When she went to give Beth a hug, "Jug attacked me, verbally and physically," Renfro recalls. I'm holding a sleeping baby.
He just starts screaming and yelling. Words you can't print. Get the fuck away from my wife! I never want to see you again. I had put my heart and soul into finding their girl. Renfro was so shaken she filed a complaint with the police against Jug Twitty. Jug acknowledges losing his temper and cursing at Renfro, but denies pushing her.
Renfro attempted a reconciliation with Beth, going as far as suggesting that the Twittys were trying to "protect" her from local criticism by pushing her away. Of Renfro, Beth says only, "She's a witch. They, and many other Arubans, have since turned on the family, and viciously. The Aruba Today staff, once the Twittys' most fervent supporters, has morphed into the unofficial clearinghouse for everything anti-Twitty. She was lying. She got caught in too many lies. I understand it.
She's a grieving mother. I'm not against Beth. But, come on, her girl's not a virgin. The girl's an alcoholic. She was drinking. I've seen the photo of that girl chugging from a bottle of [rum]. Drug dealers. Taxi drivers. But she looked at one place only: Joran. It's true that some of Beth's stories don't hold up. Before I went to Aruba, she told me that the Kalpoe family had been embroiled in the odd death of a former maid, and that Mrs. Kalpoe had been detained; it turned out the case had involved another family.
She also told me that a person on the island had fathered an illegitimate child with a friend's wife, and that the friend had committed suicide. That, too, does not appear to be true. She's hurt a lot of people down here.
A lot of people. By the end of June, with both Joran and the Kalpoe brothers in custody for three weeks, it appeared the case was nearing a climax.
Rumors flew that charges were imminent. On Friday, July 1, the government spokesman Ruben Trapenberg said they could come as early as Monday. On Sunday, police were seen walking with Joran on the beach north of the Marriott as he guided them through what he said happened that night.
Expectations were soaring Monday morning when a clerk stepped outside the courthouse in Oranjestad and read an announcement to American reporters and cameramen. A gasp shot through the crowd when she came to the point: Not only were none of the three teenagers being charged, the two brothers were being released, indicating that the judge had found insufficient evidence to justify their further detention.
Joran was ordered held without charges another 60 days. The Twittys were outraged. Beth tearfully denounced the judge's decision as a travesty, terming the Kalpoe brothers "criminals. All over television, the cable hosts piled on, endlessly castigating the Aruban justice system. For many Arubans, this was the last straw. The next afternoon a former government minister named John Merryweather helped organize a demonstration in front of the courthouse to protest the media's depiction of Aruba.
One of the Kalpoes' attorneys, meanwhile, attacked Beth's statements as "prejudicial, inflammatory, libelous, and totally outrageous. But the damage was done. A terrorist attack. Why blame the whole island, a whole country, for something that is out of our control? She attacks our justice system? What about yours? Was that ever solved? Michael Jackson—he gets off. That's American justice, and the woman is criticizing us?
One was Arthur Wood, a retired Secret Service agent who lives outside Ocala, Florida, and who spent his evenings glued to the Holloway coverage.
In mid-June, Wood e-mailed some thoughts to Jossy Mansur, managing editor of the Aruban newspaper El Diario, who had latched onto the Twitty bandwagon as part of his own feud with the Aruban government. Eager to develop leads, Mansur invited Wood to Aruba, and put him on his payroll.
Wood began chatting up photographers, stringers, and reporters. The most intriguing lead, he decided, was a rumor that one of the Kalpoe brothers had confessed to killing Natalee—sort of—to a fellow prisoner while in the Aruban jail. The prisoner had heard that a relative's gardener, named Cumpa, had seen Joran and the Kalpoes burying Natalee's body in a vacant lot near the Marriott.
When the Kalpoe brother was told the story, he supposedly went ashen and flipped over the dominoes they were playing with. Wood spent most of July tracking the elusive Cumpa. There were stories that he had fled to Venezuela, that he had disappeared, that he might have been killed.
The Mansur "investigative team," including Wood, Eduardo Mansur, and other Mansur employees and family friends, began holding nightly strategy sessions at the team's de facto headquarters: Hooters. One night they were inside poring over rumors when a Mansur cousin's teenage son suddenly blurted out, "I know Cumpa!
He's my uncle's gardener! The boy hopped in Eduardo Mansur's truck and led Wood to a large seaside home owned by Jossy Mansur's cousin Eric Mansur, a wealthy importer. Wood found Cumpa, whose name turned out to be Carlos, in the yard. According to Carlos, while driving to Eric Mansur's home a little before three that morning, he took a shortcut, a dirt road through a vacant lot beside the Marriott.
To his surprise, he found a car blocking the road. Beside the car were two large mounds of dirt. When he peered into the car, Carlos said, he recognized Joran and the Kalpoes.
He said they covered their faces. He then drove on. Carlos reluctantly climbed into Wood's truck and allowed himself to be driven to police headquarters. He disappeared inside for four hours.
Three days later, a crowd of reporters gathered in the vacant lot by the Marriott to watch the police begin draining a pond near where the gardener, as he came to be known, claimed he had seen Joran and the Kalpoes digging. The effort quickly degenerated into farce. The first pumper truck, reportedly supplied by the Mansur family, bogged down and died. Then reporters, trying to get a better view of the pond, twice broke a water main.
When the pond was empty, police found nothing at the bottom but trash. Gerold Dompig ended up discounting everything the gardener had said. The pond episode, however, gave Beth the cover she needed to begin a simultaneous excavation at a landfill behind the airport. The family had hired its own private investigator, an Atlanta man named T.
Ward, who like Art Wood was soon a staple of the nightly talk shows; in fact, the two became rivals and began sniping at each other. Wood had been sent to interview a homeless man named Poom Poom, who was hounding police with a tale of seeing a woman's body in the landfill.
Beth wasn't sure whether to believe the story until T. Ward announced Poom Poom had passed a lie-detector test. The gardener and Poom Poom episodes were followed by the jogger—a story made the rounds in August that a late-night jogger had seen Joran and the Kalpoes digging near the same spot the gardener had identified.
Police made a public appeal for the man to contact them, and he eventually did. Unfortunately, "the jogger had some problems," Art Wood says, sighing. Apparently he was a murderer or rapist or something. He says neither the jogger nor his story panned out in any way. Every day in July and August seemed to bring a new dead end. One time a park ranger found on a beach a piece of duct tape attached to several human hairs; a test suggested the DNA from the hair wasn't Natalee's.
Another day hundreds of tourists gathered behind the Marriott to watch volunteers drag out a barrel that had been seen in the ocean.
It was empty. Nothing was too outlandish to investigate. The Dutch military brought in three Fs that flew over the island using infra-red photography in an effort to identify a grave. They, too, came up with nothing. Throughout the summerlong circus, the Twittys remained at the Holiday Inn and later at the Wyndham, whose owners gave them use of the hotel's Presidential Suite. During the day they emerged to pass out prayer cards and photos of Natalee, and at night they sat for interviews.
One afternoon Beth was walking through Noord, handing out prayer cards with Greta Van Susteren, when she realized she was near the van der Sloot home. She walked to the gate, thinking she would leave a card. That's when she saw a pair of legs—it was Paulus—in the bushes.
She called for him to come out. As he did, his wife, Anita, appeared at the front door, and the couple invited Beth inside for what became a tense minute meeting. In the first half-hour, Beth listened as Joran's parents lavished praise on their son, though they eventually admitted they had been having trouble with him.
According to Beth, the van der Sloots acknowledged that Joran had been seeing a psychiatrist. The father acknowledged they could not control him.
He would sneak out, go gambling, in the pre-dawn hours. They had no control over him. At one point, Beth decided to press. Paulus, while insisting he could remember almost nothing of the night Natalee disappeared, began to sweat profusely. The sweat was pooling on the table. She had to pat him down. That head went right down.
All I saw was his white scalp. Then I began speaking with Deepak. I began questioning him. I can't even say what I said.
He told me his attorney advised him not to talk. I told him repeatedly to hold his head up and look at me. He said he didn't need the money. Deepak finally looked up at the very end, and said, 'The media hasn't seen this side of you. By mid-August, as Beth continued her crusade, communication between the police and the family had broken down entirely. Charles is 'drawing a line' under Michael Fawcett scandal as he 'prepares to be king': Prince's former Girl, 17, comes forward to say she was the woman bundled into car in suspected kidnap and she was not being Schoolboy, 10, mauled to death by lb 'Beast' dog suffered unsurvivable 'injuries to the head and neck', Man admits terror offence for wearing banned T-shirt supporting military wing of Hamas in Golders Green Wife of pilot, 67, weeps in court as he is jailed for 18 months for organising doomed flight that crashed Bus driver who was still at his stop refused to reopen his doors to let a stranded year-old girl on 'for Britain's job vacancies hit all-time high of 2.
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Bright eyes, glowing skin For sale Why Kate Middleton has ditched her handbag: Royal leaves her clutch at home because she's 'growing in Kate Middleton turns interviewer! Meghan Markle's top aide said to have 'regretted' not giving evidence in Duchess of Sussex's first legal She spent her early life in Tennessee. She graduated from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in speech pathology.
After her daughter disappeared, Beth became a motivational speaker on the topic of personal safety. She started the International Safe Travels Foundation to make people understand the importance of travel safety. She also founded the Natalee Holloway Research Center to help families of missing people. Beth got married to David Holloway. They started there life in Jackson, Mississippi. They had two children Natalee Ann and Mathew. In , Natalee was born in Memphis, Tennessee, America.
In , the couple got divorced. In , they got divorced due to compatibility. He made his comments as van der Sloot was being delivered to Peruvian police for questioning in Stephany Flores' death five years to the day after Holloway went missing in Aruba. Flores, 21, was found dead in van der Sloot's hotel room Tuesday.
Twitty said he and Holloway's mother, Beth Twitty, hoped van der Sloot might reveal new information while under questioning in Peru. He was flown from Chile and was to be handed over to Peruvian police this afternoon. Van der Sloot has also been charged with extortion in Alabama in connection with the Holloway case.
Twitty said he wasn't directly involved in that case and he could not comment on Beth Twitty's role in it. Aruban authorities said they were helping Birmingham investigators on the extortion case.
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