VAN SUSTEREN: Charles, take me back to May 30th, which is several hours after Natalee missed her flight. How did you first get wind of the fact that Beth Holloway Twitty (search) was looking for her daughter?
CHARLES CROES, TALKED TO DUTCH SUSPECT: A major friend of mine called me up. He was working with Natalee's mom to help them find Natalee. This is important; obviously Natalee's mom was working FORWARD on USA soil from a phone call TO THE US.
VAN SUSTEREN: Why would he call you? What is your occupation that would be a reason he would call you?
C. CROES: Well, I have a sail [cell]rental company. And there was apparently a phone call made. And he was calling me betting or hoping that the phone call was made from one of our phones, and so that's why he called me. This is the heart of the matter right here. THERE WAS A PHONE CALL MADE. From Aruba to the USA, and it was extremely important. This must have been why Beth KNEW Natalee had been KIDNAPPED.
VAN SUSTEREN: About what time did he call you?
C. CROES: He called me at 11:30. AM or PM? I am guessing PM, as the Twittys were about to board the plane or had just arrived in Aruba?
VAN SUSTEREN: What did he say to you?
C. CROES: He told me that he needed my help. And I asked him what it was about. And he told me that it had to do something with a cell phone. And I didn't relate it to anything but work at that point. And then he said, "There is a possibility that a phone call was made using one of our phones." And I said, "OK." And he said, "It's very, very important." I said, "Fine," and I asked him to go into further details, and he did. And then I made arrangements to go see him. It is obvious that this phone call had significant info in it. It was not just a garbled message, and most likely it contained Natalee's voice. It most likely also contained some sort of background noise or voice that allowed Beth to be sure that Natalee had been inside the Van der Sloot home, once she herself had been there and heard their voices and background noise.
VAN SUSTEREN: When you got to the gas station, did you talk to Beth? Here there seems to have been a transcript cut. Greta usually asks follow up questions that stream from the previous comment, and no gas station had been mentioned yet.
C. CROES: Yes.
VAN SUSTEREN: Did Beth have any idea at that point, as far as you knew, who her daughter had been seen with or who she had last been known to be with?
C. CROES: Yes.
VAN SUSTEREN: What did she tell you?
C. CROES: Specifically, she told me that her daughter went to Carlos and Charlie's, and that, while there, she had met up with a young guy and asked him to take her home, and that she got into a small silver or gray car that had a large exhaust on the back and tinted windows, and had left.
VAN SUSTEREN: Did she have names for any of these people or just that description?
C. CROES: She had a description of the car and she had a description of one tall Dutch guy. And at that time, she said, with darkish hair.
VAN SUSTEREN: During the time that you were talking to Beth at the gas station, did the discussion of that phone call come up again?
C. CROES: Yes, it did.
VAN SUSTEREN: After you and Beth listened to that phone call several times and hung up with the person in the states, what did you do next? This also seems a little chopped. The discussion of the phone call, and yet here they were in an Aruban gas station, and listening to the call several times? Most probably, this call was a voice mail message and Beth either had recorded it or was calling the states and playing her voice mail back over and over for Croes. Hung up with the person in the states? That was never mentioned. What person? Whom did they call back in the states? Or did someone in the states play the recorded call over and over for them? Or was this the friend of Croes who also knew the Twittys?
C. CROES: After that, we spoke a while. And then we left that location with the intention of going to the Holiday Inn to continue meeting. On the way there, a young man and I were sitting in my car. And on the way there, instinctively, I wanted to go to drive off, pull over to the cabana area, just to look to see if perhaps she was there.
Obviously, we the public would like to know more about these mysterious phone calls, but another question is what effect this obvious piece of evidence has on the Aruban investigation. The last contact of Natalee was not yelling Aruba out Deepak's car window, but some kind of desperate phone call to her home in the states. Doesn't that change anything?
I quoted a lot of extraneous text above just so that I would not be accused of editing the transcript or further confusing y'all. Sorry this had to be so long.
Good analysis, this comment in particular. While I know some here disagree, I never quite thought Beth's first reaction (absent other evidence) would be that Natalee was kidnapped.
I will have to back and read that transcript again but I remember having a sense after that interview that the Twitty's met up with Croes before the police.
Thanks for your work on it......I can't remember who it was that called Beth when they were near memphis on the trip home from Arkansas......was it the chaperone that stayed behind in aruba, or did someone else make that call? I think she intended to meet the nus with the kids at the drop-off point after their bus-trip from the airport (was it atlanta airport?)