It was a dream vacation for straight-A student Natalee Holloway and her senior classmates from Alabama’s Mountain Brook High School, who flew to Aruba in late May 2005 to celebrate their graduation on sun-drenched beaches and in pulse-thumping nightclubs. But the dream soon became a nightmare for Holloway’s family, who learned on the morning she was to return home that she had disappeared.

The primary suspect, a Dutch teenager named Joran van der Sloot, was arrested twice but never charged with any crimes directly related to Holloway’s disappearance. Then, in October 2023, van der Sloot—who was convicted of a 2010 murder in Peru—admitted that he killed the Alabama teen all those years ago.…