Joran van der Sloot admits to killing Natalee Holloway, pleads guilty to extortion

Oct. 18 (UPI) -- Joran van der Sloot admitted to killing Natalee Holloway in Aruba in 2005 as he pleaded guilty to attempting to extort her mother in federal court on Wednesday.

The 36-year-old van der Sloot, a Dutch national, was sentenced to 20 years in prison as part of the plea deal, under which he agreed to a polygraph test and to provide information about Natalee Holloway's disappearance to her mother, Beth Holloway, as part of the federal plea deal.

He is already serving time in a prison in Peru for the 2010 murder of 21-year-old Stephany Flores. Prosecutors said he will be returned there once proceedings in the Holloway case are finished in the United States.

His sentence in Peru will be completed in 2045 and if he is freed earlier, the agreement requires him to complete the new sentence in the United States.

Federal officials said van der Sloot had already recorded a statement about what happened to Holloway to satisfy the plea deal.

In the recording van der Sloot said he stopped on a beach with the 18-year-old Natalee Holloway after the two were dropped off a short distance from her hotel where he said he "laid her down" and began kissing although Holloway had said she wanted to return directly to the hotel.

He said Holloway told him to stop but he refused and Natalee Holloway proceeded to knee him "in the crotch." Van der Sloot said he then kicked her "extremely hard in the face" and she was then "laying down unconscious, possibly even dead."

Van der Sloot then said he picked up a cinderblock he found on the beach and "smashed" her head with it before walking into the ocean and pushing Natalee Holloway's body into the water.

In court on Wednesday, van der Sloot apologized and said he hoped the statement "will provide some kind of closure."

In 2010, van der Sloot told Beth Holloway that for $250,000 he would tell her where Natalee's body was buried in Aruba. After receiving $25,000, her attorney found out that van der Sloot's information was bogus.

Beth Holloway in court on Wednesday said that after 18 years of denying that she had killed her daughter, he had now "finally admitted that you, in fact, have murdered her."

"You changed the course of our lives and turned them upside down. You are a killer. I want you to remember that every time that jail door slams," Beth Holloway said.