On Psychopaths and Teen Killers

Much has been said about psychopaths and teen killers in history, but the case that has held my undivided attention in recent times is that of the Dutch teenager Joran van der Sloot who was just 17 when he caused the disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba five years ago. Natalee's body was never found, and exactly five years to the day of her disappearance, as bizarre and eerie as that sounds, on May 30, 2010, Van der Sloot brutally murdered Peruvian poker player and daughter of a politically-connected former race car driver, Stefany Flores Ramirez, in a hotel room in Peru registered under his name.Talk about bad karma returning to bite one's butt, Van der Sloot was nabbed by the Chilean police while on the run from Peru, and promptly handed over to the Peruvian authorities. Since then, he has confessed to the murder and sits in jail awaiting his trial.

I remember following the case avidly on Nancy Grace and was deeply rocked by empathy for Natalee's mother, Beth Holloway, a frantic mother desperately trying to find any information about the whereabouts of her daughter who had gone to the paradise island on spring break, only never to appear again. Joran van der Sloot was the last person Natalee was seen alive with, and though he was arrested twice in her disappearance, he was let go due to lack of evidence and because there was no substantial case of any sort without the body. The fact that his father was an influential judge in Aruba helped in keeping Joran from being locked up and convicted. Well, "murder will out one day," as the Revenge Tragedies put it, and now it's vindication time in Peru for Van der Sloot, finally. His father now dead, and the heinous murder having taken place far from Aruba, in a foreign land, there's no escape for the cold, psychopathic killer this time round.

I also recall Van der Sloot's mother proclaiming the inncocence of her 6' 3" 17 year-old, but what struck me the most was the absolute lack of remorse or empathy in the young man. Completely bereft of emotions, and devoid of guilt, as all psychopaths are, he was free to wander the streets for five years, till he struck again and preyed on another young woman he had met in a poker tournament in Peru. The reason he had so brutally murdered Stefany was that she had read an email on his laptop linking him to Natalee's disappearance, while he was out of the hotel buying bread and coffee. When she confronted him on his return, he had simply used his brute strength to break her neck and beat her to a pulp, after which he coolly sat back and sipped his coffee while she lay dead on the floor. The sub-plot to this psychopathic tragedy is that he had tried to extort $ 250,000 from Natalee's mother for information about her missing daughter, and the FBI had set up a sting to implicate him in this nefarious deal. He had been given $ 25,000 dollars as an advance, and alas, it was this money that had funded his trip to Peru, resulting in the savage killing of Stefany Flores Ramirez, before the FBI could arrest him for extortion and wire fraud.

There is no doubt in my mind that this baby-faced killer will be convicted soon, but it is very unfortunate that this young psychopath is not going to get the death penalty, as there is none in Peru, something which Joran van der Sloot so richly and rightly deserves! With all the evidence categorically mounting against him, I wonder if his mother will still be able to proclaim her child's innocence this time!