit cards and her van.

And he flees from Peru all the way down to Chile. And then a few days later, the police find him. and bam, they arrest him. Here's his mugshot. And so for the murder that he committed in Peru, he gets 28 years in prison, and while he's in prison, he gets caught trafficking cocaine, and he gets another 18 years added to his sentence. That same year, he gets extradited to the U.S. to face charges for the money scam that he pulled on Natalie's family years earlier. And for that, he gets 20 years in prison. However, after all that, they can't ultimately charge him for Natalie's murder back in Aruba, because by this point, the statute of limitations

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