WRITER FROM BIRMINGHAM SPEAKS OUT

Julia Renfro--Backstabber or Opportunist?

By Chuck Geiss

Natalee Holloway’s mysterious disappearance in Aruba during a high school graduation trip drew unprecedented attention from the national media. While fresh news is now rare, a newly published article by Bryan Burroughs in Vanity Fair provides the most recent account of what happened on the island during the weeks following Holloway’s disappearance.

The article provides few new facts, but more sensationally it points a finger at the Twitty family for being heavy-handed with the police. Burroughs proposes that their approach hindered the investigation, but the Vanity Fair article gives an incomplete account of what the Twittys and the Holloways endured in the search for their daughter. Moreover, two of Burroughs’ primary sources should be challenged.

Gerald Dompig, the island’s deputy chief of police, characterizes the Twittys and their American friends as unnecessarily aggressive and unruly during the early weeks of the search.

However, I visited the Twittys on the island two weeks after Natalee’s disappearance, and the family’s temperament was much calmer than I had expected. A tense situation was made worse by a series of tips and leads that sent the family and friends in dozens of different directions while police remained remarkably unfazed.

The family complied with island officials for weeks and turned to the international media only after concluding that continued silence about their frustrations was a losing proposition. Unfortunately, Vanity Fair did not report the full extent of the family’s travails.

Burroughs’ other doubtful source is Julia Renfro, an American-born newspaper reporter who works at one of the island’s dailies. She befriended the Twittys at first, but has since turned on them, which is a substantial aspect of Burroughs’s Vanity Fair story. Renfro was seemingly a big help to the family in the initial weeks of the search, but her motives for doing so are dubious. It is my contention she was either a newspaper reporter aggressively interested in getting a story or just someone starved for attention.

The reason Renfro suddenly found the Twittys disinterested in her help was the fact that she also orchestrated, or at least contributed to, one of the cruelest hoaxes of the investigation. Twelve days after Natalee’s disappearance, Renfro suddenly appeared in downtown Oranjestad where Jug Twitty had made an unplanned stop to buy some clothes (the circumstances surrounding how she found him remain mysterious).

Renfro was hysterical over news that Natalee had been found dead and her body had been moved to the island’s courthouse. When asked where she had learned these details, she claimed it had come from one of her regular sources, a deputy information officer in the justice department.

What followed was a frantic, ten-block car race to the courthouse made more uncomfortable by the fact that Renfro had pushed herself into the family’s already full minivan (she took a spot on the console), conspicuously inserting herself, perhaps now as a newspaper reporter, into the unfolding story.

Upon arriving at the courthouse, a throng of television cameras met the family. What happened next was a long, uncomfortable walk to the courthouse where Jug and his friends found a locked door and an apparently empty building. It was later learned that no justice department official had ever leaked the information.

The incident was yet another nightmarish spectacle that the family endured during weeks of searching for their daughter. Renfro’s contribution to the occasion was the beginning of the end of her association with the family (another fact not found in the Vanity Fair story).

It should be considered that while the search for Natalee Holloway continues, it took weeks for the family to figure out which personalities on the island were credible or not, which has led to some hurt feelings along the way.