© 2005 Steve Yuhas

Two Months Too Many of Nancy Grace and Natalee Holloway: Stop the Aruba Bashing

By: Steve Yuhas

It is day sixty-two since Natalee Holloway went missing in Aruba, either by choice or by something more sinister, and day sixty-one since Nancy Grace and her fellow “journalists” began their frenzied torment of Aruba.  The portrait painted by her and her cronies is that Aruba and her judicial system (and those involved in it) are as backwards and stupid as the Keystone Cops, but when you dig a little deeper than her scowl (can someone please find her a La Prairie counter) and rhetoric it is obvious that the blunders in this case belong to the media. 

I know it is politically incorrect to talk about a family in mourning, after all it takes a lot to spend two months in Aruba shopping, getting hand outs from inn-keepers, restaurateurs, and locals and sun bathing in paradise, but enough is enough.  Some say it is good to be a Hilton (there is even a reality show on how to act like one: dim witted and shallow is hard to do on your own), but here is an idea for Mark Barnett: do a reality show based in Aruba “It’s Good to be a Holloway-Twitty” where contestants have to see how much they can get for free from people they trash on television every day and then force tearful insincere apologies to get more.  I’m no producer, but It will be a hit – I can feel it.

The story of Natalee Holloway is done – she is dead or disappeared on her own accord and there is nothing new to report, yet every day the same media panel of US lawyers talk about the same laws that don’t apply in Aruba and pretend that Aruba has a bad record when it is the United States that gave O.J. Simpson a not guilty verdict and Michael Jackson walked free.  These legal “experts” do not know Dutch law and they seldom bring on lawyers to talk about it so the same people who gave us such expert advice during the Chandra Levy disappearance and Lacy Peterson give us the legal analysis of Dutch law and advice on how to make it better, but they make no attempt to understand it.

I did – all it took was some phone calls to local officials and lawyers and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist for the folks that have Nancy on the air to do the same, but I suppose I’m doing cutting edge stuff by actually going to the source.

There has only really been one change recently and it was that the reward went up to $1 million.  Now, predictably people are remembering seeing all sorts of things two months ago that they never saw before.  Shazaam!  It is like winning the lottery: say you saw three men near a pond, the family will cry (on cue) on the air and then the police will drain it, come up with nothing and like Emeril with garlic BAMM one day you could get lucky and find a body in the pond you point out.  Do the same for landfills and other places a body might be and you might get your million bucks.  If not – no worries it is just your tax dollars at work. 

The people of Aruba have given enough for one missing foreigner who, frankly, dressed like a slut, got into a car with a man she didn’t know and is now gone – her own friends told us that.  Those are the facts, those were the facts sixty-two days ago and they are the facts today.  Natalee is painted by her family as a pious and naïve little girl, but in reality she went to Aruba to be who she really is, after all that is why high school students from the south pick Aruba – same way high school folks from southern California pick Tijuana, Mexico. 

Natalee chose a place to vacation where she could party as an adult and now her family puts out home videos and photos of the pious woman they want you to think she is, but make no mistake – virtuous girls go to Disneyland; sluts in hiding go to Aruba.  Nothing bad should have befallen her, but to pretend she is just a good girl who got caught up in something bad is silly and the media should stop.

It was with great joy that I watched Nancy Grace give a litany of law enforcement “bungles” that were actually made by the media jumping to conclusions; if you actually look at who reported on these “bungles” – it was her network and others.  If something appears in the press it doesn’t mean it got there by the police.  More likely it means your “source” is bad and if that is true then your news is bad too.

First Grace laments the fact that the media has been “screaming about the landfill from the get-go” (Natalee’s family hired the best investigators in America to go to Aruba and find her – didn’t they look in the landfill?)  But, in truth, nobody knows where the police searched since they are not talking.  All of the “bungles” by the police were bungles by the media reporting things from unreliable sources: “…blood found in the car was reported on national TV. Not!;” “Blood found on a mattress...was a dog’s blood;” “Bones were found…they were donkey bones;” and my personal favorite: “They gave the suspects alone time in a car together to cook up their story, handcuffed together.”

Think back Nancy, the police had two black guys in custody, why would the 10 minutes that the three “suspects” spent in the police car handcuffed together make a difference – don’t you think if they cooked up a story they did it during their 10 days of freedom?  As for the blood and bones – maybe a seasoned America detective in a small city like Washington D.C. with 800 murders a year can identify bone fragments on sight, but Aruba doesn’t have the pleasure of so many murders so maybe law enforcement likes to make sure that the bones are actually human – the media reported the bones were found from sources allegedly inside the police and government.  Bones were found – just not Natalee’s.

Now the FBI is involved and Grace believes that they will now help solve the case.  Is the war on terror over or did I miss the capture of al-Qaeda cells in the USA and bin Laden?  Surely the FBI has better things to do than flying to Aruba and taking up assets to look for a missing American in a foreign country.  We have plenty of missing people here – is the FBI going to every small town and village to dig through the garbage looking for all of the missing Americans or is Natalee somehow special? 

She is not special to me and I have confidence in Aruba’s police and legal system.  Not to mention that I’d rather have the FBI making sure that trains are not going to blow up from Washington D.C. to New York (ala London) rather than in Aruba looking for a girl who may have been partly to blame for her demise.

Might I suggest a story about the colossal blunders of American law enforcement?  One murder in Aruba in 2004 (a country the size of Washington DC) and very little violence or unemployment; how about this for a story idea?  Compare Aruba’s record for crime and violence against that of your neighborhood Nancy?  I bet your police officers bungled a few investigations as well (who killed Chandra Levy and where the hell is Osama bin Laden? (I think the FBI has been looking for him too).

Don’t throw stones on a justice system that seems to work when O.J. walks free and Michael Jackson sleeps with little boys, admits it on tape, gives them Jesus Juice and shows up to court in pajamas and then is found not guilty.  Talk about bungled cases; we’ve had our fair share and maybe you’d like to shed some light on those instead of constantly trashing Aruba.

Sources tell me that Natalee’s mother (Ms. Twitty) spent a lot of time shopping (maybe she should have searched the landfill since it is open to the public) and bought such necessities as a new bathing suit.  Many of her expenses such as meals and the like were picked up by those local buffoons that Beth Twitty had to apologize to before hopefully being served with court papers for libel and slander.  Twitty should show some good will and pay back some of the people she has mooched off of for the last two months and then start paying back the Dutch Air Force for the F-16s that were used to look for a girl wearing little more than a bra when she went to a bar (I wonder what she wears to church).

Oh yeah, before you send your inept posse of expert searchers home have them look in the landfill if they didn’t to stop Nancy from yelling about it and therefore, using the Nancy Grace logic, “bungled” the investigation.  Beth, you really should get a refund from the searchers you hired – they’re not doing a very good job of finding your precious partying daughter, but you and the media have damaged Aruba enough to the point where people who know the island is good and her people kind are going back in droves.  Hotels are sold out and flights continue to be full.

All of this Aruba bashing is only making the Holloway-Twitty clan look like a bunch of bumbling idiots and ungrateful leeches, the crack investigative team Twitty hired look like fools and the media folks towing the line a bunch of patsies in the quest to kill the island's tourism industry.  Fortunately, since all seems to be well in paradise, all they're doing is helping the tourist industry boom.  Three cheers for Nancy and her sources who can't get it right.

Steve Yuhas is a columnist and radio talk show host on KOGO AM 600 based in San Diego.  He may be reached at steve@steveyuhas.com or www.steveyuhas.com (unedited)