Mallie Tucker, left, and Claire Fierman at the Alabama lake where they spent lazy, happy days with Natalee
A little more than five years ago, on the last night of a high school graduation trip to Aruba, 18-year-old Natalee Holloway met a lawyer's son, a handsome 17-year-old named Joran van der Sloot, in a popular cantina, walked out into the moonlight with him—and was never seen again. A tiny girl with long blond hair, Natalee was an exuberant personality but also serious and idealistic: About to enter the University of Alabama on a full scholarship, she hoped to become a doctor. Her disappearance left her best friends from Birmingham's Mountain Brook High confused, angry and bereft.
From the first day she went missing, her classmates lived through the frustrations of an inconclusive police investigation and the indignities of a media firestorm that made Natalee Holloway a household name. They watched as van der Sloot, the main suspect in the crime, was twice detained by police in connection with the investigation—and twice released without ever being charged.
Then, this past May 30—on precisely the fifth anniversary of Natalee's disappearance—Peruvian business student Stephany Flores, 21, was murdered in a Lima hotel room, and van der Sloot confessed to the killing. He later recanted but remains jailed in Peru, awaiting trial.
The reappearance of van der Sloot brought up haunting memories for two of Natalee's best friends, Mallie Tucker, 24, and Claire Fierman, 23. They decided to tell their story exclusively to Glamour, a story that none of Natalee's circle has told before: about who Natalee really was; what they think of van der Sloot; and how the unresolved loss of their best friend traumatized them for years. I met with them in Mountain Brook, Alabama, the Birmingham suburb where they all grew close and where Mallie's and Claire's families still live.
CLAIRE: Natalee moved to Mountain Brook in eighth grade, from tiny Clinton, Mississippi—and she kind of just fell into our group. We all had silly nicknames for each other. I was Party, because for some reason I used to instant-message my friends as PartyGirl600.
MALLIE: I was Tucka Mota, because there was a car dealership in town with my same last name called Tucker Motors, and they had a really funny commercial.
CLAIRE: So Natalee said, "Back in Mississippi, everyone called me Hooty Hoo Holloway." We later found out she had completely made that up just to fit in! But we called her Hooty. "It's Hoooo-ty," she'd say, in a high, silly voice on the phone. I saved her last voice mail until a year ago, when it became just too hard to listen to.
So Hooty Hoo Holloway came to Birmingham, and there was no beating around the bush with that girl. If she had an opinion, she would tell you. Once I asked her to get me a soft drink, and she looked at me like I'd asked her to run a mile. Like: Are you kidding? Get it yourself.
MALLIE: Natalee was an original. She was obsessed with The Wizard of Oz. She had more Wizard of Oz stuff in her room than you'd ever seen! She was in love with Lynyrd Skynyrd. And she had a Sheltie named Macy. She loved that dog so much; she would color its hair with highlighters and paint its toenails.
CLAIRE: Natalee was such a good jazz dancer. She was on the school dance team every year. And she was smart. If you had a top grade point average, you didn't have to take finals senior year. Natalee would call me during finals and say, "Do you want to hang out?" I said, "Hooty, I can't! Unlike you, I have tests!"
MALLIE: She helped me with AP environmental science. She was obsessed with topography—she loved to study the mountain ranges on maps.
CLAIRE: She was careful, not a rule bender. She turned 16 seven months before I did, and she got a cute little white Volvo. Even though I didn't have a license, I kept begging her, "Just let me drive it, please?" She finally said, "OK, you can move it one spot over" in the parking lot. She wasn't someone to take a risk.
MALLIE: Natalee and I worked on weekends at my mom's organic food store, Harvest Glen. Natalee and her mom [Beth Holloway] were super close. Beth was a speech pathologist and worked with children, and that sensitivity rubbed off. My mom employed autistic adults at Harvest Glen, and Natalee was their favorite coworker. She took them for outings, and she'd work alongside them, shucking corn and shelling peas together.
CLAIRE: She was a kind person, but not overly sweet. She just did good things.
MALLIE: I close my eyes and I see Natalee, shucking corn. It's so strange—Natalee's been gone for longer than I've known her. That's really hard for me—I kind of want the years to stop. I hold on to these dumb little images: the blond hair on her arms. And her bubbly, messy handwriting!
CLAIRE: I can still hear her reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn out loud, with great animation, while we were sunbathing on the deck at her lake house.
MALLIE: Natalee didn't have a serious boyfriend. She had a crush on this one boy—you could tell because she was all shy around him. She was particular. I think she was waiting for the perfect boyfriend: a cowboy, a Southern gentleman. She was innocent. We all were. We weren't nerds, but we weren't girls who would experiment with makeup all day either.
CLAIRE: We'd go tubing or wakeboarding until our bodies ached, out on Smith Lake. And we didn't travel much—going to the beach at the Florida Panhandle was about it. So when the graduation trip to Aruba was planned, Natalee was so excited!
MALLIE: We all painted T-shirts that said ARUBA. Of course I was hysterical cause I was the only one who didn't go!
CLAIRE: Everyone going on the trip got on two planes—about 100 seniors and four teachers as chaperones—leaving for Aruba on Thursday. We'd be coming home Sunday night.
CLAIRE: The Aruba Holiday Inn was nice; the beach was beautiful. Natalee and I went snorkeling together. At night everyone got really dressed up to have dinner at the hotel, and afterward people would go to popular hangouts for young people—one was Carlos'n Charlie's. It was your average beach bar; everybody mixed together, American kids and Arubans.
Our hotel had a casino that we all went to the last night of the trip. We found out after Natalee disappeared that Joran was a regular gambler there. Then I left, and Natalee went to Carlos'n Charlie's with some of the others.
I was in the hotel lobby at 1:00 A.M., watching everyone come home. But I didn't think, Where's Natalee?
The next morning, most of us, rushing to pack our toothbrushes, didn't know Natalee hadn't come home; we were focused on getting to the airport. But Natalee's roommate and another friend sure did.
MALLIE: Our friends said later that they had told the Aruban police stationed around the hotel, "Our friend didn't come home!" and the police just calmly took notes on a clipboard, matter-of-factly. We didn't know it at the time, but somebody had called Beth, and she talked to the authorities. Although we don't know what they said to her, she had already sensed that something was wrong.
CLAIRE: The news started to get to us in small, disconnected pieces. As I was boarding the plane to leave Aruba, two of our friends ran up and said, "Natalee's not on the plane! We don't know where she is!" My reaction was, "Beth is going to be so mad!" I'm thinking, Natalee's still lying on the beach. I had no panic. But by the time we landed in Atlanta, my dad called me and said, "Bear"—he called me Bear—"things aren't looking good." What he meant was, Natalee wasn't just on the beach; it was more serious. I panicked. Kidnapping, I thought. I cried all the way on the bus from Atlanta to Birmingham.
MALLIE: While Claire was flying home, her dad called me to say Natalee was missing. I rushed to Claire's house.
While the students were returning to Birmingham, Beth had begun gathering information about her daughter. She talked to one of the boys who'd been on the trip and learned that he'd seen Natalee with van der Sloot on the last night. "He seemed like, y'know, a regular guy," said the boy. "Like me." Nonetheless, a worried Beth flew to Aruba. Eight Mountain Brook students gathered at Claire's house.
CLAIRE: We were all in my living room, girls and boys. It was after midnight. We had left Aruba about 14 hours before. We were worried sick.
MALLIE: Beth was in Aruba. She got the address of Joran's house, and she was standing outside the gates. She called us and we put her on speakerphone. She said, "Kids, I need more details!" Anyone who had seen Joran in Aruba shouted whatever information they had. We could hear Beth pleading to be let in the house so they could talk face-to-face. Leaning into the speakerphone in Claire's living room, we were all screaming.
CLAIRE: "Beth! He has to talk to you."
MALLIE: "Natalee's in the house!" We actually thought she was being held captive in Joran's room. I guess it was safer to feel this way than to have any worse scenarios in mind.
CLAIRE: We were enraged Beth wasn't being let in. We were pacing the room and freaking out. Here is a mother in crisis, and if nobody will let her in the house…well, something is really suspicious! We knew in our gut that Joran was behind her disappearance. By now we knew from talking to other kids who'd been on the trip that Joran was a regular at the casino, and that Natalee had left Carlos'n Charlie's in the backseat of a car with him. Nobody would let Beth into the house. It just added up. He'd done something bad to her—we didn't know what, but we knew it was him. [When Glamour contacted van der Sloot's attorney, Maximo Altez, to ask for a response from his client, Altez declined to comment on the Holloway case.]
CLAIRE: We stayed up all night in my living room.
MALLIE: We felt so helpless!
CLAIRE: We fell asleep at 6 A.M.
MALLIE: We did that three nights in a row, moving from house to house, waiting for news. We never left each other's side.
CLAIRE: I was scared to shower. I didn't want to miss anything.
*On June 9, van der Sloot and brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, who had been in the car with him and Natalee, were detained as part of the investigation. *
MALLIE: We hung on to hope. We didn't cry until two weeks had passed. I thought, Two weeks is so long. I said, "She doesn't even have a hair rubber band or clean underwear!" We wished we were in Aruba, where Beth still was, helping to search for Natalee. To feel useful, we started making these little three-thread yarn bracelets. We called them Hope for Natalee bracelets.
CLAIRE: We made thousands of them—buckets of them! We passed them out to all our friends. We sent them to Beth in Aruba. She passed them out there.
*The Kalpoe brothers were released on July 4, but not van der Sloot. Searches for Natalee—both publicly funded ones and those paid for by the Holloways and their friends—continued that summer, but with no results. *
MALLIE: We kept up our hope for most of the summer. You have to remember, this happened after Elizabeth Smart was found after being missing for nine months. I went on a trip to Acapulco with my family during this time, and I kept busting through random bathroom doors—public bathrooms, on the street! I thought I was going to find Natalee with her hair all cut off and dyed black or something.
CLAIRE: There were prayer services for Natalee every day at a local church. There were yellow ribbons all over Mountain Brook. The media descended: Nancy Grace. Greta Van Susteren. Scarborough Country. The Abrams Report. So many, I can't remember. It was so strange—everyone in America seemed to "know" our good friend Natalee! Yet nobody wanted to know who she really was, what kind of person she was.
Van der Sloot was released from custody on September 3 for lack of evidence that a crime had been committed. A few weeks later, he flew to the Netherlands to start college.
MALLIE: He's free to go to college just when Natalee should be going to college along with us. We were numb.
CLAIRE: Mallie went to the University of Montavallo, in the middle of the state, and I went to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa—where Natalee was supposed to go with me. The biggest struggle was guilt. Not guilt as in, What could I have done to save Natalee? But guilt that she wasn't coming back; guilt for giving up hope.
MALLIE: College is supposed to be happy, but for us it was just so sad. I would go to Tuscaloosa, where Claire was, every weekend. We'd be with our other friend, who was supposed to have roomed with Natalee. And seeing that empty second bed in that room…
CLAIRE and MALLIE: That was supposed to be Natalee's bed!
CLAIRE: And there were all these Natalees—girls with long blond hair—everywhere on campus.
MALLIE: This was when we really started to detach ourselves. We stopped talking about Natalee—even to each other. It wasn't a pact or anything. We were traumatized.
CLAIRE: I guess it wouldn't come as a surprise that we also weren't good at dating. When I met a guy, I'd be scared s—tless. I'd be, Why are you talking to me?
MALLIE: Me, too. I didn't date in college. We never went on single dates. We would always go on group dates—the guy had to be surrounded by people we'd known for a long time.
CLAIRE: Eventually I had boyfriends in college, but I made them jump through hoops until I trusted them.
In November 2007, when the girls were entering their junior year, van der Sloot was taken into custody again—as were the Kalpoe brothers—for "suspicion of involvement in voluntary manslaughter." But the prosecutors did not present enough evidence to charge them, and all three were released.
CLAIRE: Just to get through college, we went into denial. The more reminders, the worse our denial became. We needed to protect ourselves from our pain. We stopped looking at our own personal pictures of Natalee.
MALLIE: I used wine to hide my feelings from myself. I drank and drank. Numbness was what I was after.
CLAIRE: I had this horrible anxiety. I was afraid of parking my car in the dark. I would fly out of the car and into the house. I developed OCD—I'd make lists all the time of everything I was going to do. If I didn't have a plan, I would get very nervous.
MALLIE: I wasn't focusing on my studies. I was drinking too much. By junior year I flunked out of college.
In March 2008 came explosive news: A Dutch journalist had taped van der Sloot saying that he had seen Natalee die on an Aruban beach, although he did not admit to having harmed her. Prosecutors found no evidence to support van der Sloot's "confession," which he later withdrew.
CLAIRE: All of Natalee's friends got together to watch the video on TV. There were 12 of us in our friends' basement, watching Joran saying "of course" Natalee was dead. Did we believe it? Yes. We were shocked. It was so bizarre: No one said anything. We just turned off the TV, and we stood up to leave and said, "See you tomorrow."
MALLIE: We never spoke of Natalee anymore. She'd not only disappeared from our lives—she disappeared altogether.
CLAIRE: But, deep inside, we were in pain. I came home from watching the video with my friends, and my mom, who'd also watched it, was sitting on my bed, crying her eyes out. She hugged me, and this—three years in—was the first time I really cried. From then on, I cried every day. I literally woke up and burst into tears every day during college. But, oddly, I didn't connect it to Natalee.
MALLIE: In June 2008 I was accepted at Safe Harbor, a substance abuse facility in Orange County, California. When I completed the inpatient treatment, I knew I wanted to help others—not just women with alcohol and drug problems, but also women who'd been traumatized, whether they had lost a friend, or had been a victim of domestic violence, rejection or abandonment. I found a college near Safe Harbor and enrolled in a two-year course to become a certified drug and alcohol counselor. The fact that I was able to make it through all of that—it was Natalee's situation pushing me through.
Today I work at Bradford Health Services in Birmingham, and I tell patients who've been traumatized: Gently confront your detachment. If you've lost a friend, think of her every single day. Take her picture out…like I have finally done with Natalee's. That won't heal the pain—and it's not the anniversaries that hurt; it's the random things, like hearing Lynyrd Skynyrd, that hit me—but it makes the pain manageable.
CLAIRE: We stay in touch with Natalee's mom, Beth. She's devoting her life to making sure that what happened to Natalee never happens to anyone else. [Beth Holloway, in cooperation with the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, created the Natalee Holloway Resource Center to assist families of missing loved ones. To learn more or to volunteer, go to crimemuseum.org/NHRC.]
But the most important thing Mallie and I did for ourselves was something we did about a year ago.
I was in therapy—still crying, still anxious—and my therapist said, "Why don't you write Natalee a letter?" So I flew to L.A., where Mallie was. We each wrote Natalee a letter telling her how much we loved and missed her. At the end of mine, I wrote, "I'm sorry, but I have to let you go." I signed my old nickname: Party.
MALLIE: We took the letters to Huntington Beach at sunset, and we read them aloud. We dug a hole in the sand and put the letters in.
CLAIRE: We lit a bonfire and then we burned the letters.
MALLIE: That was our funeral for Natalee.
CLAIRE: The anxiety and guilt lifted. And we have never told anyone about it—until just now.
MALLIE: When I heard that they'd found and arrested Joran—on May 30, the fifth anniversary of Natalee's disappearance—I had a strangely familiar feeling. It was the excitement I'd been waiting to feel when I'd hear the words, "They've found Natalee, alive." I couldn't use it for that, but I could use it for relief: Joran was in jail, and it looks like he will stay there.
CLAIRE: Where do we think Natalee's body is? We don't go there.
MALLIE: I know I will see her again some-day. All of life is a big waiting room.
*Sheila Weller is a senior contributing editor at *Glamour.
