Natalee Holloway Facts: Everything To Know About Investigation, Human Remains

The Natalee Holloway missing case gained spotlight after a six-part Oxygen series, "The Disappearance of Natalee Holloway," detailed the investigation. Natalee went missing in 2005 and was officially declared dead in 2012 despite her body not being found.

The series shows how her father Dave Holloway conducted a private investigation to find out what happened to his 18-year-old daughter. Natalee was last seen in 2005 during her vacation in Aruba, a Dutch Carribean island off Venezuela, from where she went missing. Three people are believed to have played a part in her disappearance — Dutch man Joran Van der Sloot and two Surinamese brothers, Deepak and Satish Kalpoe.

Dave's 18-month long private investigation uncovered human skeletal remains at an undisclosed location in Aruba. Currently, the remains are being analyzed to check if it is linked to the case. Late last month, the forensic investigator responsible for testing the newfound human remains said he is confident he’ll be able to determine whether they belong to the teenager.

“There was no indication that there was ever going to be possible remains found, yet when they were they happened to be bone samples and my deepest area of expertise is in mitochondrial DNA analysis,” Jason Kolowski, the former Forensic Laboratory Director of the D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences and part of the team responsible for identifying human remains after 9/11, told the Daily Mail in an interview. “It was almost like these perfect storms came together and said, this was the right place, this was the right time, these are the right people to be involved.”

After the Holloways felt unsatisfied with the investigation by Aruban authorities they decided to continue the search for the truth themselves. The Aruban authorities officially closed the case in 2008.

An initial test found the human remains belonged to a single person of Caucasian and European descent. Natalee was Caucasian and of European descent.

“We’re going to have statistical probability and a confidence level that this is Natalee or not,” Kolowski told the Daily Mail. “We’re waiting on the lab to finalize the data, which they will deliver to me and I will try to turn the data around into results which I will then deliver to Dave.”

Kolowski said he was hopeful the results would amount to justice for Natalee and the Holloway family.

“There is a personal hope that this is Natalee, but only because I have met Dave and I have had communications with Beth [Natalee's Mother] and I really have come to know the story of what they’ve been through and the struggles they have been through,” he said. “As a forensic scientist, you try not to let your personal emotions become involved with a case because you don’t want to introduce any kind of bias. I really want to put the truth forward.”

In the most recent development in the case, a key informant in the disappearance of Natalee decided to quit cooperating with the investigation, the episode of the Oxygen series that aired Saturday revealed. The informant, a man known as Gabriel, was set to participate in a sting to get a confession from another man about what happened to Natalee.