Will Joran Get Away with Murder Again?

by Diane Fanning

Many feel Joran van der Sloot should be behind bars for the murder of Natalee Holloway.  Instead, he's been traipsing around the world.  Now, it may be time for him to pay--unfortunately, another young woman had to die to make that possible.

When 18-year-old Natalee Holloway disappeared while on vacation in Aruba in late May 2005, her parents zeroed in on 17-year-old Joran van der Sloot. He was the last person seen with Natalee and he kept changing his story.

Dutch authorities obviously shared their suspicion, arresting Joran twice—but never charging him with her murder. Hope for closure in the case died from a combination of investigative error, an island desire to minimize the crime for the sake of tourism and the hostility generated by Natalee’s parents who made inadvertent missteps as they were caught up in an alien justice system. It appeared that, short of the miraculous discovery of a body, with compelling, intact forensic evidence, there would never be any justice for Natalee Holloway.

For five years, he’s tormented Natalee’s parents through titillating interviews with bloggers and members of the media. Most recently, he accepted a $25,000 down payment in two installments toward the $250,000 he requested from Beth Holloway. In return, he said he’d argued with Natalee and threw her on the ground. Her head hit a rock and she died. He also said that his father—who conveniently died in February—helped him to bury her body in the foundation of a house. A week later, he sent an email saying that he lied.

Along with many others, I believed that it was only a matter of time before Joran was accused of another act of violence against a woman. His obvious narcissism and clear disdain for Natalee’s grieving family made that a foregone conclusion. We could only hope that, this time, it would not be fatal.

Stephany Flores Ramirez (below right) encountered Joran in a casino where they were both gambling. She won a $10,000 pot using some money fronted by Joran. They went to his room to divide up the winnings. According to Joran, she was on his laptop and accessed an article about Natalee Holloway. He said that was a gross and intolerable invasion of his privacy.  "I didn't want to do it," he said.  "The girl intruded in my life."

A civilized person, feeling such an affront, would ask the other person to leave the room. Instead, Joran elbowed her in the face hard enough to knock her unconscious and slammed her into the wall with sufficient force to cause a brain hemorrhage and then strangled her to death with her shirt. Some reports indicate that also he stabbed his victim repeatedly.  Stephany died on May 30, 2010—exactly five years to the day of Natalee’s demise. 

Joran confessed to this murder but his defense attorneys are now saying the confession was coerced and not admissible in a court of law. I imagine Joran is now entertaining fantasies of getting away with this homicide, too.

However, he is facing an entirely differently situation this time. When he ended Natalee’s life, he was on his home island of Aruba. Natalee was just another foreign woman vacationing there. Now, Joran is the foreigner and Stephanie is the native of Peru. I think that factor in this murder will count heavily against Joran’s evasion of justice in this case.

The court of public opinion in Peru seems outraged by Joran’s crime. According to The Associated Press, even holy men gathered outside the courthouse to condemn him. “Outside, seven Indian shamans in brightly colored ponchos repeatedly stabbed a cloth doll representing van der Sloot in a "spiritual punishment" ritual. ‘We're punishing him so that all the forces of evil are purged,’ one shouted.”

However, I am still troubled by the puny sentence. The maximum he could receive for murder in Peru is 35 years. Even if he served the entire sentence behind bars, I think Joran van der Sloot will still be a danger to women when he is 57 years old. To make matters worse, Peru traditionally gives a shorter sentence to those who confess to their crime.

It’s hard to know what to hope happens. Do you want Joran’s confession to be heard in the courtroom, thus nearly guaranteeing that he would receive a sentence shorter than thirty-five years? Or do you hope his lawyers succeed in having the confession thrown out and look to the prosecutors to present a strong enough case for conviction?

I tend to think that either way, the courts will not be very forgiving of the foreigner who killed a native citizen, of a man who is believed to have killed another woman in a fit of rage.

We have to count on Peru to take care of business—to finish the job that Aruba could not. If they, too, fail and Joran gets away with another murder, I have no doubt that he will kill again.

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Joran van der Sloot: A Serial Killer?

by Pat Brown

Now that Joran van der Sloot is back in the headlines, returned to Peru after his infamous run to Chile to avoid arrest in the murder of 21-year-old Stephany Flores Ramirez, speculation is spreading that van der Sloot is a serial killer. Although never convicted in the murder of Natalee Holloway, who went missing in Aruba in 2005, we all know she was murdered even though she is still just officially missing. Now that Joran is in a Peruvian jail, suspected in the brutal bludgeoning death of Stephanie, he is being called a serial killer. People are starting to wonder if he has a string of bodies around the world, everywhere he's traveled in the last five years -- murders he has never been linked to.

But van der Sloot is no serial killer. He may have killed more than once, but that doesn't make him a serial killer - a serial date rapist, but not a serial killer. He doesn't fit the FBI definition of serial killer, nor mine. He doesn't exhibit serial killer behaviors.

The FBI definition requires the killer to commit three murders, each separated from the others by a cooling off period.

My definition requires only one known sexual homicide of a stranger (or at least not an intimate partner or close friend), because I know that just like potato chips, he can't have just one. A person who crosses the line to plan, rape, and murder a complete stranger likes the thrill so much he will do it again. We may have linked a suspect to one killing of a stranger, but that doesn't mean he hasn't done it before or won't do it again. To be entirely accurate, I call these "suspected" serial killers, but I know in reality they're serial killers at heart. Once we have a string of homicides (and then they don't have to be sexual to be the work of a serial killer but most are) that have down time in between them (so as to distinguish them from mass murderers and spree killers), we can be pretty sure we have a serial killer out there.

The second issue is behavior. A serial killer plans his crimes. He decides to kill, usually when his life is on a downturn - his girlfriend dumped him, he lost his job, or his mother died. Feeling more of a failure than usual, he imagines that if he grabs some unsuspecting, innocent human being, humiliates and brutalizes her, and takes her life away, he'll feel in that moment like a god, a superhero, someone with control over life and death -- and who can show society that he has such power. He takes the prize -- someone dearly loved, someone society thinks is better than him. His shining moment: When he sees the terror in his victim's eyes and watches the life drain out of her.

He basks in the glory of that act for days or weeks. He laughs as police search desperately for a killer-ghost. Feeling better about himself, he gets on with normal life. Weeks, months or years later, his ego severely bruised again, he repeats his crime and, once more, gets his vile fix.

A serial killer wants to get away with his crime so he can do it again and again. In almost every case, the serial offender picks a stranger and abducts or attacks her when no one is looking. His plan is to kill horribly, violently. Rape isn't always part of every serial killer's crime, but is often an added amusement, since it's one of the most degrading acts a victim can suffer. Rape for the serial killer is fun, foreplay to murder.

That's not the modus operandi of Joran van der Sloot. This arrogant psychopath's plan to obtain power and control is through sex, and if the woman doesn't cooperate, through rape. He targets women in public places, uses his own name, woos them, and plies them with liquor or drugs (sometimes likely without their full knowledge). When they exit the public venue, he is the person known to be in the woman's company. Most likely, he gets the woman to have sex with him without force. At times, the woman is probably too out of it to resist him; when the sex is over, she goes home and doesn't report it. Why? She knows there will be no evidence of rape to prove she was violated without her consent.

And then we have Natalee and (at right) Stephanie. What happened to these women? Joran van der Sloot did not premeditate their murders, or he wouldn't have been so stupid as to be the last person seen with them. Furthermore, with Stephany, he wouldn't have taken her back to his own hotel room and killed her there, since his real name was on the register. He would at least taken her to another isolated public area, as he did Natalie, if his intention was murder. No, Joran "only" planned to have sex with the girl, one way or the other.

So what went wrong? Apparently, neither Natalee nor Stephany wanted to have sex with Joran, and neither girl was so inebriated or drugged that he could easily take advantage of her. Natalee was able to walk onto the beach, and Stephany was able to walk into Joran's hotel room without his support. They may have been somewhat drunk or drugged, but not nearly enough that they couldn't put up a fight. Natalee was likely smothered in the sand during sex, and Stephanie didn't even take her clothes off before Joran went ape on her.

Along with being a serial date rapist, Joran van der Sloot also exhibits the kind of rage we usually see in domestic homicides. When a woman finally stands up to her husband or boyfriend and says she is not taking it any more or leaving him, he becomes enraged. She dares deny him his "rights" and his loss of power and control over his woman! That drives him mad. He'll be damned if she'll treat him that way, insult his manhood, mock him in the eyes of society. If he can't control her, he'll kill her. He will end the relationship, not her, in his own way and his own time.

Joran van der Sloot behaves this same way with his "women" even if their relationship lasts just the evening. She'll do as he says or else. Most of the women he leaves with to have sex with don't end up dead, simply because they were willing or weren't fighting. But sometimes, he gets unlucky, and then so do the women like Natalee and Stephanie.

Joran got away with the murder of Natalee Holloway (left). But this time, he screwed up so badly, I doubt he'll manage to avoid a long tenure in a Peruvian jail. Thank God for stupidity and hotel surveillance cameras. Joran's serial date-raping life will finally come to an end. No more women will have to die because they "just said no" to a piece of garbage like him.

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INTRODUCING CATHY SCOTT & SHERYL McCOLLUM

Women in Crime Ink is pleased to introduce two new regular contributors: True Crime Author Cathy Scott and Crime Analyst Sheryl McCollum.

Cathy Scott is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist who's received more than a dozen awards from news organizations in California and Nevada. Her work—which has appeared in The New York Times, Reuters, George magazine, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, The New York Times Magazine, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and Las Vegas Sun—has taken her to Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Panama. Dividing her time between San Diego and Las Vegas, Cathy also writes fulltime for Best Friends Animal Society's magazine and Web site. She is a member of the Authors Guild and the Society of Professional Journalists' national Speakers Bureau. She has served as the Nevada chairwoman of the Society of Professional Journalist’s Sunshine Committee, which works to keep government records open to the public. At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Cathy was an adjunct journalism instructor for five years, a position she gave up to stay on the Gulf Coast for nearly four months to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Cathy is perhaps best known as the author of seven nonfiction books, including the Los Angeles Times best-seller The Killing of Tupac Shakur as well as the critically acclaimed The Murder of Biggie Smalls. Her other crime titles include Death in the Desert: The Ted Binion Homicide Case and Murder of a Mafia Daughter: The Life and Tragic Death of Susan Berman. Cathy's latest, The Rough Guide to True Crime, is being released August 31. She is currently finishing the case of Barbara Kogan, a Manhattan millionaire's widow who was indicted late last year for the contract murder of her husband nearly two decades ago. The book is scheduled for release by St. Martin’s Press True Crime Library in spring 2010.

Cathy has appeared on Unsolved Mysteries, Oxygen network’s “Snapped,” the Discovery Channel, CourtTV, CNN, MTV, Uncovered TV, Talk Books, and National Public Radio.

Women in Crime Ink is also welcoming Atlanta-based Sheryl McCollum, renowned crime analyst and college professor. She is the Director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute. Under Sheryl's direction, the Institute has been responsible for helping renew interest in cases that were deemed unsolvable. Sheryl has been involved in a number of notable investigations, including the disappearances of Natalee Holloway, Chandra Levy, and Amber Hagerman, as well as historical cases such as the Atlanta Child Murders and the Moore's Ford Bridge Lynching.

Sheryl is also the Director of a Metro Atlanta Cold Case Crime Analysis Squad. During the 1996 Olympic Games, Sheryl was Coordinator for the Crisis Response Team, which planned and trained for four years and responded to the Centennial Olympic Park Bombing, providing victim services through the criminal trial seven years later. In the wake of 9/11, Sheryl was Director of the Georgia team that was sent to the Pentagon in Washington, DC (aftermath at left). She is a POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) Certified Instructor, a Hostage Negotiator, a Crime Scene Technician, and a First Responder. Holding two Master’s Degrees, one in Policing and one in Criminal Justice, Sheryl is also a college professor, teaching Criminal Investigation, Crime Scene, and Forensics.

You can watch her as a regular guest expert on Nancy Grace. Sheryl has also been featured on Fox and Friends and CNN. Most recently, she is co-host of the new program "Fugitive Fridays" on the The Levi Page Show.

Read Sheryl's first piece for Women in Crime Ink on Thursday. And you can expect Cathy's first post a week from tomorrow, on July 23rd.

Please join us in welcoming our newest contributors!

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