Private eye who helped Natalee Holloway’s family wants to help find Sudiksha Konanki — as convinced she didn’t drown
A private eye who worked for Natalee Holloway’s family is offering to help in the University of Pittsburgh student disappearance of Sudiksha Konanki — because he fears she’s likely been snatched.
TJ Ward, who helped Holloway’s parents when she vanished in Aruba 20 years ago, told Newsnation late Monday that he “made contact with the [Konakni] family” to “try to help them locate their daughter” in the Dominican Republic.
The private eye agrees with the missing student’s family that something terrifying may have happened.
“I don’t think that she drowned in the ocean,” Ward also told Fox News, saying that “drowning would be one of the last things I think of right now.”
“I totally believe that somebody knows something, where she is, or somebody took her away, or somebody’s holding her somewhere.”
Local authorities suggested Konanki may have drowned because she was last seen on the beach — seemingly with a young man — around 4 a.m. after a night out with friends.
However, Ward said: “If she had gone into the water, she would’ve washed up somewhere with a tide the way that comes into the island.”
Konanki’s disappearance shares some similarities with Holloway’s, including that both women traveled to a Caribbean beach resort with classmates.
Both women also vanished on the beach at night after staying out late with friends.
Holloway’s case came to a horrifying conclusion last year after a longtime suspect in her disappearance, Joran van der Sloot, confessed to her killing.
Ward said that young people are attracted to vacations in Caribbean island where they can drink and party at a younger age than in the US, but said they “don’t understand travel in these other countries.”
“There’s problems there with assaults, kidnappings and so on and so forth,” Ward said.
“There’s bad people out in the middle of the night, and I don’t know why she was out at 4:30 in the morning, or where her friends were, but you can’t be by yourself like that, walking in a country that you know nothing about,” Ward said. “You need to stay in groups and where you’re not going to be a target.”
While Dominican authorities have speculated that the pre-med student likely drowned after jumping into the ocean in a brown bikini, her father, Subbarayudu Konanki, filed a complaint Monday seeking to expand search efforts over his “growing suspicion” that she could be the victim of kidnapping since her body never washed ashore
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