May 30 will mark a decade since 18-year-old Natalee Holloway vanished from the idyllic Caribbean island of Aruba.
It was a day that ended her dreams of becoming a physician, a day that cut short the innocence of her friends and classmates, and a day that forever changed the lives of those closest to her.
"I guess most people do look at anniversaries, but I still think about it every day,'' said her father, Dave Holloway. "That's something you'll never get out of your mind."
"The emotional trauma has a way of healing, and a person doesn't realize it until time goes on," he said. "When something comes up significant, you fall back down into that emotional state of trauma. I try to avoid those things as much as I can."
Natalee disappeared May 30, 2005 while on a high school graduation trip to Aruba. She and more than 100 of her Mountain Brook classmates were on an unofficial graduation trip when they met Joran van der Sloot, a Dutch student living on the island while he attended the Aruba International School. They met at the Excelsior Casino, which is attached to Holiday Inn where the group stayed.
They later went to Carlos N' Charlie's in downtown Oranjestad, where Natalee was last seen about 1 a.m. getting into a car with van der Sloot and his two friends, Surinamese brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe. The next day, when the graduates gathered in the hotel lobby to head for the airport to catch their return flight, Natalee was nowhere to be found.
Her packed luggage, cell phone and passport were found in her hotel room. The group went on to the airport - many of them didn't even know Natalee was missing until later - but chaperone Bob Plummer, a Mountain Brook schools teacher and coach, stayed behind to wait for Natalee. He was one of seven chaperones for the group of 130 or so students, and chaperones were basically there for emergencies only.
"It was made apparent they were of legal age and they were on their own,'' he said. "I told them on the way day, 'I know y'all may like this, but for my own peace of mind, we're going to have roll call at 11 a.m. every day."
"That morning I was checking roll and she wasn't there,'' Plummer told AL.com. "I was thinking, 'She's here somewhere' and I continued thinking that, but as more days went by, it was apparent something bad had happened."
Something bad did happen, though to this day, no one knows for sure the details of what is believed to be the last hours of her life.
Natalee's parents, both remarried to others since their divorce 12 years earlier, flew to Aruba, along with family friends. In the days and weeks that followed, there were massive searches for Natalee and a multi-agency police investigation into her disappearance. From the start, van der Sloot and the Kalpoes were known to be the last people seen with Natalee while she was alive. When first questioned, they said they left the club with her to go to the California Lighthouse on the northern tip of the island to look for sharks. They said they dropped Holloway off at her hotel and denied knowing what happened to her.
On June 5, 2005 two former hotel security guards known for cruising hotels to pick up women, were detained but released six days later. On June 9, van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers were arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and murdering Natalee. A fourth person, later identified as disc jockey Steve Gregory Croes, was also arrested. On June 22, 2005, van der Sloot's father, Paulus, too was arrested. Four days later Paulus van der Sloot and Croes were released.
The stories given by the younger van der Sloot and the Kalpoes changed repeatedly, and despite multiple arrests, by December 2007, all had been released without charges and prosecutors officially declared the case closed due to lack of evidence. The investigation was temporarily reopened in 2008, but the court system deemed again there wasn't enough evidence to charge van der Sloot.
In February 2010, Paulus van der Sloot died of a heart attack, which many attribute to the stress of the case and the implications of his involvement. The following month, van der Sloot contacted Beth Holloway's lawyer with an offer to show them the location of Natalee's body and tell them how she died in exchange for $250,000 with a down payment of $25,000. As part of an undercover FBI sting, $15,000 was wire transferred to his account in the Netherlands, following the receipt of $10,000 in cash that was videotaped by undercover investigators in Aruba. The information he gave them turned out to be false.
Van der Sloot, an avid gambler, took the money to Peru. On May 30, 2010, five years to the day of Natalee's disappearance, 21-year-old student Stephany Flores was reported missing, and found murdered three days later in van der Sloot's hotel room. Van der Sloot was arrested in Chile, and deported to Peru. Three days later, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Birmingham charged van der Sloot with extortion and wire fraud. He was later indicted on the charges on June 30, 2010.
Van der Sloot pleaded guilty and is now serving a 28 1/2 year sentence in Peru. While imprisoned, he married and is the father of a daughter.
In 2011, Holloway filed a petition in Birmingham to have Natalee declared legally dead. The order on legal presumption of death is used in cases in which a person has been missing for five or more years. It is a legal mechanism to obtain a death certificate and to settle probate matters.
Natalee's estate was worth $500 - the graduation money she had received from her father and stepmother. Holloway said at the time he had set aside money for Natalee's college that he then needed for his son's college expenses, which required a death certificate.
In January 2012, Jefferson County Probate Judge Alan King signed the order. "I have been preparing myself for this day for the last 6 1/2 years,'' Holloway said after the hearing. "We hope that today will bring some closure."
That closure has yet to come. "I look back on it and I wonder how I even made it through,'' Holloway says. "You're always thinking we're going to get an answer quickly and it never comes. I never dreamed it would be 10 years, and we would not have a solid answer."
Earlier this month, Holloway returned to Aruba yet another time, chasing a lead after a man named Jurrien De Jong told Holloway and Inside Edition that he saw Joran van der Sloot chase her into a small building under construction. De Jong said he never went to the police because he was involved in illegal activities at the time. He says he has come forward now because of a recent TV report where van der Sloot claims he was part of an undercover operation in which Holloway was buried at sea. Prosecutors in Aruba have dismissed De Jong's claims, saying his claims couldn't be true because the building to which he referred had not been built at that time.
Even before his trek back to Aruba, along with private investigator TJ Ward and a cadaver dog, Holloway said he was reluctant to get up his hopes. "I don't know how many times I've buried Natalee,'' he told AL.com, "and I don't want to go through that again."
In his heart, he thinks he knows what happened. He is certain van der Sloot paid a bartender in Aruba to drug Natalee with GHB. He is sure van der Sloot took her home, killed her and, with the help of his influential father, hired South American drug runners to remove Natalee's body from the island, because "they couldn't afford to find a body on the island."
"The answers lie in Peru and Aruba,'' Holloway said. "Those three (van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers) know exactly what happened. And nobody's ever gotten anything out of them."
He said he has considered a face-to-face meeting with van der Sloot, looking him in the eyes and demanding answers from him. "I still hold out hope that with hard prison life, maybe he'll change,'' Holloway says. "I don't think at this point and time he's ready to do anything, but we'll probably one day make a trip to Peru."
"We may not get an answer until he comes to Birmingham,'' Holloway said. "I'm 55, so I'll be 78 when he gets back here. Hopefully, I'll still be around."
In the meantime, Holloway has had to move forward. "I have a wife and three other children,'' he said. His son and Natalee's brother, Matt, is now 26 and the father of a little girl, Rylee Ann, who was born in December 2014. Holloway's other daughters are now 17 and 12, and the safety of all of his family isn't something he takes lightly.
"You're always more conscious of your surroundings,'' he said. "You're always protective of your kids, but I guess I'm a little bit more so than most people."
Beth Holloway, too, has moved forward. She didn't respond to a request for an interview, but told B-Metro magazine that while she still does some public speaking engagements, she has also returned to work in speech therapy for the Cullman County schools and is engaged to be married.
In an interview with close friend and Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, which was televised May 16, Beth Holloway said she has learned to find happiness, happiness in her son, her granddaughter and her speech therapy work. "I can look back over the past 10 years and there were no steps wasted, and there are no regrets,'' she said. "I did all I knew to do and I think that gives me greater peace now."
"I've lived every parent's worst nightmare and I'm the parent that nobody wants to be," she said. "But I've done the best that I could to reach out to others and to deliver that message of hope, and the personal safety message so hopefully their loved ones can be safe when traveling."
Many of Natalee's friends are now married, some with kids of their own. Plummer said he runs into them occasionally, less often than he used to, and said most seem to be doing well. It's odd to seem the grown up, when Natalee will forever be 18. "That's how we forever will remember her because those are the pictures we see,'' Plummer said.
He said he can't believe it's been 10 years since the ill-fated trip. "This is the time of year when people start to ask, so my wife and I were just talking about it,'' he said. "I think the community as a whole has pretty much put it behind them, until something comes up about it. They have accepted it and moved on, because there's not a whole lot else you can do about it."
Holloway said does wonder Natalee and her life would be like. "It's the natural thing to do,'' he said. "I lost my Dad when I was five, he was struck by lightning, and I think the same about him too. But you try not to dwell on it a whole lot."
In his book, "Aruba, the Tragic Untold Story of Natalee Holloway and Corruption in Paradise," written by Holloway with R. Stephanie Good and Larry Garrison and published in 2006, Holloway opens up by talking about Natalee's graduation and how they were three tickets short, which would have excluded his other young daughters from attending. He asked her to try to find more tickets.
"She assured me that she would call all three hundred of her classmates if she had to in order to come up with them,'' he wrote. "On Monday, May 23, we heard from Natalee and, in a hoarse voice, she told us that after calling nearly every student, she was finally able to get us the tickets. She said she was just not going to give up on us."
He said he will return that favor, and feels so strongly about that, it's how he ended his book. "I am a father who gets into bed every night wondering what has happened to my daughter. The hours pass by very slowly and my mind keeps going over all of the details in her case one by one. I try to drift off, only to think about one more possibility, one last thing that I might have missed. Did I ignore an email that seemed to far-fetched only to miss the one real lead that would have solved the case of Natalee's disappearance? Did I stop digging one minute too soon at the landfill? Did I walk away from the Buddhist just before he was going to offer me Natalee for the reward money? What about the psychics? The theories? The rumors? The hypotheses? The opinions? "
"We won't give up on you Natalee,'' he wrote. "You didn't give up on us, and we will continue the investigation until we have all of the answers to your disappearance."