Taken: Natalee Holloway on Netflix: what’s new in the documentary

Taken: Natalee Holloway, Netflix’s new true crime series about one of the most famous missing person cases of the 2000s, is out now. All three episodes landed on Wednesday 4 November.

Natalee Holloway, 18, from Mountain Brook in Alabama, vanished in May 2005 on the last night of a high school graduation trip to Aruba. Her body has never been found.

What’s new in the Netflix series?

According to Netflix, the series includes footage from a 2010 FBI operation targeting Joran van der Sloot that has never been released publicly before. It also features former Aruban deputy police chief Gerold Dompig speaking about the case for the first time in 20 years.

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“The main thing that was lacking in this case is that we never found Natalee,” Dompig says in the series.

Who appears in Taken: Natalee Holloway?

Natalee’s mother, Beth Holloway, is at the heart of the series. Explaining why she agreed to take part now, she says: “First and foremost, we finally had a conclusion, and that was important.”

Natalee’s friends from the trip, Madison Greer, Claire Fierman and Sue Remick, also take part, along with lawyer John Kelly, Aruban businessman Charles Croes, who helped lead the search, journalists who covered the case and retired FBI agents.

What happened to Natalee Holloway?

Van der Sloot, a Dutch student living in Aruba, was one of the last people seen with Natalee, but he was never charged over her disappearance in Aruba. In 2010 he was caught in an FBI sting trying to extort money from her family, and later that year he murdered Stephany Flores in Peru, for which he was jailed.

In 2023, after being extradited to the US, he pleaded guilty to extortion and wire fraud and, as part of the deal, gave an account of how he killed Natalee. The series follows the case from the first search to that admission.

Sources: Netflix Tudum, Netflix official trailer.