Holloway suspect faces 30 years in Peru

LIMA, Jan. 13 (UPI) -- A slain Peruvian woman's family vowed to be in court for the sentencing of her killer, a suspect in the case of a missing U.S. teen declared dead Thursday.

Enrique Flores, brother of 21-year-old Stephany Flores -- strangled in a Lima hotel room five years to the day after Natalee Holloway of suburban Birmingham, Ala., disappeared during a high school graduation trip to Aruba -- said family members would definitely be in court for Joran van der Sloot's 10 a.m. EST Friday sentencing.

The family members did not attend the court proceedings Wednesday, when van der Sloot, 24, of Arnhem, Netherlands, confessed to "qualified murder" and simple robbery in Flores' 2010 death.

"I am truly very sorry for what I have done. I feel very bad," he told the three presiding judges.

The qualified-murder plea, part of a legal petition under Peruvian law called an "anticipated conclusion of the process," lets van der Sloot qualify under sentencing guidelines for a reduced sentence of as much as 30 years. If he had denied the charges and gone through a legal process, he could have faced life imprisonment.

After van der Sloot entered his plea, his lawyer told the court his client suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder due to his father's 2010 death and the treatment he received after Holloway's 2005 disappearance -- which he referred to as the "other occurrence that he did not commit," Fox News Channel reported.

Police said van der Sloot murdered Stephany Flores, who he met at a casino, in his Lima hotel room May 30, 2010, then took money and bank cards from her wallet and fled to Chile, where he was arrested four days later.

Investigators said he strangled her in a burst of rage after she found computer files on his laptop, while visiting him in his hotel room, linking him to Holloway's disappearance.

Holloway, of the wealthy Birmingham suburb of Mountain Brook, Ala., was last seen with van der Sloot leaving a bar on the Dutch island early May 30, 2005.

She was 18 at the time. Her body was never found.

Jefferson County, Ala., Probate Judge Alan King declared Holloway legally dead Thursday in a hearing scheduled long before van der Sloot's plea and sentencing in the Flores murder.

The FBI is treating the case as a homicide, but van der Sloot has not been charged in her death. He was twice arrested in the case but released for lack of evidence.

Van der Sloot faces federal charges in Alabama for allegedly trying to extort $250,000 from Holloway's mother, Beth Holloway, with the false promise of revealing the location of her daughter's body and describing how she died. The charges of extortion and wire fraud were filed the day of van der Sloot's arrest in Chile.