Natalee Holloway A Forensic View Natalee Holloway 1













Natalee Holloway forensic 060417-01





 

Natalee Holloway


Natalee Holloway
 
Aruba region
   A forensic view - “Just concentrate on the facts Watson”

Last site update: 3rd May 2007

Page:

  1. Index

    Introduction

     -Mountain Brook
  2. Joran LIED!!! (Addendum: 3/5/07)

     (but how significant is that?)
  3. Let's take it down a bit

     - Assumptions

     - Minimum energy surface

     - Armchair Detective

     - Natalee “hater”?
  4. The Chinese Whispering Gallery (Update: 22/2/07)

     4a - Dirty Cyber Games
          - HMI goes underground

          - the Renfro Statement
  5. Virgin or Vamp? - who was the Natalee who disappeared?

      Pictures of Mt Brook students.
  6. Reasonable doubt

     - Beth's Theory
  7. “Just concentrate on the facts Watson.”

    The Scene

     - Premble

     - In detail

     - At Carlos & Charlies

     - Woo woo Aruba!

     - Distances

     - The lead in

     - The lead out (u/d: 16/3/07)

     - Outside the frame

     - Hotel electronic room key log

     - Timeline

    Beth's scenario

     - The Cavalry in a China shop

     - Disposal
  8. Beach Conditions (Edit/Add: 13/3/07)

     - Downstream Island Currents (New: 6/3/07)

       - Dummy doubts? (Add: 3/5/07)

     - Was Aruba properly searched?
  9. My Script Two Scenarios
  10. The Cast - the scene and main actors

    White hats, Black hats, and all the colours in between.
  11. Links

     - Pro-Holloway

     - Natalee “hater”

     - Rational-neutral

     - Crackpot

    11a - The Flying Turd Awards
  12. Rulings trigger leaks

     - Court rulings in Aruba and New York;

     - Joran and Kalpoes “statements” leaked;

     - the PvdS “letter from Natalee”;

     - “Missing” posters.
  13. Review to January 2007 (New: 4/2/07)

     - Pigs in the gutter press

     - More on “statements”

     - Beth-speak

     - Keycards, drugs, and drowning

     - Family and friends

     - Deepak sues Dr Phil for defamation

     - Beth sues Deepak for Wrongful Death

     - Filing Summary

     - Twitty's divorce

     - Summing up

     - A fine line - Heli pulls a Darvil
  14. Some specific responses (New: 11/2/07)

       - Statistics, Intoxication, Drowning

     - Addenda (New: 13/2/07)

       - Trolls, Search technology, digital evidence

     - Addenda (New: 20/2/07)

       - Keycard swipes

       - Cell phone location

       - Beach conditions and drifting out

       - Salinity (add: 24/3/07)

       - Sea search (add: 24/3/07)

       - Suicide (New: 26/3/07)

     - 14a - Suicide (New: 3/5/07)

       - (Timeline)
  15. Those pesky keyswipes (New: 6/3/07, Correction: 3/4/07, 3/5/07)

     - The key swipes

     - To recap (Add: 3/5/07)

     - Swipe 0126

     - Swipe 0322 and 0336

     - Our own flashbacks

     - A flight of fantasy
  16. nomdeguerre's summary - body disposal (New: 3/5/07)

     - Commentary

     - Gut feelings

     - Finding the keycard - The short answer pro tem. (New: 3/5/07)




Without Fear or Favor

Photos have Rollovers,


as do Links.


Dateforms: d/m/y and yymmdd.

If you have just arrived from Mars or logged in from Outer Mongolia and never heard of this case, I am not going to do yet another Natalee primer when Wikipedia has already done a good job - come up to speed there first; or you can just plunge right in...

The Author

The author is an electronics technician, twice divorced with a 24 year-old son, who has spent a lifetime solving the mysteries of industrial accidents and even the occasional sabotage.

No Mail

Note: it's not hard to figure out how to e-mail me - Don't. This is not a blog or a forum, it's an


e-ssay or Web Essay.

If you are one of the apparently 70% of Americans who are certain Joran killed Natalee you will find ample space to abuse me at Scared Monkeys.

If you have a correction or addition of fact try posting to Refugees Unleashed, Freedom of Blog, or address the issues in a page of your own.

[4/2/07] Scrux is back from the dead and under new management.

[22/2/07] My sincere thanks to the many posters who have made kind remarks about this work.

Internet “Rapture” warning: this site may vanish at any time without notice. If you want to save something, do it now.


It wasn't intended that way, but these pages are under continual revision, correction and expansion. Errors in early pages may only be corrected in later pages.







Introduction


The disappearance of Natalee Holloway on the island of Aruba in the early hours of 30th May 2005 has become a real-life mystery that looks like going down in history alongside crimes like the Lindburg Kidnapping and outright mysteries like the Marie Celest.

Since the early morning Natalee vanished without trace vast amounts of media time and blog text has been expended on the case and the many paths that have flowed from it. Mostly futile. And mostly factually in error.

pic of Natalee over region map

Her disappearance triggered a bandwaggon that quickly morphed into a hysterical lynch-mob juggernaut as axe-grinders with a hundred different agendas jumped aboard.

In general it has become polarised into two camps, pro-Natalee who are white, rich, influential, conspicuously religious, implictly racist, anti-abortion, pro-capital punishment, and politically and socially highly conservative. In a PR coup they have managed, for a while at least, to deflect any examination of the role of students, caparones, and parents by dubbing questioners as “haters” of Natalee or her mother Beth.

The other camp is just about everybody else outside the circle, the so-called “haters”, and includes those with concerns for natural justice, the rule of law, presumption of innocence, questions of responsibility and duty-of-care; about her fellow students, their parents, and the trip chaparones; the media and it's obvious bias for a pretty rich white girl Princess in Distress; and outright commercial exploitation - “HMI”. (see Links page)

“Natalee Holloway” now produces more than a million [*] hits on Google, and dozens of blogs are either dedicated to her or have threads containing thousands of posts. There is a kind of “Natalee Mania” out there, as much driven by venom as prayer, and there are lashings of both. With three Trusts set up and taking donations, and now Dave's book out, it has even grown a “Natalee Inc.” sector.

* [the number of hits has actually dropped 20% from 1.2M to 1M since the 12-month mark passed; this week (20/8/06) had dipped to around 900k but rose back to 1M with the confession in the JBRamsay case] (more Page 13)

Allied with this has been saturation media coverage for many months, in particular by Greta Van Susteren on the Fox Cable news network, but also CNN and the others. The various blog comments show how much this MSM coverage defines, forms and limits the information space for those commenting.

How can you say that?


by minny on 8/18/2005 8:02 PM


If you had been paying attention to the news reports you would realize that Natalee (God rest her soul) was killed by one of the boys she left Carlos N Charlies with!

This unintentionally accurate comment reflects the “received truth” or line being pushed by Beth and the media. Minni is effectively saying “stay on-message” and repeat it, it's disloyal to question it.

Commenting on the media commenting on Natalee has even become a blogging micro-industry of its own.

To many of these people Beth's theory of drugged date-pack-rape and murder is a foregone conclusion. This is an assumption that presses many red hot emotional buttons, particularly in America, particularly in the South, and particularly in an affluent isolated enclave like Mountain Brook, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham.

Yep, this is the same Birmingham Alabama of the grainy black and white footage of 'nig-rows' being fire hosed, trunchoned, and mauled by dogs during the Freedom Rides of the 1960's. Y'all know 'bout that, Martin Luther King “ah - have - a - DREAM!”, and all that. (is that a cheap shot, or history?) (see addenda)

Beth's scenario however does not actually rest on any established fact, only assumptions piled on top of supposition.

There is no brused and semen-stained corpse to examine in this case. No torn clothing. Nothing in fact to suggest any attack at all, much less a sexual one. Simple assertion, no matter how sincere, strident, or vicious, is not a satisfactory substitute for evidence.

Beth's credibility has taken some bad hits but most notably when she claimed to have statements that all three youths had sex with Natalee, but has since failed to produce them. Then there was the forged “confession” tape aired on Dr Phil, and endorsed by Beth.

Natalee's family has taken a civil law suit out against those they think are responsible for Natalee's disappearance. It asserts a toxic portrate of Joran van de Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers, and recounts in lurid detail what they think happened to Natalee. This claim is fabricated on such a stretch of the currently available evidence that it is certain to fail. (source: links from Hyscience)

As we will see here, a major part of Beth's ugly fantasy is pretty-well impossible, and the remainder possible but implausable. I feel for her, but in this she is an unreliable non-witness who has persisted in a number of very serious and public accusations which she has not been able to back up.

It is for others to explore why Beth should conjour in public such a lurid image of her virginal daughter being violated like this, the image is pornographic, and what it says that her imaginings are like this; and not of a mother refusing to accept the image of a child raped and murdered, instead insisting she drowned accidentally, against all the evidence. Similarly TV pundits like Dr Phil and some bloggers who maintain hopes that she has been kidnapped, abducted, or run away, and will somehow turn up alive.




Mountain Brook

So they retreated into self-imposed and socially isolated little prisons of privilge where Church and Country Club membership are the twin axies of society, conformity essential, patriotism compulsory. The Mountain Brook school is reportedly 95% white.


posted by Jessica Smith


3) Where did you go to school?


Mountain Brook High School, one of the “best” & most conservative high schools in the country. Southern Baptists. Daily prayer. Censored books. Enforced patriotism.


Source: http://looktouch.blogspot.com/2006/04/where-were-you-in-1996.html

MB is called “The Tiny Kingdom”. It's deemed by the naive Brookie to be (and is to some extent) separate from the real world (ref: “Carry Me Home” by Diane McWhorter who received the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2002 for this account of living in MB during the Birmingham civil rights demonstrations of 1963). Bad things happen to “other people”. Well, Natalee would be the 4th MBHS student to die this year (2 suicides, 1 auto accident, now Aruba).


Comment by Mountainman - 6/10/2005


http://www.opinionbug.com/?p=514

As we shall see the reality of Mountain Brook students differs somewhat from the idealised image presented to the world by Beth Twitty and others.




Source: Vanity Fair Jan 06


Addenda:

HarryTho on Hyscience wrote:


The Aussie theory resembles one of ours. We added a possible medication reaction with Natalee's other intakes of the evening. Yes, watershock would affect any swimmer under those conditions, very quickly. It is a persuasive scenario.

Full credit must go to Harry for his “1/11” (11th Jan 2006) post. We can both take heart from the fact that this work was almost complete when Harry's prior work was discovered. This is not a race, and the fact that this work comes to similar conclusions independently provides some mutual verification.



kaycee77025 wrote: And is he mocking MLK while calling others racists?

No. That classic film clip is the totem for a major socal shift that led to enclaves of fear such as Mountain Brook. For any reader under 45 that may be the only totem they recognise. It's not name-calling but a recognition of the almost-explicit racism in statements like “Natalee would never have got into a car with Deepak and Satish if Joran hadn't been there” which decodes into “a good Southern white girl wouldn't get into a car with two Blacks unless a white boy were there to protect her”.






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Natalee Holloway forensic 060417-02





Natalee Holloway 2



Joran LIED!!!

Updated: 1/6/06


Add: 12/3/70, 3/5/07

Much is made of Joran lying or changing his statements; he lied, ergo he killed Natalee. We'll come back to this.

It could equally be pointed out that one of the students, Natalee's close friend and one of her roommates on the trip, has also very significantly changed her version of events;

Although, Francis Byrd did mention seeing Natalee in the Holiday Inn after Carlos & Charlies. And, a few security personnel admitted seeing her, as well.


Source: Greta/Fox


Ruth McVey, Liz Cain, Francis Ellen Byrd

The following, June 2, 2005, interview is often quoted, so it is include it in its entirely.


The interviewer is Joe Scarborough.


Interviewer: Let me ask you, Frances Ellen, when is the last time you saw her?

Frances Ellen Byrd: That night.


Interviewer: Yes, you saw her the night...


Frances Ellen Byrd: I was with her that night.


Interviewer: You were with her that night.


Frances Ellen Byrd: Yes. Yes.

Interviewer: All the friends went back to the hotel. And did you all see her go back to the hotel or not?

Frances Ellen Byrd: I am just leaving it that we saw her there.

Interviewer: Saw her that night?

Frances Ellen Byrd: Right.

Mountain Brook youth minister: Yes. Absolutely.

Interviewer: All right. Well, Frances Ellen, thank you so much for being with us tonight. Mark (Mark Yoder,the youth minister), thank you. And, of course, our prayers are going to be with you, with Natalee and with Natalee's family on this very important search.


Frances Ellen Byrd: Thank you. Thank you so much.


(crosstalk)


Mountain Brook youth minister: We really encourage everyone to pray. Thank you.


Frances Ellen Byrd: Pray for Natalee. She is coming home.


Mountain Brook youth minister: Yes.


Interviewer: All right. Thank you so much.


Source: TV program is called Scarborough Country MSNBC


http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8083810

What the exchange in bold actually means, Frances Byrd's evasion of a direct question on a critical point, has been debated at considerable length since it was made. The question;

“And did you all see her go back to the hotel or not?”

...sounds precise, but is actually ambiguous, unlike “did you see her back at the hotel?”. And if the question is confusing then the answers won't make a lot of sense either.

[12/3/07] Clarification: the “there” is variously taken to definitely mean C&C's or the Holiday Inn, and many commentators have been certain both ways, often supported by a reasonable logic and supposition. Since reasonable arguments can be made both ways we must realise that the basic information is insufficient to draw the desired conclusion - where exactly (and at what time) FEB saw Natalee that night. It is simply inconclusive.




Lee Broughton's FBI statement is much more illuminating, and is covered in detail later.



What is clear is how little 125 teenagers, their parents, and seven chaparones, have placed on the record since Natalee disappeared.

There is also the unresolved matter of the security video from the Holiday Inn entrance that morning. This comes down to the disputed identification of a young woman entering the hotel at a time that would have been after Natalee had been with Joran. Some people apparently think it's Natalee, while Beth thinks it isn't.

One could compare the significance of these various inconsistancies and the attention given to them.

Beth and the media have tended to concentrate on inconsistancies in Joran's version, while paying scant attention to inconsistancies in the statements of the Mountain Brook students and others.

This seems strange because, in logic, how Joran got home from the beach seems to have no obvious connection with what transpired there. On the other hand if Natalee was indeed seen at her hotel after she was with Joran the direct implications are profound - the three prime suspects could not have harmed her.

Moreover Beth herself is on Dr Phil some four months after the night detailed here asserting that she was “certain” that Natallee was still alive, and further that she had received a truncated voice-mail that she, in her professional opinion as a voice therepist, was sure was Natalee's voice.

Witness statements are inherently unreliable. The study of air crash investigations provides a rich source of examples where many witnesses may all experience a single chain of events but typically report a wide range of observations of the same events. Even highly experienced aircrew can have a very different perception of what happened to what the Flight Data and Cockpit Voice recording show. In contrast, about one percent of witnesses can have stunningly accurate photographic recall.

Memory is imperfect. Add lashings of alcohol (and maybe other drugs), and Francis “remembering” seeing Natalee is not too far removed from Joran “remembering” being driven home by Satesh. By the time these statements were made both had aquired a sense of “recovered memory”; people interpret and “correct” their memories in the light of later events. Many people who have lost a loved one “see” them in crowds for months afterward. These may not be “lies” but simple mis-perceptions.

Sorting the wheat from the chaff is why material evidence and its correct interpretation is so important to discovering the real truth, free of fear or favour.

What I'm going to do here is as far as possible ignore all those statements for the moment and try to concentrate on known facts, in particular cell-phone and similar logging file records.

While these are not beyond question themselves, the fact that they do not clearly incriminate or exonerate anybody speaks to their independance as observations.

What this does is impose regions of possibility around the events in the Marriott Beach (*) area between midnight and dawn that morning.

(*) Note the informal name Marriott Beach indicates that part of Palm Beach in front of the Marriott and other hotels at the north end of the hotel strip on Palm Beach - which is actually the main central beach on the sheltered west coast. The Fisherman's Huts are at the northern end of Palm Beach.

For example; the various theories that have the group going to the north coast of Aruba are in trouble simply because there isn't enough time between known locations for such a trip to be possible. These time constraints are very important and will be discussed in more detail.




Addendum:

Posted by: Splat


On: Scrux


Posted: Mon May 29, 2006 4:58 pm

I like the lies. They are good clean intelligent lies that are quite fitting. Nothing wrong with the lies. They go precisely with the flow of the unfolding events.

- his father calls him and says joran there are 12 people here wanting to know what you have done with their daughter

- joran yelps oh shit, deepak what if it was that girl last night

- deepak being older cooler and relaxed, relaxed due we'll just say we dropped her at her hotel

- joran, okay cool

arrive at the house and what do they see a desheveled bunch of drunken Alabamans screaming blue murder. Police men everywhere. A scrawny willowy whisp haired like being that looks like a female glaring and snarling 'give me my daughter I want her know.

- click click whirrrr what the hell is going on joran wonders

ma'am we dropped her off at her hotel, come let me show, make haste

- ever cool deepak when they get there interjects, oh yeah and even a guy in a black shirt with a walkie talkie helped her in

- joran thinks to himself, nice going deepak, that sounds good

and away they go on their merry lying tale.

No one implicated anyone.

they said she was smashed, and to counter the probably question if she was why did you not escort her in, they prepared for that with she tripped and said leave me alone, but snuck in that since they didn't escort her in, the guy with the black t shirt and walkie talkie did. All based therefore covered. Brlilliant quick thinking on their part.

No one implicated anyone.

It just so happened that there were two security guards harrassing tourists and hanging around the holiday on. On investigation that all firmed up proper and real. The two guards arrested were arrested not because of deepaks 'generic guy in black t shirt with walkie talkie' but because they were found in possession of tourist goodies including mtbrookers, witness's confirming they were dealing drugs, witnesses confirming they were being harrassed by them. The list is endless.

No one implicated anyone.

Deepak implicated a phantom. It just so happened that there were two of them and they turned out to be real.

Source: Scrux



Addendum: 3/5/07


Author: nomdeguerre


Posted to Freedom of Blog: Mon Apr 2nd, 2007 01:01 am


I wish I had a dollar - no, make that a quarter, it would be plenty - for every time someone at SM, BFN, etc. has posted that Joran van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers must be guilty of doing something to Natalee, because, “Why would the innocent lie?” I could retire rich and spend all my time lying on the beach in Aruba. LOL

Sports Fans, I'm a retired law enforcement officer, and I'm here to tell you that the innocent lie all the time. It's a dumb thing to do, and it often gets them in more trouble, but there is no bright white line that connects lying to guilt per se, especially in the early stages of an investigation. Just a few reasons that I can remember having innocent people lie to me in my career:


(1) They're scared. For example, they know they were in and around a place where a crime occurred. Even though they know they had nothing to do with it, they don't know who did, and they know the police don't, either. In order to avoid suspicion, they try to place themselves somewhere else.

(2) Subset of #1: They panic. This sometimes occurs because an interrogator comes on too strong. I usually tried to avoid throwing somebody against the wall verbally until I knew I had them. You don't want to get an innocent subject locked into a lie. Wait till you have evidence you can throw in their face.

(3) They're not guilty of what you're questioning them about, but they feel guilty about something else.

I once had a case where an employee denied being in the building when a theft occurred from an office safe; he was one of three people having the combination. Sign-in sheets maintained by the guard at the front desk gave his statement the lie and made us suspect him even more.

Turns out he was there, alright, but nowhere near where the theft occurred: he was meeting a co-worker after-hours in her office on another floor. They were both married and having an affair. Took polygraphing a few people to finally sort that one out. If he had told us the truth from the beginning, he wouldn't have been in trouble - at least not with the government, LOL.

This may be what prompted Joran and the Kalpoes to lie initially. While they did not do anything to hurt Natalee directly, they know they dumped her at a time and place where she could have run into trouble before getting back to her room. Joran has said as much in some of his interviews.

(4) They're protecting someone else.


(5) They're afraid NOT to lie to protect someone else.

I once had a suspect whose overbearing boss was breaking the law left and right. Not huge stuff, but he just didn't think the rules applied to him. The boss was guilty as hell and everyone who worked for him knew it, but he had powerful friends (one in particular) who had gotten him out of so many scrapes and he was so vengeful that his underlings were initially afraid to tell investigators the truth when we arrived on the scene and started asking questions.

In the midst of a long investigation, the main person who was protecting him died. (Cannot say more about that; you'd recognize the name.) When we arrived in that office the following Monday to continue the investigation, we had the happiest lynch mob of people waiting for us that you ever saw in your life. LOL


(6) They're genuinely confused about the facts. These lies are usually inadvertent but often persist longer than any other kind.

(7) They don't KNOW all the facts but for some reason think they have to fill in the blanks to make their stories credible, so they make stuff up, such as telling you that they saw something from an impossible angle.

Memo to everyone reading this: If you're ever questioned by a criminal investigator and you truly don't know the answer to a question, for God's sake just say, “I DON'T FREAKIN' KNOW”.

(8) They don't trust the system. I have seen people lie when the truth would have gotten them out of trouble because they thought if they told the truth, they'd still be under suspicion. This is sad, but it does happen, often with people who are least able to defend themselves.

I could go on like this for an hour, but I'm going to be late for church if I don't wind this up, so as Frances Ellen says, “I'll just leave it at that”, except for one final possibility that may have applied to Joran and the Kalpoes but not to anyone I ever investigated.

(9) They live under a system where they know it takes very little to constitute reasonable suspicion and therefore put you in an un-air-conditioned jail for up to 90 days. I don't mean to be overly critical of Dutch and Aruban law. All legal systems have their drawbacks. This may be one of yours. Not saying it is, just that it's possible.

Last edited on Mon Apr 2nd, 2007 01:05 am by nomdeguerre

Source: FoB







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