A judge signed an order Thursday declaring Natalee Holloway dead, more than six years after the American teenager disappeared on the Caribbean island of Aruba.
Judge Alan King signed the order at the end of a hearing in a Birmingham courtroom that was attended by the missing woman's divorced parents, David and Beth Holloway.
David Holloway told the judge in September he believed his daughter had died and he wanted to stop payments on her medical insurance and use her $2,000 college fund to help her younger brother. Thursday's hearing was scheduled before a suspect questioned in Holloway's disappearance, Dutchman Joran van der Sloot, pleaded guilty Wednesday in Peru to the 2010 murder of a woman in Lima.
Natalee Holloway disappeared on a high school graduation trip to Aruba on May 30, 2005. The 18-year-old was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot early that day. Her body was never found and the case garnered intense media scrutiny and international attention.
King acted on a petition by David Holloway to have the missing 18-year-old declared dead.
The teen's mother originally objected, but her lawyer, Charlie DeBardeleben, said she subsequently changed her mind once she understood her husband's intentions. Natalee Holloway's parents were divorced in 1993 and Beth Holloway sat in the back row of the courtroom, mostly staring at her hands in her lap during the hearing Thursday afternoon.
She declined comment, but her attorney said, "She's ready to move on from this."
Mark White, an attorney for Dave Holoway, told the judge just before he announced his decision, that there was no evidence that Holloway was alive.
"Despite all that no evidence has been found Natalee Holloway is alive," he told the judge, noting that exhaustive searches, blanket international media coverage and even the offer of rewards had turned up nothing new.
