Unresolved Vacation Tragedies: From Natalee Holloway to Amy Lynn Bradley Alternatively, “Haunting Unraveling: Infamous Cases of Missing Tourists”

Beth Holloway’s daughter Natalee vanished during their vacation trip to Aruba in 2005, at just eighteen years old. Her disappearance made international headlines and was investigated for many years until Joran van der Sloot confessed to her murder as part of a plea deal on charges of extorting money from the family. Van Der Sloot had also murdered Stephany Flores five years later in Peru, for which he received a 20-year sentence in the US and was ordered to pay $25,100 in restitution to Holloway’s mother Beth. Brittanee Drexel disappeared during her spring break trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in 2009 but it wasn’t until thirteen years later that Raymond Moody confessed to kidnapping, raping and murdering the seventeen-year-old. Meanwhile, Amy Lynn Bradley went missing while on a Caribbean cruise with her family in March 1998 at age twenty-three; despite extensive searches of both ship and shore, her fate remains unknown to this day. These cases have been explored further through documentaries such as “The Disappearance of: Natalee Holloway” (2017) and “Pathological: The Lies of Joran van der Sloot” (2024).