Natalee Holloway's father seeks official declaration that disappeared Mountain Brook woman is dead

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama 

Natalee Holloway

A judge has set a Sept. 23 hearing on a request filed by Natalee Holloway's father to have her legally declared dead, more than six years after she disappeared during a high-school graduation trip to Aruba, court records show.
The petition, filed in June by Dave Holloway, asks Jefferson County Probate Judge Alan King to enter what is known as an "order on legal presumption of death."
The process, which requires multiple hearings and publication of notices seeking information that she is alive, is expected to last into early 2012. Fewer than a half-dozen such cases are filed annually in Jefferson County, court officials said.
Natalee Holloway, who was 18 when she disappeared hours before her school group was to return to Mountain Brook, left no will. Her possessions are worth less than $500, the petition said.
She was last seen alive after midnight on May 30, 2005, and was declared missing the following morning when her packed bags and passport were still in her hotel room and she failed to catch her flight home.
The petition makes several references to the homicide investigation conducted by Aruban authorities and the ongoing focus on Joran van der Sloot in connection with Holloway's disappearance.
Van der Sloot was charged in 2010 in federal court in Birmingham with attempting to extort $250,000 in exchange for information about where the teen's body could be found. Van der Sloot currently is in a Peruvian jail, charged in the death of another woman there that occurred five years to the day after Natalee Holloway's disappearance.