Within days of Natalee Holloway’s disappearance, her mother suspected Joran van der Sloot was involved. What she couldn’t have known was just how much, and for how long, Joran would manipulate the truth. For nearly two decades, he cycled through lies, near-confessions, and sensational claims that kept Natalee’s story in the headlines while dragging her family through hell.

In Part 2, we follow the Holloways through the maze of shifting stories, the scams and false leads, a shocking murder in Peru, and finally, after eighteen years, the shocking revelation that broke the case wide open.

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Eighteen-year-old Natalee Holloway vanished during a senior trip to Aruba, a disappearance that captured international attention and reshaped the island overnight. Her family fought for answers with a level of visibility most grieving families could only dream of. But more attention doesn’t always mean more truth.

In Part 1 of our two-part deep dive, we revisit the night Natalee went missing, the investigation that unraveled almost immediately, and the media storm that turned her case into a global spectacle. This episode examines what the spotlight illuminated, and what it obscured, in a family’s desperate search for their daughter.

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In this bonus episode, I sit down with investigative reporter Jennifer Mayerle, the journalist behind the WCCO documentary Footprint to Murder. Jennifer spent years following Jeanie Childs’ case, building trust with Jeanie’s family and navigating the emotional and ethical challenges of reporting a story this complex.

We talk about what it was like to cover this case from the inside: the relationships behind the reporting, the tensions around forensic genetic genealogy, and how the footprint evidence shaped the investigation. We also get into the questions that still linger, and what it means to center a victim’s humanity in a story often flattened by headlines.

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For more than 25 years, Jeanie’s case stayed unsolved. Investigators had fragments—a DNA profile appearing across key items, a set of bloody footprints—but not a name. Then, a new technology entered the picture with the potential to blow the whole case wide open. In Part 2, we follow the quiet breakthrough that put a suspect in focus, the messy, very human work of proving it, and the questions that still remain about privacy, power, and what “justice” really means for a grieving family.

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In the Summer of 1993, a leak in a south Minneapolis high-rise led a caretaker to a horrifying discovery: 35-year-old Jeanie Childs, murdered inside her apartment. On the floor beside her, a haunting clue: a trail of bloody bare footprints. Today we start at the beginning of a decades-long search for answers, tracing Jeanie’s story, the evidence left behind, and the first threads investigators followed as they tried to uncover what really happened that night.

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In 1993, Jeanie Childs was murdered in her Minneapolis apartment — a brutal crime that haunted her mother for decades. When genetic genealogy finally named a suspect twenty-five years later, it brought answers her family had spent a lifetime fighting for and new questions about what justice costs in the age of technology.

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I’m going off the record with my co-producer, Olivia, to break down our Menendez Brothers series, from how the story evolved during production to what it reveals about our culture’s fascination with crime and punishment. We talk about the ethics of telling familiar stories, the lasting impact of media coverage, and the newest developments in the brothers’ case more than 30 years later.

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Broadcast into millions of homes, the Menendez trial became something bigger than a murder case. It was television. Tabloid fodder. Even comedy material. But when trauma turns into spectacle, what gets lost? In Part Three, we trace how the case was flattened into a punchline, and why, 35 years later, it demands a different look.

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At just 18 and 21, Erik and Lyle Menendez stood trial for killing their parents. To many, it seemed unfathomable: how could two privileged kids from Beverly Hills do something like this? When they finally spoke, the picture that emerged was darker and more complicated than anyone expected. In Part Two, we follow the trial that gripped the country, and the stories the brothers had kept hidden for years.

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In the summer of 1989, wealthy media executive José Menendez and his wife, Kitty, were found dead inside their Beverly Hills home. The brutality of the crime was shocking enough, until the truth came out. Their killers weren’t intruders. They were their sons, Lyle and Erik. In Part One, we begin unraveling the story of a family that looked perfect on the outside, but was breaking apart from within.

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