The Natalee Holloway Mystery, One Year Later

May 30, 2006 — -- A year ago today, 18-year-old Natalee Holloway mysteriously vanished on the last night of her five-day vacation with friends in Aruba.

Over the last 12 months, some cable news channels have seemingly devoted more time to the disappearance of the beautiful, blonde, straight-A student from Alabama than they have to the war in Iraq.

Holloway is not alone. Since May 30, 2005, thousands of other children and teenagers have also gone missing and have not had talk shows focusing on them night after night, fighter jets searching for them, or calls for a national boycott to pressure police into finding them. Yet, despite the extraordinary efforts and international attention, Holloway's parents fear investigators are no closer to cracking the case than they were a year ago.

"I don't think of it as a specific date to honor Natalee, because I truly feel that I honor her every day," Beth Twitty, Holloway's mother, told ABC News. "We don't have answers, and we are still in the middle of an active investigation. … We have raised expectations every time we hear of a new arrest and we think that, 'Oh maybe this is it' maybe this won't be a dead end."

From the beginning, police have focused in on the last person to see Holloway alive, Joran van der Sloot, the Dutch teenager who said he kissed her on the beach that night. Van der Sloot was arrested and detained for months, but police never officially charged him with Holloway's murder.

Joe Tacopina, van der Sloot's attorney, said police wasted valuable time by focusing in almost exclusively on his client.

"He's an 18-year-old boy whose life has been turned upside down by this," Tacopina told ABC News' Law & Justice Unit. "People have called him all sorts of names like 'predator,' 'rapist.' But there is absolutely no evidence that he had anything to do with it. In fact, there's exculpatory evidence that he had nothing to do with it -- like computer records and phone records that support his timeline."