Natalee Holloway’s mum speaks out after Netflix doc, detailing her first impression with Joran

She spent ’18 years in the dark’

17 seconds ago

Kieran Galpin | Entertainment

In Netflix’s Taken: Natalee Holloway, her mother, Beth Holloway, almost instantly clocked that Joran van der Sloot had killed her daughter.

Hours after touching down in Aruba in 2005, Beth Holloway went to Joran van der Sloot’s house in a bid to find her daughter. She recieved very few answers, but knew immediately that he knew more information than he was letting on.

“My initial interaction with Joran was another moment of, ‘He knows. He knows what happened to her,’” she said in a new interview with NBC.

She might have known, and she was definitely correct, but Beth’s quest for answers would take multiple arrests, nearly 20 years, and another death of a teenage girl.

“The weight of the world has been lifted off me,” she said. “I spent 18 years in the dark. I just couldn’t see it. I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t hear it, and so I’d waited 18 years, and it’s horrible that that’s the news I get. Families need to know the answers, no matter how brutal they are.”

One thing kept her going through the time: Hope. Hope that she would find answers for herself, but also justice for the young woman who had vanished.

“I was determined by hope, and I was driven by love, and the love for my daughter, and to find out the answers to what happened to her, and I was acting on faith. And when you do those three things, you can accomplish a lot,” she added.

Credit: Netflix

An update on Natalee Holloway’s mum after the doc

“I finally have a conclusion,” Beth Holloway said about doing the documentary. “There’s a finale. It took me 18 years to get the answers, but justice takes a lot of work, and I felt like now’s the time to tell, for the first time, a comprehensive and conclusive story of what happened to Natalee and her journey of 20 years.”

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After taking nine years off work to look for her daughter, Beth has since resumed her work as a speech pathologist at an Alabama public school. She’s also working with the families of other missing people, putting her years of trauma and heartache to good use in a supportive role.

Sometimes I’m just there to facilitate communication with law enforcement. Maybe they need help facilitating search and rescue resources, personnel, guidance,” she told Tudum.

But that isn’t to say the fight is over. Earlier this year, Beth filed a complaint against Joran in the hopes of bringing criminal charges against him.

“I’ve been working busy behind the scenes, got the murder complaint [against van der Sloot],” she said. “And now we’re working on, hopefully, murder charges. So I’ve been busy, but one step at a time.”