By Dan Riehl

ORANJESTAD, Aruba (Crime Library) — Nobody took the boy seriously, it was just one of those silly, off-handed comments a teen throws out, maybe as a way to ease the tension before setting off on a big adventure. After all, what was the worst that could possibly happen as the 100 plus members of the graduating class of Mountain Brook High School set off last spring for a jaunt to Aruba?

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Oh sure, maybe some of the kids would take advantage of this barely chaperoned rite of passage to drink a little too much rum, maybe get al ittle too much sun, and maybe there might even be a breathless tryst behind the dunes. But there was no cause to take the boy's off handed comment as prescient in any way. "I think one of us isn't coming home," the boy said as he drove off with his mother." She ignored him, of course. It was just one of those things that teenage boys say.

In the end, though, he was right. One of them didn't come back. It's been nearly six months since Natalee Holloway vanished into the thick tropical Island air of Aruba. Six months of frantic searches, six months of angst and bitterness, six months of allegations of everything from murder to prosecutorial misconduct. Her disappearance has become an international cause celebre, and the focus of growing international tension.

It has fueled wild and sometimes reckless speculation in the media, most notably on the television crime talk shows, but even now, it remains an intractable mystery. All the information there is, it seems, has come from things that boys say.

Depending upon who you ask, Natalee Holloway was either raped and murdered by vicious young predators, sold into sexual slavery in South America, or at the heart of an international political plot involving drugs, smuggling and money laundering.  Still others insist she may have simply run away, or committed suicide in the nighttime surf of Aruba. Then again, she may have drowned accidentally, much like missing  Lynn Moran did in Portland, ME, this past October.

With no real evidence released to point to one scenario over another, individuals' loyalties to friends, family, country, or even what one watches on television seem to dictate people's opinions, rather than the few known facts.

Natalee was nowhere to be found come the morning for the student's flight home. Friends, thinking she might yet show up at the airport, packed up her belongings and carried them to the hotel lobby. One chaperone remained behind to see if she might show up as the rest of the Mountain Brook, Alabama, contingent made its way to the airport.

Back on Aruba the lone chaperone contacted the police and was disappointed when only a beach patrolman arrived. Unfortunately, it was not unusual for a young person to party a little too hard on the last night on the island and not show up for a day or two. But Natalee Holloway never did turn up. The chaperone also managed to meet up with a member of the DEA who had been on the island on other business but nothing significant emerged from that meeting.

Mountain Brook, Alabama, is home to many financially well-off and politically powerful people and one individual furnished a corporate plane allowing Natalee's family to land on the island, coupled with what has been reported as a group of Alabama businessmen, the very next day.

Determined to find out what happened and even possibly retrieve Natalee, the group was soon moving about the island. With information from Natalee's friends, now back in Alabama, the family determined that Natalee was last seen in the company of a boy leaving the local Carlos'n Charlie's on the last night of the trip. The Mountain Brook graduates spent a fair amount of time at the popular Caribbean chain restaurant, notorious for its drinking and dancing, during their stay in Aruba.

With the aid of local businessman Charles Croes and videotape from one of the casinos, the family was able to identify Joran Van der Sloot and where he lived. Aruban authorities were not officially involved in the investigation at this time, as they needed at least 48 hours to pass before a formal missing persons report could be filed. Still, they accompanied a group including family and friends of Natalee Holloway to the home of Van der Sloot.

When Joran's father Paulus Van der Sloot came to the door, he informed the group that Joran was at a local casino playing poker and the group went off to find Joran. It's been reported that around then Joran received a cell phone call from his father, letting him know that there had been people at the house wanting to talk to him regarding a missing girl. Evidently Joran left for home with friends and passed the group of Natalee's friends and family along the road.

Allegedly, it was on the way back from the casino that Joran Van der Sloot decided to falsely claim that he and friend Deepak Kalpoe dropped Natalee off at her hotel, the Holiday Inn. That claim would eventually lead to the arrest of two black security guards known to frequent the area outside the Holiday Inn and it would also continue to cast suspicion on Van der Sloot right up until today. But his own poor judgment on lying to police and his possible involvement in a horrible crime weren't the only problems Joran had as the investigation wore on, even after he admitted later that he was alone with Natalee on a beach the night she vanished and that he left her there, not at a Holiday Inn as he earlier stated.

Jossy Mansur, a powerful man and publisher of the Aruban daily Diario eventually took a keen interest in the case. Along with bringing forward numerous leads all of which went nowhere he insinuated himself into the investigation in a manner that hardly did Joran Van der Sloot any favors. From the very first time America's cable news outlets and other journalists appeared on the island of Aruba, Mansur and/or representatives of Diario produced information harmful to the now three suspects Deepak and Satish Kalpoe and Joran Van der Sloot.

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Dan Riehl can be reached at: itsjustdan@comcast.net