Natalee Holloway: New Clues

Investigator Tells 48 Hours She Probably Died From Excessive Alcohol, Maybe Drugs

(CBS) 
Dompig says Joran's basic story changed three times. "But the little facts changed over 25 times. So it was never the same."

One critical element of the interrogation remains in dispute: did Joran admit to having sex with Natalee?

Twitty claims that Joran was clear with the police about one thing — that he had sex with her daughter the night she disappeared.

"I had access to several statements, and in one of Joran's statements he's describing Natalie as she's falling asleep and waking up, falling asleep and waking up repeatedly. And, as she's doing this, he is explaining, he's very sexually explicit, graphically detailing what he is doing to Natalie. OK?" Twitty said.

Twitty and her attorney would not share those documents with 48 Hours. In spite of her claim, Dompig says there is no proof of sexual assault.

Asked if Joran van der Sloot ever confessed to being sexually intimate with Natalee, Dompig says he never did.

"Believe me, we were looking for anything to throw him, to keep him in jail," says Dompig. "The only thing he admitted to was that he was fondling [her] sexually, like kissing, touching her. And there was no sexual in terms of penetration or whatever, really having sex with her.”

After nearly two dozen lengthy interrogations, the police still had no confession and had found no body. So on Sep. 3, 2005, Joran van der Sloot was released to his parents.

"This young man, a 17-year-old-boy was able to withstand 90 days in prison, and undergo specialized interrogation, and they weren't able to get a confession from him," says attorney Arlene Shipper.

"What does that say ?" Roberts asks.

"It can mean two things — either he's innocent, he really doesn't know what happened, or he's a genius," she replied.

Joran van der Sloot has denied any wrongdoing, but he has done nothing to dispel Dompig’s suspicions.

Asked what FBI profilers told Dompig about van der Sloot's psychological profile, he says, "They use the word sociopath. And the fact that he was capable of lying about basically everything."

Twitty says there's a reason she thinks van der Sloot is lying — he is covering something up. "He's covering something up so horrible that he can't tell the truth," she says.

But if Joran can’t or won’t tell the whole story of what happened that night, police think they may soon find someone else who will.

"New people are coming in the picture," says Dompig. "It is possible that there was help. Or it is possible that there was a second group involved other than these three boys.”

With no major break in the Holloway case in the past six months, Aruban authorities are re-doubling their efforts to find Natalee’s body.

One of the most persistent theories clouding the case is the notion that her body was dumped out at sea.

But Dr. Ruben Cruz, the head of the island’s search and rescue team showed 48 Hours that an unweighted body thrown overboard near the shore would wash up on the beach.

Cruz says he and his team have tossed a dummy overboard many times, but that in every case, it drifted back to shore. The only way that wouldn’t happen is if a boat sailed more than two miles offshore — a trip that would have turned up on police radar and been captured on tape.

Police have accounted for every boat in the water the night Natalee vanished.

Authorities now believe that the teenager's body may be buried somewhere among some dunes, but not because it washed ashore. The Aruban authorities’ new theory is that someone, someone possibly very close to the young suspects, took the time to carefully hide the body, not once but maybe twice, literally re-burying her.