Joran Van Der Sloot Admits To Extorting Holloway's Parents

Clearly with nothing to lose, the young murder suspect has admitted to extorting Natalee Holloway‘s parents by demanding money for the location of their daughter’s body. His stated motivation: revenge.

Van der Sloot was a suspect in Holloway’s 2005 disappearance, and he’s now charged with the murdering Stephany Flores in a Peru hotel room. He even confessed to killing Flores, but now says he was intimidated and wants to retract the confession. But according to the AP, he now admits he demanded money from Holloway’s family in exchange for the whereabouts of her body. He took two payments from Holloway’s mother, one for $10,000 and one for $15,000, and then revealed a location which turned out to be fake. By way of explanation, he says,

I wanted to get back at Natalee’s family – her parents have been making my life tough for five years. When they offered to pay for the girl’s location, I thought: ‘Why not’?

Of course there are a lot of excellent reasons why not, from the moral — it’s cruel to take advantage of a grieving family — to the practical — extorting a missing girl’s relatives isn’t particularly smart if you were a suspect in her murder. However, several experts seem to believe that this kind of normal-people reasoning doesn’t really occur to Van der Sloot. Back in June, Dutch forensic psychology professor Corine de Ruiter said the murder suspect exhibited “all the major features of a classic psychopath.” Profiler Pat Brown also said Van der Sloot displayed psycopathic behavior: “they tell you what you know and lie about what you don’t know.” And the Daily News noted that Van der Sloot’s cellmate had given him a new nickname: “Psychopath.”