 The Natalee Holloway case may be all-but unsolvable, so it's apparently time to take the next logical steps in order to keep this ratings barn-burner alive.
Step 1: Send Greta back to Arbua -- STAT! To hell with the London terrorists and that damned space shuttle -- and for God's sake make sure her hotel is properly booked...!
Step 2: run irrelevant backgrounders on the suspects. Item -- Joran van der Sloot can't play poker. According to PageSix:
Miami club impresario Tommy Pooch, who played next to Van Der Sloot for more than two hours, tells us the Dutch-born youth "was as nice as can be, but he was a terrible poker player.
"He kept buying back in, and finally he got knocked out when they stopped buy-ins," Pooch said. "He was a terrible bluffer . . . He was a young, excitable kid. He wore the sunglasses and the baseball cap like they do on TV, but even that didn't help."
Van Der Sloot must have had a habit of losing money in the poker room of the Holiday Inn-Aruba. "It seemed like everyone knew him there," Pooch said. "It was his hangout. He knew all the dealers by name. He was a local yokel."
Step 3: Drop an unsubstantiated bombshell. Scarborough Country's the place for that sort of thing, and Joe didn't disappoint last night. Scared Monkeys is on the case:
SCARBOROUGH: Now, friend, let me tell you, I’m going to give you some information right now. It’s information that you’re not hearing on TV. It’s information that you haven’t heard certainly in the court system. Inside sources in this investigation tell me and have told me—and I found out earlier today that there are reports from people who are inside the bar that, actually, Natalee Holloway was approached twice by Joran van der Sloot.
Twice, he made passes toward her. Twice, she rebuffed him. The second time, she pushed him away. And a friend of hers from Birmingham from the school hit him with a closed—or, I’m sorry—Joran hit Natalee Holloway with a closed fist. Then this
friend tried to walk in between the two and tried to stop him from aggressively going after her and suggested that he take it outside. If he wanted to fight somebody, he should fight somebody his own size.
It’s going to be very interesting to see if that information comes out tomorrow in the court hearing, whether we find out, again, two times—and I’ll tell you what. This information, when I learned it today from somebody very close to the case, this information certainly changes what we’ve heard, which, early on, we heard, of course, that Natalee just jumped in the car and drove away.
Here's the transcript. A risky move for Scarborough, to be sure. No such news or even gossip appears on any of the Birmingham news sites, and it's hard to believe, honestly, that such a story wouldn't have hit the rumor mill long ago ... I suppose he can always claim later that he's technically not a journalist... Hyscience has more info on the case. There will be fresh hearings on the detention status of the three suspects today.
[Sidebar: The Natalee Holloway story may not be important to everyone, and there's a strong case to be made that it's time for the media to leave it alone (so much bigger global fish to fry), and for the U.S. and other governments to lay off the use of military jets for the purpose of finding one missing girl, but don't look for this story to go away anytime soon ... at least, not until the ratings start to drop...]
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