Netflix's Natalee Holloway trailer has viewers asking about Joran van der Sloot's other victim

Netflix released the trailer for Taken: Natalee Holloway on October 22: three episodes, premiering November 4, directed by Dani Sloane. The pitch is that Beth Holloway, Natalee's mother, tells her full story for the first time, backed by interviews with detectives and audio from the family, friends, and the FBI.

The case needs little introduction, which is precisely the issue viewers are raising. Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old from Alabama, vanished on a graduation trip to Aruba in 2005 and was never found; Joran van der Sloot, the last person seen with her, confessed to killing her only in 2023. The top comment under the trailer looks past all of it, toward Peru:

"I know this documentary is about Natalee, but let's also remember his other victim: Peruvian 21-year-old girl Stephany Flores. When people talk about this guy, they always remember Natalee but often forget about Stephany. She deserves to be remembered too."

— the most-upvoted comment under Netflix's trailer

The victim the comments are talking about

Stephany Flores was a 21-year-old business student in Lima, the daughter of a former Peruvian presidential candidate. Van der Sloot killed her in a hotel room and is serving a 28-year sentence in Peru for her murder, per DutchReview's timeline of the case.

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The date is the detail nobody who covers this case can get past.

Stephany Flores was killed on May 30, 2010 — five years to the day after Natalee Holloway disappeared.

Why "another documentary" is a fair question

The second most-liked comment under the trailer makes a broader complaint: "there are so many stories we DON'T know about, didn't get national attention, and don't have several documentaries about them." For this case, "several" is literal. The disappearance has already produced a 2009 Lifetime movie and a 2017 Oxygen series fronted by Natalee's father, plus nonstop cable coverage that director Dani Sloane herself describes — she told press that growing up in the 2000s, Natalee's face was impossible to escape.

Netflix's answer to "why again" is the 2023 turn in the story. Van der Sloot was extradited to the US that year for taking $25,000 from the Holloway family in 2010 in exchange for information he never delivered, and in pleading guilty he finally confessed to the killing — meaning Beth Holloway is now telling the story with an answer she didn't have for 18 years.

My position: the commenters aren't wrong about true crime's habit of re-litigating the same famous cases while others go untold, and it says something that this pushback now shows up at the top of the comments rather than the bottom. Whether Taken justifies itself comes down to one thing on November 4 — whether a mother with a confession in hand has something to say that three screen versions of this story haven't already said.

Previously we wrote: Netflix stock just hit a two-year low, and Ted Sarandos is blaming the shows