An Alabama probate judge revealed at a court hearing Thursday that he will sign an order that will declare Natalee Holloway dead, over 6 years after the teenager disappeared on the Caribbean island of Aruba.

Judge Alan King announced his decision at a hearing in his Birmingham courtroom Thursday which had the missing woman’s divorced parents, David and Beth Holloway, in attendance.

David Holloway said to the judge in September he believed his daughter had died and he wished to stop payments on her medical insurance and use her $2,000 college fund to assist her younger brother. Thursday’s hearing was set ahead of a suspect questioned in Holloway’s disappearance, Dutchman Joran van der Sloot, pleaded guilty Wednesday in Peru to the 2010 killing of a woman in Lima.

A high school graduation trip is when Natalee Holloway disappeared on May 30, 2005. She was last witnessed leaving a bar with van der Sloot early that day. Her body was never discovered and the case gathered intense media scrutiny and international attention.

King was acting on a petition by David Holloway to have Natalee declared dead.

Her mother objected at first, but her lawyer, Charlie DeBardeleben, stated that she now had no objection. Natalee Holloway’s parents were divorced in 1993 and Beth Holloway sat in the back row of the courtroom, mostly staring at her hands in her lap throughout the afternoon hearing. She refused comment when she entered the courtroom.

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