The Murder of Stephany Flores Ramírez

Stephany Flores

Stephany Flores Ramírez was a 21-year-old university student in Lima. On the evening of Saturday 29 May 2010 she met Joran van der Sloot, a Dutch national who had arrived in Peru from Colombia two weeks earlier to play in a poker tournament, at the Atlantic City casino in the city, where the event was being held. Police later obtained video of the two of them together at the casino.

What happened at the hotel

At about 5 a.m. on Sunday 30 May, a hotel employee saw Flores and van der Sloot go into his room at the Lima hotel where he had been staying. Two people saw him leave at around 8:45 a.m., and police concluded that she was killed in that interval. He left Peru the next day. Flores's body was found in the room late on 1 June. The date of her death attracted worldwide attention because it fell exactly five years after Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old American, vanished in Aruba in 2005. Van der Sloot had been arrested in that case in 2005 and again in 2007 but was never charged.

Flight, arrest and confession

Peruvian police issued an alert, and on 3 June 2010 Chilean police detained van der Sloot in a taxi travelling from Santiago towards Viña del Mar, where he had rented a room. The next day Chile expelled him and handed him to Peruvian officers at the border. The day before, US federal prosecutors had charged him with trying to extort Holloway's mother. At first he said he was innocent, while acknowledging that he had met Flores at the casino, but he later confessed. Prosecutors' account was that Flores had come across material about the Holloway case on his computer and that a confrontation followed in which he killed her. He also admitted taking her belongings, including her credit cards.

Trial and sentence

In January 2012 van der Sloot formally admitted to the murder and robbery, a step that allowed him to seek a shorter term under Peru's procedure for an early conclusion of proceedings. A three-judge panel sentenced him to 28 years in prison, two years below the maximum, and ordered him to pay 200,000 soles in reparations to Flores's family. The court set his release date, counting time already served, as 10 June 2038, and ordered that he be expelled from Peru once he completes the sentence.

The Holloway extortion case and confession

The 2010 American indictment accused van der Sloot of asking Beth Holloway for 250,000 dollars in exchange for revealing where her daughter's remains were, with 25,000 dollars paid up front; after receiving that first payment, he described the information he had given as worthless. Under a 2001 treaty that allows temporary extradition between the two countries, Peru sent him to the United States on 8 June 2023. On 18 October 2023, before a federal judge in Birmingham, Alabama, he pleaded guilty to extortion and wire fraud and was sentenced to 20 years, to run concurrently with his Peruvian sentence. As part of the deal he gave a detailed account admitting that he had killed Holloway in Aruba in 2005, which her mother said was confirmed by a polygraph. He could not be charged with her murder in the United States, and the statute of limitations had run out in Aruba. At the end of October 2023 he was sent back to Peru to continue serving his sentence for killing Flores.

Developments since 2024

The Holloway confession has kept the case in legal motion. In early 2026 Aruba's prosecutors said the material they obtained from the US Justice Department was not enough to charge him with murder there, and the time limit for a manslaughter charge had expired on the island. After Beth Holloway filed a criminal complaint in the Netherlands, Aruba transferred its file to the Dutch prosecution service in Amsterdam in April 2026 so it could assess whether he could be prosecuted under Dutch law, where the relevant offence has not lapsed. No Dutch charge had been reported in the sources reviewed here. In Peru, his 28-year sentence for killing Flores is unchanged.

Why the case matters

For Peru, the case showed that a foreign suspect could be tracked across a border within days and convicted in the country where the crime took place, with casino video, witnesses at the hotel, quick cooperation from Chile and a confession all playing a part. The Lima conviction was the first time van der Sloot was held legally responsible for taking a life, more than a decade before his admission about Holloway. It also showed how Peru's plea rules and its treaty with the United States could be used together: the 2023 temporary surrender let an American court act without interrupting a sentence imposed for a Peruvian victim.