Peru Jails van der Sloot on Murder Charge

(June 11) -- A Peruvian judge ordered Joran van der Sloot jailed today on charges of first-degree murder and robbery in the death of a 21-year-old Lima woman. The judge determined that the suspect in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway acted with "ferocity and great cruelty," The Associated Press reports.

Investigator say van der Sloot took Stephany Flores to his hotel room after meeting her in a Lima casino, bashed in her face, strangled her and rifled through her wallet.

"The aggravating factors are having acted with ferocity and great cruelty," court spokesman Luis Gallardo told the AP.

As a result of today's ruling, the 22-year-old Dutchman will be held in a penitentiary pending trial. If he's tried and convicted of murder in Peru, he faces 15 to 35 years in prison. There's been no word yet on when that trial will begin.

Meanwhile, an attorney representing Beth Holloway, the mother of Natalee, appeared on NBC's "Today" show today to discuss details of an extortion plot in which van der Sloot allegedly offered to provide information on Holloway's disappearance in exchange for a large sum of money.

Holloway, an 18-year-old Alabama woman who vanished on a trip to Aruba in 2005, was last seen leaving a nightclub with van der Sloot. Her body has never been found.

According to John Q. Kelly, Beth Holloway's New York-based attorney, the extortion plot began on March 30 when he received an e-mail from van der Sloot stating that he could provide details on Holloway's death and the location of her body in exchange for $250,000. Kelly says he was skeptical but decided to play along.

"[I was] assuming everything he was going to tell me was false but had to ... approach it very carefully and keep communicating," Kelly said. "[If] the information turned out to be true, Beth would get closure, and she'd bring Natalee home. [Or] assuming it was false, it would be extortion and wire fraud once the falsehoods were proven."

The series of e-mails Kelly exchanged with van der Sloot eventually led to an Easter Sunday meeting at a hotel in Aruba.

"He thought I was bringing [money]," Kelly said. "I engaged him in a long series of conversations, tried to get as much info as I could and then told him at the very end, when he was pushing the issue, that I didn't have money."

Kelly said van der Sloot became "angry" and left when he found out he would not be receiving any money that day. Nonetheless, the electronic communications continued, and on May 10 Kelly again traveled to Aruba. This time, however, the FBI was involved, and an official sting operation was launched.

Kelly spent four hours with van der Sloot during the second meeting. He said he provided van der Sloot with $10,000 in cash and agreed to wire him an additional $15,000.

"The first $25,000 was to be upfront for what happened to Natalee and where she was," Kelly said.

The two then traveled by car to several locations and wound up in front of a house where van der Sloot allegedly told Kelly that Natalee was buried in the foundation.

"I took pictures of him in front of the house pointing to the location," Kelly said.

Authorities would later discover that the house van der Sloot had pointed out was not even built during the time Natalee went missing. Despite this discrepancy, officials from Texas EquuSearch, a Texas-based missing person search and recovery group, assisted in a search of the area using ground-penetrating radar. An official with EquuSearch told AOL News that nothing was found.

Not long after the second meeting, van der Sloot allegedly sent Kelly another e-mail and "indicated it was all a hoax," Kelly said. Van der Sloot then used the $25,000 he received to fund a trip to Peru to play in a poker tournament. It was there, on June 2, that Flores was found dead in van der Sloot's hotel room in Lima, setting off a police manhunt that ended with his arrest in Chile on June 3.

Kelly said the events that transpired in Peru have "devastated" Beth Holloway.

"Another young girl is dead, and another family is living the nightmare that she went through," Kelly said. "Needless to say, she's distraught right now just for the other family and the situation."

While no new information on Holloway was gleaned from any of the meetings, Kelly said he did walk away with an opinion of van der Sloot.

"You can just look right into his eyes and see he is cold as ice and pathological," Kelly said.

Authorities in Peru are now saying that van der Sloot has made additional statements to them about Holloway's disappearance.

"He let slip that he knew the place where this person was buried," the chief of Peru's criminal police, Gen. Cesar Guardia, told the AP. But he said that van der Sloot told investigators "he would only testify [on the matter] before Aruba authorities."

Whether anything comes of those alleged statements remains to be seen.