You're listening to a tenderfoot TV podcast.

In May of 2005, an 18-year-old girl from Alabama flew to Aruba for the kind of senior trip that most teens only daydream about.

Sun, freedom, and one last adventure before college.

But Natalie Holloway never made it home.

Her disappearance became a media frenzy, interviews, theories,

breaking updates that often said more about the world watching than the case itself.

But beneath all the noise was a simple truth.

An 18-year-old girl vanished after getting into a car with a boy she had just met.

Her disappearance was already devastating enough, but what happened next made the truth even harder to find

because the last person seen

with Natalie became one of the most notorious names in modern true crime.

Yoron van der Sloot, a teenager whose story changed again and again and again, each version

more unhinged than the last.

For years, Natalie's family lived inside this chaos,

the false confessions, the scams, the arrests, the failures, the moments where hope would flicker

and then collapse. And then, five years of the day after Natalie disappeared, another young woman

was found murdered in a hotel room in Peru. Her killer? The same

man authorities had once let walk away. This December on True Crime, I'm bringing you back to the

beginning, the night out, the investigation, the media storm, and the forces that turned one family's

nightmare into one of the most controversial cases of the last 20 years.

We'll look at the systems that failed Natalie, the way that the story was twisted for profit,

and the cost of nearly two decades of lies.

...