Peter de Vries and the Van der Sloot family

By early November 2006, just a couple weeks after Peter announced he was pursuing this case, the Van der Sloot family issued this statement on line, via JR the Dutch Attorney at the Freedom of Blog site.

Posted: Sun Nov 5th, 2006 05:38 pm

The Van der Sloots and Peter?

Why, some would say would the Van der Sloot's take this approach with Peter and refuse to cooperate with him? After all, if Joran has nothing to hide, then why not just sit down with Peter and tell all he knows?

No one of course can answer this question better than the Van der Sloots themselves, but several reasons come to mind, based on events that were happening at that time.

Needless to say they had had very bad experiences with the media in general since the first days of this ordeal and to them Peter was another big time media person, who it seemed was trying to latch on to this case for ratings and money. His approach with them had been through emails and not especially warm or friendly, but more in a pushy, taking for granted mode that seemed to suggest, that they would cooperate, no matter what.

It was really their strongest feeling at this time to let all media talk die away as Joran was settling into life at college in Holland and doing very well, especially in college. The Van der Sloots really did not see any good from more media attention, certainly not in Holland.

In addition, another alarming event occurred at the end of October 2006 which caused them to be quite upset for Joran's safety in Holland. Joran's apartment was broken into where he lived with some other college students. The break in occurred after they had left for classes and it was only Joran's possessions that were violated. The list of what was taken included files, important documents, DVDs, pictures, his camera cards everything from his computer. This had a tremendous impact on the way the family and Joran were viewing things at the time. And while there was no proof of Peter de Vries involvement in this break in, the fact that at the time he was desperately trying to find out information about Joran would cause them to be suspicious, not necessarily of Peter himself but of someone that might have been trying to gain information for Peter's upcoming TV program.