Van der Sloot: 5 years bracketed by crimes

June 14, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

LIMA, Peru

For all of his garrulous charm, Joran van der Sloot didn’t do himself any favors in his online interactions, where his generation tends to reveal a lot about itself.

“If I would have to describe myself as an animal, it would be a snake,” he wrote on his YouTube page. Perhaps wistfully wishing the past undone, he continued: “however, I want to be a lion, and one day I will be a lion.”

At age 22, van der Sloot is now a caged animal. He sits in a bleak third-world prison, where he fears his fellow inmates. After requesting isolation, he shares a cellblock with a reputed Colombian murderer-for-hire.

Van der Sloot’s journey from the quiet comfort of Aruba to being escorted briskly in handcuffs past Peruvian crowds screaming “murderer” is a tale of dissolution, deception and increasing desperation, according to friends and people who have chronicled his life.

Bracketing that journey are the May 30, 2005, disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba and, five years later to the day, the strangling death of Stephany Flores in his hotel room in Lima, Peru.

Bred in privilege on a Caribbean tourist island, a high school soccer and tennis star, the handsome, physically imposing young Dutchman has fallen about as far as a young man can fall. But between the disappearance of Holloway, one year his senior, and the death of Flores, one year his junior, where was Joran van der Sloot? What journey led him from the ashes of one missing-persons case to the heart of a murder?

Who, really, is he?

The moment word got out that van der Sloot was suspected of Flores’ murder, speculation swirled that he’d left a trail of young female victims in his travels — that he was something of a playboy killer for the globalized 21st century. He likes to travel, after all, and there were visits to Cambodia, Hong Kong, Venezuela, the United States.

Peruvian police officials called van der Sloot a “psychopath.” A New York detective who worked for the Holloways, Bo Dietl, branded him “a homicidal maniac.”

But no evidence has emerged thus far linking van der Sloot to any other disappearances or killings, and he certainly does not fit the profile of a deranged loner. He has had plenty of interpersonal relationships — friends, girlfriends, ardent defenders.

Before Lima, the only case in the past five years where he’s known to have caused bodily harm was in January 2008. Then, he threw a glass of red wine in the face of Dutch crime reporter Peter de Vries right after a live TV program on which the journalist called him a liar.

But the five years in between those brackets — Holloway and Flores — were bumpy ones for van der Sloot:

He is twice arrested in the Holloway disappearance, and twice released. He is harassed by crime-obsessed media and tracked doggedly by investigators hired by the Holloway family.

He relocates to Holland but, perpetually accosted, can’t live a normal university student’s life. He settles in Thailand, where he studies business without earning a degree. He buys a coffee shop.

In February, his prominent lawyer father collapses and dies of a heart attack on an Aruba tennis court at age 57. Van der Sloot flies home, lingering there after the funeral.

Then he moves. Strapped for cash, he obtains $25,000 from Holloway’s mother in exchange for a promise to lead her to her daughter’s body. The FBI secretly records the alleged extortion, but van der Sloot is not arrested.

Instead, he heads off to Lima to play poker. He kills Flores, Peru’s police say, after a night of poker with her at a casino in which he had about 10 drinks of whiskey and pisco while she drank wine. The evidence against him is so overwhelming, they say, that he has no choice but to confess.