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."

The Prime Suspect

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."

Holloway's Last Moments

In an exclusive interview with ABC News senior legal correspondent Chris Cuomo in February, van der Sloot described the last moments he saw Holloway alive.

"She was sitting on the sand by the ocean. … We cuddled awhile on the beach just laying there. … Until I said, about time to walk her back to her hotel. … At that moment, she said she didn't want to go back to her hotel and she wanted me to stay with her, because it was her last night. I tried to convince her to go back to the hotel and she said just put me down."

Van der Sloot said he had made a mistake when he left Holloway at the beach.

"I should have brought her back to her hotel, or I should have made sure I left her with someone -- one of her friends -- but I just should have gotten her back to where she should have been."

Earlier this year, Holloway's parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against van der Sloot and his father in a New York court, alleging that the teenager imprisoned and sexually assaulted Holloway and had been involved in her disappearance.

The lawsuit refers to van der Sloot as "the predator" and says that at least three young Aruban women had complained they were the victims of "date rape" by van der Sloot and his alleged accomplices.

A Revolving Door

Despite the focus on van der Sloot, the investigation soon became a revolving door of people on interest. Police arrested, and then released, 10 different men -- two of whom were later re-arrested and re-released. Last week, the latest suspect, a casino worker at Holloway's hotel, Guido Wever, was released six days after his arrest in Holland on May 17.

"Aruba needs to stop with the senseless arrests and really get focused on who these suspects are that they're going after," Twitty told ABC News. "Not just wind up with dead ends again, and again, and again."

A Potential New Suspect?

Now a new chief of police in Aruba may breathe new life into the investigation.

Tacopina said the new chief, R.F. Bernadina, was taking a fresh look at things and not just focusing on van der Sloot. He pointed to one potentially promising lead in particular: a composite sketch of a man who reportedly had encounters with as many as three women on the same stretch of beach where Holloway was last seen.

"They never looked for this individual," Tacopina said. "Never put a sketch on the island to see if there was a connection between this individual and Holloway's disappearance. … Now they're finally doing that."

Still, some critics believe Tacopina is trying to divert attention away from van der Sloot.

There are other developments. Last month, Aruban police were seen searching the sand dunes on the northern coast of the island, even though those same dunes had been searched many times before.

Holloway's father, Dave, said a final ocean search for her body might be carried out next month, even though the chances of finding her in the waters off Aruba more than 12 months after her disappearance are almost nonexistent. Investigators say if her body were dumped in the surf, it would have washed back on shore. Anything farther out would have been carried out to sea on the ocean currents.

Parents Fight for Justice

Today, a year later, Holloway's parents continue to fight for justice for their daughter, even though each promising new lead has brought only heartache instead of answers.

There was the piece of duct tape found on the beach that was attached to some human hairs. Tests indicated the hair's DNA didn't match Holloway's.

Tourists watched as volunteers dragged a barrel from the ocean. The barrel was empty. Finally, even the Dutch military brought in three F-16s to fly over the island using infrared photography in an attempt to find Holloway's grave. They too came up empty. The family refuses to give up.

Last year, Dave Holloway wrote a book called "Aruba: The Tragic Untold Story of Natalee Holloway and Corruption in Paradise." For the last two months, Twitty has been speaking to high school students in nearly a dozen states, warning them of the unseen dangers of overseas travel. She said her goal was to tell Holloway's story to students in all 50 states.

Holloway's mother told ABC News that the biggest emotional milestone was overcoming her initial denial that she might never find her daughter alive. She said she didn't want to put Holloway's case in the same sentence with other famous cases with terrible endings.

"Take for instance Laci Peterson -- I thought of her mother daily," Twitty said. "Daily, those initial three months in Aruba I just thought about her every day, every day. Because I couldn't see that I was going to have to place Natalee in the same setting as Laci and that was just a huge milestone for me when I was finally able to do that. … That her outcome may not be good."