Joran van der Sloot, the Dutch man suspected of kidna*pping Natalee Holloway in 2005, will be in court on Wednesday for a plea and sentencing hearing in a case where he is accused of trying to get hundreds of thousands of dollars from the woman’s family. The records were filed Friday.
More information about the plea could not be found right away. His lawyer in the United States and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Alabama’s Northern District both did not respond right away to requests for comment.
The hearing will take place in Birmingham federal court at 9:30 a.m.
In 2010, a federal grand jury charged van der Sloot with wire fr*aud and extortion as part of the scheme.
Van der Sloot was sent back to the US from Peru in June. He is currently serving a 28-year sentence in a different case for the mu*rder of Stephany Flores, who was 21 years old, in 2010.
Holloway, 18, from a suburb of Birmingham, went missing while on a trip to Aruba for her high school graduation. Van der Sloot, who was a student at an international school on the Caribbean island at the time, was last seen with her leaving a bar.
It was never found that Holloway had died. Van der Sloot was arrested, but he was later freed and never charged.
In 2012, a probate judge in Alabama said that Holloway was legally dead.
In 2010, a federal grand jury said van der Sloot was trying to get hundreds of thousands of dollars from Holloway’s family in exchange for information about where her body was.
The mother of Holloway sent van der Sloot a $25,000 down payment, and her lawyer agreed to pay him another $225,000 when her body was positively identified. This was done even though van der Sloot knew the information he gave was “worthless,” according to the 2010 report from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Alabama’s Northern District.
Early this year, Van der Sloot’s lawyer said that he kept the $25,000 and gambled with it.
The lawyer, Máximo Altez, told the Associated Press that van der Sloot agreed to be sent back to the US because he was in the Challapalca prison, which is known as the “worst prison in the world.”
She told the AP, “Any prison in the United States is a five-star hotel”
