On May 30, 2005, Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old celebrating her graduation from Mountain Brook High School, disappeared while on a trip to Aruba.

Joran van der Sloot, the 35-year-old Dutch national long suspected in her disappearance and death, was extradited from Peru on Thursday on charges that he tried in 2010 to extort Beth Holloway with a false promise of leading the mother to her daughter’s remains.

Natalee Holloway, now missing more than 18 years, would be 36 years old if she were alive today.

No one has ever been charged in her disappearance.

Van der Sloot, convicted in Peru of killing college student Stephany Flores on the fifth anniversary of Natalee’s disappearance, on Friday will face arraignment in the extortion case in a Birmingham federal courtroom.

Here are some of the key figures in the nearly 20 year old mystery of Holloway’s disappearance:

Natalee Holloway: On a five-day trip to Aruba after graduating, Holloway didn’t appear in the hotel lobby or at the airport as expected the morning they were to fly back. She was last seen on the island around 1 a.m. leaving a Carlos ‘n Charlie’s club. Her passport was still in her room. Roughly 130 students and chaperones made the trip, which was until that point an annual rite of passage at Mountain Brook High.

The Memphis native who moved to Alabama in 2000 was expected to attend the University of Alabama. In high school, she was in the National Honor Society, studied Spanish and was a member of American Field Service, which works with foreign exchange students. She had taken trips to Europe, Canada and some cruises. She planned to study premed that fall on an academic scholarship.

In the Mountain Brook yearbook, Holloway’s senior quote came from the old Lynyrd Skynyrd song “Freebird.” It says: “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? For I must be traveling on now, there’s too many places I haven’t seen.”

’Natalee’s Miss Itinerary,’’ Katie Henley, a fellow graduate who was also on the trip, said. ‘’If she knew she was going to miss a flight she’d freak out. It’s just not like her . . . When she wasn’t there we knew something was wrong.” There have never been any confirmed sightings of her since Aug. 30, 2005.

Though legally declared dead in 2012, her remains have never been found. If alive, she would turn 37 in October 2023.

Joran van der Sloot: Born in the Netherlands in 1987 to a father who was a lawyer and an art teacher mother, van der Sloot was an honor student and star athlete in Aruba, where his family moved in 1990. As a teen, he frequented the island’s casinos.

The night Natalee Holloway vanished, van der Sloot, then 17, nearly got into a fight with her friends at a bar, Brian Reynolds, who was on the trip, told a reporter in 2005.

He had been talking to Holloway, who he met days before she disappeared. ”There was almost a fight between my friend and him,” said Reynolds. “I had to break them up. That’s when I got a good look at them.”

He left a bar with two friends and Holloway, who was reportedly intoxicated, early in the morning on the day she was last seen. His story of what happened that morning has changed repeatedly over the years.

According to federal documents, van der Sloot on June 2, 2005, told authorities that he and Holloway had driven to the California Lighthouse area of Arashi Beach because Holloway wanted to see sharks.

He said that he dropped Holloway off at her hotel – the Holiday Inn in Aruba’s High Rise Hotels district – about 2 a.m. Van der Sloot subsequently made several contradictory statements about what happened to Holloway and his involvement.

At times, he has confessed to hiding or disposing of her body. “Van der Sloot claimed that when she fell down, she hit her head on a rock and died as a result of the impact,’’ an FBI Special Agent once wrote.

Van der Sloot in 2012 pleaded guilty in Peru to murdering 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a prominent Peruvian family. She was killed in 2010 five years to the day after Holloway’s disappearance.

He was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Van der Sloot married a Peruvian woman in July 2014 in a ceremony at a maximum security prison. He was transferred among Peruvian prisons in response to reports that he enjoyed privileges such as television, internet access and a cellphone, and accusations that he had threatened to kill a warden. He fathered a child while in prison.

Federal authorities in Alabama contend that in 2010 van der Sloot exploited the fear of Holloway’s mother, Beth, that she would never find her daughter’s body or know what happened to her unless she paid him $250,000.

Beth Holloway: In the years since her daughter’s disappearance, Beth Holloway, a former teacher, has been an advocate for Natalee and other missing young women.

“I’ve been able to redefine my life, and I’ve been able to find joy and happiness through my son, through my son’s new family, and my work, so I think I’m in a good place now,” she said in a 2015 interview.

She has written a book, was once rumored to have dated John Ramsey, whose daughter Jon Benet was murdered in 1996, and in 2011 hosted Lifetime Television’s Network’s show “Vanished.”

Holloway filed a scathing lawsuit in Birmingham against Oxygen Media, claiming they duped her into providing her DNA and that the conduct in the making of a 2017 true crime series.

On March 29, 2010, van der Sloot contacted an unidentified representative of Natalee’s mother via email.

During a series of emails that followed, according to charging documents, van der Sloot offered to take the representative to Natalee’s body and tell that representative what happened to her and identify those involved in her disappearance and death.

For an initial payment of $25,000, he would take the Holloway representative to the location of Natalee’s body. Once the body was recovered and confirmed to be Natalee, he said, he would then collect the remaining $225,000.

He then admitted to the representative that he lied about the location of Natalee’s remains.

In 2019, she joined the search for missing Alabama college student Aniah Blanchard.

“I followed Natalee’s case and I’ve always admired her for her strength — just thought she was an amazing lady,” Blanchard’s mother told ABC News of Beth Holloway. “She’s an amazing woman.”

Jug Twitty: The couple, whose 2000 union was a second marriage for both, attracted international attention after Natalee Holloway disappeared.

The Twittys appeared together during the early stages of the search. As it dragged on, Jug Twitty returned to Birmingham, and Beth remained in Aruba for almost three months.

In 2007, he filed for divorce saying they had “such a complete incompatibility of temperament that the parties can no longer live together.”

In the years since the divorce, Twitty has continued to be vocal about the handling of the case.

“He’s a monster, he’s a sick individual,” Twitty said of van der Sloot in 2010. “He should have been taken off the streets a long time ago.”

Dave Holloway: Natalee’s father, Dave Holloway, told AL.com in an interview in 2015 he will never give up searching for the oldest of his four children.

“I still think about it every day,’’ he said. “That’s something you’ll never get out of your mind.”

In 2012, he successfully petitioned to have his daughter officially declared dead. He said it was needed to handle several lingering issues. It also might eventually help the criminal probe in her case, he said.

“We hope that today will bring some closure,” he said at the time.

He has made return trips to Aruba and followed leads that turned into dead ends.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve buried Natalee,’’ he once told AL.com, “and I don’t want to go through that again.”

Still, he said he had thought of one day meeting with van der Sloot and getting answers.

“I still hold out hope that with hard prison life, maybe he’ll change,’’ Holloway said then.

“We may not get an answer until he comes to Birmingham.”

The Kalpoe brothers: On what was to be her last night in Aruba, Natalee and her friends met up with van der Sloot and his friends, Surinamese brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, who were then 21 and 18, respectively.

In the days that followed, van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers were arrested multiple times in connection with her disappearance, but were released without being charged.

The three initially told police that after a night of eating, drinking and dancing, they took Holloway to a northern beach before dropping her off at her hotel around 2 a.m.

Satish Kalpoe’s lawyer later said his client admitted that his story was a lie and then claimed that he and his brother dropped Holloway and van der Sloot off together at a beach near the Marriott hotel, then went home, said the lawyer.

As of 2020, the Kalpoes continue to live and work in Aruba.

Paulus van der Sloot: An Aruban lawyer in training to be a judge in 2005, Paulus van der Sloot was questioned repeatedly along with his son.

He himself was arrested in the case a month after she vanished, but he was soon released.

When his son was charged with extortion in 2010, an affidavit said Natalee Holloway died after Joran van der Sloot threw her to the ground when she attempted to stop him from leaving her.

The affidavit says that Paulus van der Sloot then helped his dispose of Natalee Holloway’s body.

Joran van der Sloot said his father told him Natalee Holloway’s body was buried under the foundation of a house.

The affidavit was filed months after Paulus van der Sloot died while playing tennis at age 57.

Stephany Flores: A Peruvian business student Joran van der Sloot met while playing poker in a Lima casino in 2010, Flores died at Joran van der Sloot’s hands five years to the day Natalee Holloway vanished.

Flores wanted to continue playing poker online so the two went to his hotel in her SUV at about 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, May 30, 2010.

“We went to my room and played poker on my laptop, and at that time I opened my e-mail and saw a message saying, ‘I’m going to kill you,” his confession read.

Van der Sloot says he then explained to Flores that he had been arrested and was a suspect in the disappearance.

Upon hearing the information, Flores “struck me on the left side of my head with her fist,” he said in his confession.

“In that moment I impulsively hit her with my right elbow in the face exactly on the nose. There was a lot of blood all over the place. … I took my shirt, placed it on her face pressing hard until I killed Stephany …”

She was in her third year studying business administration at University of Lima, and ran the merchandising arm of the family entertainment and event-promotion business, her brother told CNN.

Van der Sloot left the hotel, telling staff not to “his girl,” police said.

He was in Chile and sent back to Peru.