The forensic investigator responsible for testing newfound human remains in the Natalee Holloway case is confident he’ll be able to determine whether they belong to the long-missing teenager. 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, said he was hopeful the identification would finally bring the Holloway family some peace.

Kolowski became involved in the case after a team associated with Natalee’s father, Dave Holloway, called him earlier in the year — 12 years after Natalee’s initial disappearance. A subsequent investigation involving unidentified tipsters and a key suspect yielded a set of human remains from an undisclosed location in Aruba. Now, Kolowski is testing those remains to determine whether they belong to Natalee.

“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,” Kolowski told the Daily Mail in an interview this week. “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.”

Kolowski and a “trusted third party” have already made headway in the testing. An initial test found the remains to be human, belonging to a single person of Caucasian and European descent. Natalee, who went missing in 2005, 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.”

Natalee was officially declared dead in 2012 — her body, however, was never found. A Dutch man named Joran van der Sloot remained to this day the primary suspect in the case. Van der Sloot himself is still behind bars in Peru for the murder of another young woman: 21-year-old Stephany Flores, who was killed five years to the day after Natalee’s disappearance. Natalee’s father called the newfound human remains the “most credible lead” he’s seen in 12 years of searching for his daughter.

Kolowski was hopeful the results would amount to long-overdue 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 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.”

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