In May 2005, 18-year-old Natalee Holloway left Carlos ’n Charlie’s, a bar in Oranjestad, Aruba, with three young men . She was on a graduation trip with classmates from Alabama’s Mountain Brook High School and was scheduled to return home later that day. But she never made the flight.

One of the men was Joran van der Sloot, a 17-year-old Dutch honor student who lived on the island. Over the next 18 years, he gave police, reporters, and Holloway’s family one story after another about what happened that night. His story kept changing, and investigators rejected several of his accounts as false.

Then, in October 2023, van der Sloot finally confessed to killing Holloway . By then, he’d already spent more than 13 years in a Peruvian prison for killing another young woman.

Netflix’s docuseries Taken: Natalee Holloway revisits the case, with Natalee’s mother, Beth Holloway , telling the full story of her search for answers for the first time.…