Director of Netflix’s Natalee Holloway doc on why they refused to interview her killer Joran van der Sloot
Netflix’s latest true crime documentary about the death of Natalee Holloway tells the harrowing story of how the young American went missing in Aruba, but it does not include an interview with her admitted killer Joran van der Sloot or two men who were arrested and later released in relation to the case Deepak and Satish Kalpoe.
Holloway’s disappearance went unsolved for 18 years before Van der Sloot admitted in 2023 that he had killed her in 2005. This was done as part of a plea deal following a conviction for attempting to blackmail her family.
Netflix’s Taken: Natalee Holloway is the biggest show on Netflix worldwide and has seen a great deal of renewed interest into the late 18-year-old’s case, but director Dani Sloane had no interest in speaking to Joran van der Sloot for the doc.
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Speaking exclusively to LADbible, she said: “I think when you talk to Joran when anyone talks to Joran there's obviously a piece of like ‘How can you believe what he's saying?’ It’s very different when he's hooked up to a polygraph so… there was definitely thought about it, consideration.”
Joran has changed his story of what happened on numerous occasions, with local police speaking in the documentary saying he changed his story ‘at least 40 times’.
Whilst he has never been charged with her killing in Aruba due to a lack of physical evidence, the Dutch national admitted to what happened finally in 2023 as part of an FBI polygraph test.
This was part of his plea deal after trying to blackmail Natalee’s mother Beth for $250,000 in exchange for claiming to provide information about where she was buried. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for this in the US, which he is serving concurrently alongside a 28 year murder conviction for killing Stephany Flores in 2010.
Continuing, Sloane said: “At the end of the day, he's in prison in Peru. He has told his side of the story in every which way, left and right. And we've finally gotten the truth. It’s potentially a can of worms to reopen that again and give him a platform to tell another story and just confuse the issue even more when he's not hooked up to a polygraph and doesn't have the FBI sitting across from him.
“Journalists have gone this route before with him and have gotten what they've gotten.”
Brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe were also initially investigated by Aruban police as they were in the car alongside Natalee and Joran, however have never been charged in connection with the case.
Unlike Joran, Sloane said that she did reach out to the Kalpoe brothers for an interview, however the reclusive brothers have retreated from the public eye and were not interested in speaking in the doc.
She added: “ Look, we reached out. I mean, look, in any of these cases, in any story where somebody is publicly accused of something and then, you know, questioned but not convicted or indicted or charged it is so important to be able to give them an opportunity to tell their side of the story.
“The truth for them is that they were there that night. They were talking to Joran before and after this all happened and so you know the question of ‘what did they know how much did they know’, I mean you hear [local police chief] Gerald Dompeg talk about it like it was really difficult to investigate them too. They did break down at a certain point and start telling like little half-truths so you know it was important for us to reach out to see if after all these years they wanted to talk but you always understand when somebody doesn’t want to.”
She stated that the ‘reality is that they have never spoken publicly’, saying she was ‘not surprised’ that they did not respond to requests.
Sloane said that Natalee’s mother Beth is ‘so proud’ that people are now discussing her daughter beyond just the pictures that were shared to try and help find her.
She finished, saying: “I think it’s really wonderful that [Beth] is being held up in the way she is, people are being really kind to her [in the wake of the documentary] and have really embraced this mother on this quest for justice… there was this point in the past where people turned on her. For me it’s wonderful to watch her get this re-examination, re-evaluation of her role in all this.
“She’s so excited that people know who Natalie is now, she’s not a flattened image on a tabloid, she’s not her senior portrait that was circulated everywhere, she’s actually a real person.”
Taken: Natalee Holloway is available to watch on Netflix now.
Topics: Netflix, True Crime, TV and Film, Documentaries, Originals
Michael Slavin
