(June 5) — Eerie coincidences are coming to light as authorities compile their case against Joran van der Sloot, the longtime suspect in Natalee Holloway’s disappearance, who’s now expected to be charged soon in the killing of another young woman in Peru.

The Alabama 18-year-old vanished five years ago on Memorial Day weekend while on a high school graduation trip to Aruba. That’s exactly five years to the day before the slaying of 21-year-old Stephany Flores, who was found dead last weekend in a Lima hotel room registered to van der Sloot.

“We are probably talking about a serial killer,” Peru’s interior minister, Octavio Salazar, told reporters, according to the New York Daily News.

The 22-year-old Dutchman was captured in neighboring Chile and delivered to Peru yesterday to face possible charges. Authorities say security cameras spotted him and Flores walking together in a hotel and casino where a poker tournament was being held. Later the woman’s body was found fully clothed but battered and bruised, with a broken neck, in van der Sloot’s hotel room.

Investigators also found a baseball bat in the room, and two law enforcement sources told CNN that it was the suspected murder weapon.

Van der Sloot told Chilean police that he did not kill Flores but said “he met her, and at some point, they went to a casino,” Chilean police spokesman Fernando Ovalle told The Associated Press.

A journalist who happened to be there covering the Latin America Poker Tour wrote a blog for the San Francisco Chronicle describing the scene. Tournament officials told him van der Sloot wasn’t playing in the poker tour but was instead a “railbird,” a slang poker term referring to someone who stands elbow-to-elbow with other spectators.

Van der Sloot was twice arrested and then released in Holloway’s case. He’s denied any involvement in her disappearance as well, and was never charged. But he’s accused of trying to sell information about the case — including perhaps the location of Holloway’s body — for $250,000. A warrant is out for his arrest in Alabama on charges of extortion and wire fraud.

Van der Sloot’s former attorney, Joseph Tacopina, told CNN it was too early to tell whether any of these cases are related. “I just think we need to take a step back before we get to the ‘I told you so’ stage, and let’s see what the evidence is here,” he said.

Tacopina said he’s no longer representing van der Sloot and that the young man no longer has a good relationship with his family.

His mother is “shocked” by the latest allegations against her son, according to her lawyer, Bert de Rooij, who spoke to Dutch media. He said Anita van der Sloot spoke to her son by telephone on Thursday evening, and that Joran had “certainly not” admitted to murdering Flores.

De Rooj said he’s been trying to reach van der Sloot by e-mail. “I am advising him to find a lawyer who knows something about laws affecting foreigners in South America,” he said.

Meanwhile the families of Holloway and Flores are speaking out as well.

Flores’ father, Ricardo Flores, a former race car driver, said he doesn’t want the death penalty for van der Sloot, only justice. In Peru, murder carries a prison sentence of up to 35 years.

“She was absolutely innocent … good and without any malice,” Flores told the AP.

“My daughter resisted,” he said. “There was violence, resistance to being raped — and there’s where she was murdered.”

The Holloway family has also been closely following the Flores murder, which has revived horrible memories from their own daughter’s disappearance five years ago. The teen’s mother, Beth Holloway Twitty, is said to be “overwhelmed” at news of another case involving van der Sloot.

“She’s just really very disturbed,” a close friend, Carol Standifer, told the CBS “Early Show” on Friday. “Every Memorial Day weekend, it’s hard for her and it’s hard for all of us who went through this because it brings it back, and we remember what happened.”

Natalee’s father, “Jug” Twitty, said he hopes the investigation into the Flores murder in Peru is conducted better than his daughter’s was in Aruba.

“We could have had the answers in the first couple of days down there had they done their job right,” he told CBS. “And this should have never happened what’s happened in Peru.”
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From CNN

Santiago, Chile (CNN) — Joran van der Sloot, the suspect in a young woman’s slaying this week in Peru and previously considered a suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba, was captured Thursday in Chile, authorities said.

Van der Sloot is the main suspect in this week’s slaying of 21-year-old Stephany Flores Ramirez, who was found Wednesday in a Lima, Peru, hotel room registered to the Dutch man. Chilean police told CNN that paperwork showed that van der Sloot entered Chile on Wednesday.

Peruvian Interior Minister Octavio Salazar Miranda said Thursday that Peru has made arrangements with Interpol to extradite van der Sloot.

Van der Sloot, 23, was traveling alone in a taxi near the Chilean central coastal city of Vina del Mar when he was detained, said Douglas Rodriguez, spokesman for the Chilean Investigative Police.

Van der Sloot was transported Thursday afternoon to police headquarters in Santiago, Chile’s capital.

TV images showed him emerging from a black police SUV at the police station. His hair, which had been black in previous images, was red and worn in a close-cropped crew cut.

In Peru, a wake was held Thursday in Lima for Flores, who was scheduled to be buried later in the day.

An uncle of Natalee Holloway said he was saddened by the Flores family’s loss.

“We are disappointed that Joran has been able to do this to another young girl,” Paul Reynolds told CNN. “He was not held accountable for what happened to Natalee and as a result has been able to repeat his actions. Sorry this other family has to go through the same thing we have.

Van der Sloot, who was arrested in connection with Holloway’s disappearance in 2005 but later released, has denied any involvement in her case.

There is “incriminating evidence” linking van der Sloot to the killing of Flores, said Peruvian criminal investigator Cesar Guardia Vasquez.

The woman’s bludgeoned body was found in Room 309 of the Hotel Tac in the Miraflores section of Lima, police said. She suffered blunt trauma to the head, breaking her neck, and to her torso and back, Peruvian police said Thursday.

Van der Sloot had been staying at the hotel since arriving from Colombia on May 14, police said. Room 309 was booked in his name, authorities said.

A hotel guest and an employee witnessed the pair entering the hotel room together at 5 a.m. Sunday, Guardia said. Police have video of van der Sloot and Flores together the previous night at the Atlantic City Casino in Lima, he said.

Two Peruvian cab drivers said in an interview on CNN affiliate America TV that they drove a man matching van der Sloot’s description to a city on the other side of the Chilean border.

“He paid me and I took him to Arica, to the border,” cab driver Oswaldo Aparcana said.

The man sat in the front seat and smoked many cigarettes, Aparcana said. The passenger told the cabbies he used to live in Aruba, said the other driver, Carlos Alberto Uribe.

The victim’s father said he believes van der Sloot is responsible for the young woman’s death.

“We have all the evidence to show that the killer is this man,” businessman and race-car driver Ricardo Flores told CNN en Español.

But van der Sloot’s former attorney, Joseph Tacopina, told CNN it was too early to reach any conclusions.

“I just think we need to take a step back before we get to the ‘I told you so’ stage, and let’s see what the evidence is here,” Tacopina said Thursday.

Tacopina said he is not representing van der Sloot and no longer has a good relationship with the family.

Holloway, the Alabama teenager, disappeared May 30, 2005, five years to the day since the hotel videotape that officials say showed van der Sloot and Flores going into his hotel room. Both women are reported to have met van der Sloot at a night spot.

Ricardo Flores said police found his daughter’s car about 50 blocks from the hotel. Inside the car, he said, authorities found pills like those used in date rapes.

Ricardo Flores said he did not believe his daughter knew the Dutch citizen beforehand.

Both of them speak English and they struck up conversation at the casino, he said.

Interpol had alerted its office in Chile and other bordering countries of the case and placed them on alert in case van der Sloot tried to leave that country, Peruvian Interpol Interim Director Gerson Ortiz told CNN.

Van der Sloot was arrested in Aruba in 2005 along with two other men, brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, in connection with Holloway’s disappearance. They were later released.

In 2007, they were arrested a second time after Aruba’s then-chief prosecutor, Hans Mos, said he had received new evidence in the case.

Van der Sloot, who was attending college in the Netherlands, was brought back to Aruba. But judges ruled the new evidence — which included an Internet chat the same day Holloway disappeared in which one of the three youths said she was dead — was not enough to keep them jailed.

In 2008, prosecutors sought unsuccessfully to arrest van der Sloot a third time after a videotape surfaced on Dutch television. In it, van der Sloot tells a man he considered to be his friend that he had sex with Holloway on the beach after leaving the nightclub, then she “started shaking” and lost consciousness. He said he panicked when he could not resuscitate her and called a friend who had a boat. The two put Holloway’s body in the boat, he said, and then he went home. The friend told him the next day that he had carried the body out and dumped it in the ocean.

But an Aruba court ruled there was not enough evidence to re-arrest him. Aruban prosecutors said authorities had met with van der Sloot in the Netherlands, but in a two-hour interview he denied any role in Holloway’s disappearance.

CNN’s Beth Carey contributed to this report.

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