A friend of Natalee Holloway’s suspected killer has claimed that her skull was burned in a cave.

John Ludwick is a friend of Joran van Der Sloot, who was the last person seen with Natalee, 18, before she disappeared in Aruba in 2005. Ludwick made the bombshell confession in the Oxygen docuseries The Disappearance of Natalee Holloway.

As CrimeOnline previously reported, Ludwick had previously said that Van Der Sloot paid him $1,500 to dig up Natalee’s buried remains near a residential property in Aruba. A tipster by the name of Gabe reportedly helped set up a sting operation in which he recorded Ludwick detailing how he helped van der Sloot dig up and dispose of her body.

In the latest confession, Ludwick tells private investigator T.J. Ward, who has been working with Natalee’s father Dave Holloway, that he witnessed van der Sloot trying to destroy evidence of her remains, and assisted his friend.

“The idea was to crush everything to the point where it wasn’t recognizable as her bones or skull or anything like that,” Ludwick tells Ward.

“The only thing that got burned was the skull to burn the hair fibers … It was doused in gasoline in a fire pit in a cave.”

It remains unclear where any additional remains are located.

Natalee was in Aruba on a school trip with her high school classmates to celebrate their graduation in May 2005 when she vanished after a night out at a bar. Though van der Sloot has not been officially charged in connection with her disappearance and presumed death, he has been the primary person of interest in the case for over a decade.

Joran van der Sloot is currently serving a 28-year prison sentence for the murder of a Stephany Flores Ramírez in Peru, who was killed exactly five years after Natalee vanished.

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