"The more you talk about it, the more you come to a realization that this part of the closure process."
So says Dave Holloway about his involvement in the first installment Oxygen's new true-crime series, The Disappearance of Natalee Holloway. For 12 years, Dave has agonized about what happened to his 18-year-old daughter Natalee when she disappeared from the island of Aruba on May 30, 2005, captivating the nation as the quest to convict Joran van der Sloot for the assumed murder took dramatic twists and turns. (Van der Sloot is currently serving time in a Peruvian prison for the murder of Stephany Flores Ramírez, who was killed five years to the day that Natalee went missing.) And while he tells E! News that he's found small offerings of closure along the way, it's the events chronicled in the new series that might finally put this case to rest for good.
"Even though we did have some sort of closure back in 2010 when Joran was arrested for the murder of another young lady...and then we had Natalee declared deceased in 2012," he told us in advance of the show's premiere on Saturday, Aug. 19. "And things were good for a few years until some new leads popped up."
"There's a lot of new information. We have to research, as we did from 2005, every little tidbit that comes up...we have to follow the lead until we discredit...It's been like a soap opera," T.J. Ward, the family's longtime private investigator who appears in the series alongside Dave, admitted. "That's why it's captured the attention of the world...Now it's coming down to the wire and we're now targeting and closing in on certain individuals...But now it's the waiting game, trying to find the end result."
"It may be coming to a close because we have found human remains and we had those tested," Dave added, referencing the bombshell news the pair announced on Today regarding an informant with connections to a person of interest in Natalee's disappearance. "And they tested positive for um, I'm not going to give you any details, but they tested positive for human remains." (Per the network, DNA testing is underway with results pending.)
For more from Dave and T.J., including Dave's thought on how he's kept the fight for justice for Natalee going for so long, be sure to check out the video above. And for even more from the pair, be sure to check out E! News at 7 and 11 p.m., only on E!
The Disappearance of Natalee Holloway premieres Saturday, Aug. 19 at 7 and 9 p.m. on Oxygen.
(E! and Oxygen are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)