Investigators believe they may have found a DNA match for the remains of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway, who went missing in Aruba 12 years ago.
“They are human, and they are of Caucasian, European descent,” forensic scientist Jason Kolowski told Oxygen.com.
Natalee was both Caucasian and of European descent.
She disappeared while on a trip to the island paradise in 2005 with her classmates after having just graduated from high school.
On the last night of her stay she was shown on security camera footage leaving the bar with a local teenager, Joran van der Sloot.
Classmate Jessica Caiola said she saw Natalee driving away in a white car and remembers thinking that Natalee must have found a ride back to her hotel. That was the last time Natalee was seen.
Van der Sloot, the prime suspect in the case, was never charged with her death due to lack of evidence and is now serving a 28-year prison sentence for murdering a 21-year-old woman in Peru.
Natalee’s parents hired a private investigator to work on the case because they felt that the investigation by Aruban authorities had been botched.
It wasn’t until recently that they had new information to go on.
As Oxygen.com revealed in its docuseries on the case, a man named Gabriel came forward saying that his roommate, a friend of van der Sloot’s, had told him the location of the body.
The roommate, John Ludwick, allegedly told Gabriel that van der Sloot revealed details of how Natalee died that night, and offered Ludwick $1,500 to rebury the body.
Based on what Gabriel told the family and investigators, they were able to find bone fragments.
The DNA that was sent to a lab for testing is mitochondrial, which, unlike nuclear DNA, comes only from the mother.
Natalee’s mother, Beth Holloway, submitted her DNA to the lab to see if there was a match.
“Beth’s would be exactly the same as Natalee’s or any of Beth’s other children,” Kolowski told Oxygen.com.
Kolowski expects the final results of the DNA testing to come out some time in September.
From NTD.tv
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