We in Holland get the story’s instalments by the day. It is not easy to judge from the distance of TV clips and the odd interview with an obviously stoned Joran van der Sloot, but I would not be surprised if he were analysed as a textbook psychopath (sociopath).
Remember the movie ‘Primal Fear’, with Edward Norton?
Van der Sloot does not seem to feel any human emotion (empathy, compassion, perhaps even real fear). He walks like a zombie through life. But he knows how to act out emotions, as if he cared - or else he wouldn’t have attracted the attention of young and impressionable women. I think something horribly went wrong in his upbringing, or in his neurological development. Which, of course, is certainly not to say he’s not to blame for his acts.
I don’t know whether something happened to the young Joran that he couldn’t cope with, but that is a psychiatrical possibility. Were his parents divorced? In a violent way? Did he experience perinatal damage to his head? Did he get beaten up a lot? It’s all possible.
But at this point one thing is most certain: he won’t be having the happiest of times in a Peru prison, whether he’ll be in there for 35 years (in a murder conviction) or somewhere between 6 and 20 years (manslaughter as an act of impulse).
I would be totally unsurprised to find that: a. Natalie was nowhere near the first, and b. his connected daddy is fully aware of the 'inconsistencies' and has been shuffling his killer son one-two steps ahead of the law for a long time.