Holloway Suspect: 'I Know What Happened'

Van der Sloot said on the tape that his Aruban friend, alone, took Holloway out to the ocean and dumped her apparently lifeless body.

(www.peterrdevries.nl)

But was she really dead?

"How were you so sure she was dead, Joran?" van der Eem asked on the tapes. "You know, people can also go into a coma."

"Yeah, I wasn't sure about that, but it really startled me to death," van der Sloot admitted.

"But she could also have been in a coma," van der Eem said.

"That's possible too, huh?" van der Sloot answered. "That's very possible."

Van der Sloot said he immediately began crafting an alibi.

"I have to do normal things," he said. "And I am going to casino tomorrow night so I'm on camera."

But calling into a TV show this past week, van der Sloot said his admissions to van der Eem were a put-on.

"It is true I told someone. Everybody will see it Sunday," van der Sloot said over the telephone on the Dutch television show "Pauw & Witteman."

"That is what he wanted to hear, so I told him what he wanted to hear," Van der Sloot said, adding that he never fully trusted the man to whom he'd described his encounter with Natalee Holloway.

"It is so stupid, it is so stupid, it is really stupid," Van der Sloot said, his voice cracking.

Based on de Vries tapes, the chief prosecutor in Aruba announced Thursday that he is reopening the case.

De Vries also showed his findings to Holloway's mother, Beth Twitty.

"She told me she kind of knew it already that Natalee wasn't alive anymore, but when you get this message it's still, yeah, a kind of relief," de Vries told ABC News.

Twitty admitted as much to ABC News.

"Now, with the knowing," she said, "it lets you put some things to rest. And that finally, finally, finally it's over."

According to the DeVries Dutch TV special, De Vries built his case with the help of van der Eem, 34 an Antillian who spent his youth in Curacao and Aruba but who has lived in the Netherlands for many years.

Van der Eem said he met van der Sloot at a poker table in a casino, and they talked about starting a marijuana-growing business. The two later would talk about and smoke marijuana during lengthy recorded conversations.

But van der Eem said he really wanted to bring van der Sloot down and decided to set a trap. Soon, he approached de Vries, the famous Dutch crime reporter, about working undercover, and de Vries hired him.

"I knew what I was doing," van der Eem said. "I had no emotions for this kid. The mother deserves an honest answer for what happened to his daughter."

The mystery behind the disappearance of the blond teenager has eluded efforts by the Aruba police and even the FBI for more than two years.

De Vries showed some of the key pieces of videotape to the Office of the Public Prosecutor of Aruba Jan. 24. Thursday, the island's chief prosecutor, Hans Mos, announced he has "intensified [the] investigation of Natalee Holloway due to recently received information."