Open Letter to Mrs. Van Der Sloot

OPEN LETTER TO MRS. VAN DER SLOOT So far, you are the cool one. Your vapid smile has been seen on TV, but otherwise you have drawn little notice. Indeed, I cannot even remember your name.Do you enjoy your anonymity, seeing in it a refuge from the hate and contempt directed at the rest of your family members? When you lie in bed at night, what do you think of? Good times in the past? Or do you sense the tension, the silent acknowledgement of guilt, the fog of amorality gone bad that even you must recognize by now? “Oh, Joran is such a good boy….” The statement that every mother might be expected to say.I’m sure that the Aruba government would like your photo to be on the front page of every newspaper, dutifully preparing his favorite food in a congenial household meal. But at night, do you ever think of that night? Of muted, half-conscious cries and struggles by the beach? Of brutal force? What kinds of thoughts go through your mind? Do you ever trade places with the other mother in this saga, or do you close your eyes and heart and thoughts? “Oh, Joran is such a good boy ….”My friend once told me that when your husband was going in for questioning, he once turned to you in the presence of the TV cameras and growled, “GET IN HERE!” as though you were a trained dog behaving badly. Is that indeed how you see yourself? Or do you fear what might happen to you? Is survival your only concern? Do you know that you too might go missing, at the behest of your own family? Do you look at them and see the knowledge of murder?No doubt you dare not talk with them about the looks that you can sometimes see in their eyes. What future do you see? Will you deny your knowledge for the rest of your life, hoping to pass quiet days in a house darkened to keep off the Caribbean heat? Do you think that refusing to speak out will make the nightmares go away? Or do you have a needle, a bottle, or something else to dull the senses and keep the ghosts at bay? Not only the ghosts of what has happened, but the ghosts of what could have been – for you must know that only criminals and Aruba government officials now tolerate the van der Sloots.And when your days are ending, if you are allowed to live out a natural lifespan, what visions will you see at the end, and struggle to deny? Will you run from the truth your whole life? And when your family are rotting in prison, should that come to pass … do you think that anyone will heed your cries, or care for you? If you do not speak out, you will be remembered as the handmaiden of evil. Shutting your eyes to the last … “Oh, Joran is such a good boy ….” It will not redeem you.This 1916 poem, "The Fence," by Carl Sandburg is worth your reading and thinking about. For we all have metaphorical fences in life ... but yours is not destined to last. "Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the workmen are beginning the fence. The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that can stab the life out of any man who falls on them. As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off all the rabble and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering children looking for a place to play. Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow."`````````````````````````````````I began my personal search for truth regarding the Natalee Holloway case almost eight months ago. Within a couple of weeks of her disappearance on Aruba I began to wonder about the individuals that were currently be held on suspicion on the Island.I am not a psychologist nor am I a psychiatrist and I must add for clarity that what I say and do is my opinion and my views and are not reflective of anything but my own thoughts. Some of what I write about is public knowledge and some is speculation on my part. I do not pretend to have the answer as to what happened to Natalee and I have never met the suspects or anyone connected with the case.I looked at the main suspect Joran van der Sloot, and I listened to him speak and eventually I came to the conclusion that something was amiss. I began to believe in my own mind that Joran was not the boy being portrayed by his mother and father in interviews. Aside from the cockiness and the apparent lack of feelings that he has displayed regarding a girl who hasn't been since he last admitted to dropping her off on a sandy beach on Aruba, there was something more. I looked into his eyes and there was no "there...there". He seemed to me like an empty vessel comprised of bravado and arrogance and even more, he seemed to have absolutely NO compassion or empathy for this girl. Even if she was a stranger to him who he had only known for a few short hours there should have been some compassion for her plight and for her family. I observed none from this young man.I began to think of a word that I have often used in researching individuals who are suspected or known to have committed crimes against their fellow human beings. I thought of Scott Peterson and Ted Bundy and Angelo Buono of the Hillside Strangler case. I thought of Dennis Rader, the BTK killer and I began to see some similarities to this boy with no apparent compassion or empathy in his voice or words or eyes. Was he one of THEM? Was he a sociopath who is incapable of feeling anything for any other human being other than himself? Was he devoid of remorse?I can't be one hundred percent sure because as I stated above I have no reports from professionals to back up my own feelings of unease whenever I see or hear this boy speak. Natalee Holloway is still missing and the people who claim to be looking for her have often caused me to doubt the sincerity of their efforts. I won't go into all of the reasons for that because most of the readers here have already formed their opinions and observed what is going on in Aruba.They have heard the Deputy Chief of Police speak and the hired American Spokesperson, Steve Cohen. They have heard the shrill words of Arlene Ellis Shipper and the rest of the pep squad who were hired to defend Aruba against charges of neglect and corruption and failure to do a proper investigation. There is no need for me to reiterate all that is known about this case and to remind the readers of this site that there are many unanswered questions and that with each so-called forward movement there are ten steps back which places us all at the beginning...May, 2005 and the night that Natalee disappeared without a trace. No television show will send it's lead actors to find her and no crime lab will solve the case in an hour and obviously no Aruban official will speak directly to any of us with the information that we here in America have come to expect of our own investigative bodies. It just doesn't work that way on Aruba.So, I will leave it to you the reader to agree or disagree with me when I claim to have a sense that the boy in question is not "there" in the normal sense that we expect people to be and that he does not act in the way that we expect people to act when confronted with a situation like Natalee Holloway's.It is all the more frightening when one knows that he most likely really WAS THERE during Natalee's last hours. --Posted by Anonymous to seedyrum"musings at 2/21/2006 05:05:56 AM