Our hearts go out once again to the family of Natalee Holloway, as fresh words from the contemptible Joran van der Sloot tear open their old wounds.
It’s a thing about the nightmarish loss of a loved one: Even something small, decades later, can leave you bent over in the old, familiar anguish — as if the whole horror had just come down yesterday.
And a de facto confession from the psycho you’ve always known did it is no small thing.
Natalee, 18, vanished in 2005 during a high school graduation trip in Aruba. Van der Sloot was the last person seen with her, but Aruban authorities were never able — or never willing — to charge him in the case.
Now undercover video shows van der Sloot smugly all but confessing to the murder.
“I always lied to the police. I never told the truth,” he said in Dutch, grinning and holding the hand of his wife, talking to a reporter for Radar Online and the National Enquirer.
More: “Also, when I was younger, I never told everything. The police just never knew what they had to ask. I think that was one of the worst police investigations that ever took place.”
Asked if he’s speaking about the Holloway case when talking of the police’s incompetence, he says: “Yes, yes, yes. Yes, this is also where I am guilty, and I admit everything that I have done.”
The interview took place inside Peru’s Challapalca Prison, the “Alcatraz of the Andes,” where van der Sloot is serving a 28-year sentence after confessing to the 2010 bludgeoning murder of student Stephany Flores — a killing that came five years to the day after Natalee’s disappearance.
Perhaps the confession will allow some added closure for the Holloway family. Yet they likely take greater solace in knowing that he’ll be rotting in Peru for a very, very long time.
Here is the hotel surveillance footage that provided the damning evidence to convict Van der Sloot in the Flores case: