BIRMINGHAM, Ala. —

A U.S. judge on Tuesday agreed to delay Joran Van der Sloot's extortion trial until the fall to give him more time to prepare a defense or decide if he wants to enter a guilty plea.

Van der Sloot's attorney Kevin Butler had asked for the continuance from the July 31 trial docket to give more time to "review the discovery, investigate this case, and prepare for trial." Prosecutors agreed to the change.

Video above: Van der Sloot was extradited to the U.S. in June 2023

Van der Sloot, often considered the chief suspect in Natalee Holloway's 2005 disappearance in Aruba, faces federal charges that he tried to extort money from the missing teen's mother in exchange for revealing where to find her daughter's remains. He was extradited from Peru this month to face trial in Alabama, Holloway's home state.

"Given the defendant's need to adequately prepare his defense and to make an informed decision on whether to enter a guilty plea or proceed to trial, the court finds that the ends of justice served by extending the pretrial deadlines and granting a continuance outweigh the best interest of the public and the defendant in a speedy trial," U.S. Magistrate Gray Borden wrote. Borden said the extension would last until Oct. 2, but said the exact trial date would be set later by the presiding judge.

Holloway went missing during a high school graduation trip with classmates and was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot, a student at an international school on the island where he grew up. Her remains have never been found. No one has been charged in her disappearance.

U.S. prosecutors said that in 2010, van der Sloot sought money from Beth Holloway to disclose the location of her daughter's body. A grand jury indicted him that year. He has initially plead not guilty to the charges.

Van der Sloot earlier this month was brought shackled into an Alabama courtroom to be arraigned on federal charges as Holloway's parents watched.

HAMILTON, Ohio —

A community vigil was held Monday on the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of 23-year-old Kara Hyde.

Police said Hyde was reported missing on Dec. 18 by her loved ones.

According to police, Hyde was last seen by her mother on Dec. 5, 2021, leaving their house on Grand Boulevard.

Lisa Hyde said her daughter is an addict and there had been talk among people she knew that she may have been seen in nearby Crawford Woods.

In April, Hamilton police increased their reward for information on Kara's whereabouts.

Shortly after she was reported missing, Texas EquuSearch Midwest teamed up with detectives from the Hamilton Police Department to search the wooded area. Nothing was found that would lead them to Kara.

"I didn't expect her to be gone and not be found," Lisa Hyde said. "That's a whole new ball game, and it's terrifying."

The hole in Lisa's heart remains unfilled, and she describes it as a pain only a parent would understand. Her young adult daughter vanished a year ago, and her case remains unsolved.

"She said, 'I'm going to get your present; I'll be right back, Momma. I love you,' and out the door, she went," Lisa Hyde said. "It was the last I saw her."

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Kara was small in stature but big in personality. Her brother, James Saylor, believes she was the glue that held the family together.

"There's a void, an emptiness that can't be filled," Saylor said. "It's like a missing piece to our family."

Dozens of friends and family members gathered Monday night. They held candles, clutched onto one another, and shared stories of Kara Hyde.

"I'm just so scared and sad," Lisa Hyde said. "I'm scared to death that I'll never find out what happened or what I will find out. I live in constant fear."

There is a cash reward for information that leads to finding Kara.

Anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to contact Detective Brian Wynn at 513-868-5811, extension 1272.

As the main suspect in the unsolved disappearance of Natalee Holloway arrives in Alabama to face charges of wire fraud and extortion, the judicial process remains complicated.

Video above: Natalee Holloway disappearance timeline

John Carroll, professor of law at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, explained that while the case has gained international attention, van der Sloot will not be given special attention.

Why is Joran van der Sloot being extradited to Birmingham, Alabama?

In 2010, van der Sloot was indicted on wire fraud and extortion charges. He is accused of trying to extort $250,000 from Natalee Holloway’s mother in exchange for information on where her daughter was buried.

Natalee Holloway was on a trip to Aruba with her Birmingham-area high school in 2005 when she disappeared. Holloway's body was never found, and no charges were filed against van der Sloot in the case.

What happens when van der Sloot arrives in Alabama?

"He will be placed in a kind of detention facility that federal authorities use — a county jail somewhere around here," Carroll said. "He's already been appointed a public defender. He will now will be treated just like any other criminal defendant in the United States."

Where will he be held?

Joran van der Sloot will likely be held in a very secure part of the detention facility, given his history, according to Carroll.

How soon can we expect van der Sloot in court?

Van der Sloot's first appearance will likely be an arraignment where he will be given an opportunity to enter a plea, according to Carroll.

How soon could this case go to trial?

"It completely depends on the court docket," Carroll said. "Just talking to people, we are talking about a year out. First, the discovery process has to go on, the government has to share info with the defendant. There will be a motion practice, arguably where the defendant would get to file a motion. Just based on the court schedule, I see nothing that indicates that this gets any priority. I think this will be treated just like any other federal criminal case in Birmingham."

What happens while van der Sloot is being held and awaiting trial?

Both the prosecution and the defense will have to prepare for trial.

In terms of van der Sloot's defense, "I am confident that lawyer has never interviewed client. He has to get the client side of story," Carroll said.

He went on to say, "Just like any other criminal case, his lawyer has to develop the defendant's side of the case."

How long could this trial last?

Carroll told sister station WVTM that this does not look like a long trial, possibly a week, noting the facts in the indictment are straightforward.

After a verdict, what happens next?

If found guilty, van der Sloot would need to be sentenced.

The maximum sentence for wire fraud charges is 20 years. After sentencing, van der Sloot would then go back to Peru to serve out the remaining part of his sentence for the murder of a business student in Peru.

Five Native American women have disappeared or been killed along California's rugged Lost Coast in the past 18 months.

The crisis has spurred the Yurok Tribe to issue an emergency declaration and brought increased urgency to efforts to build the first database of such cases in California. The tribe also is working to gain supervision over foster care and build an indigenous justice system that would ultimately handle all but the most serious felonies.

Tribal officials say reclaiming sovereignty over such systems is the only way to end the cycle of loss that's taken the greatest toll on their women.

Blythe George, a Yurok tribal member also works on a project that documents the missing and said, “I came to this issue as both a researcher and a learner, but just in this last year, I knew three of the women who have gone missing or were murdered — and we shared so much in common.” George said, “You can’t help but see yourself in those people.”

One of the missing is 33-year-old Emmilee Risling who disappeared after she was last seen walking across a bridge in a remote part of the Yurok Reservation.

Reporting problems have made the true number of missing indigenous persons unknown, according to a 2021 U.S. Government Accountability Office report.

Native women are said to face murder rates that are nearly three times those of white women overall, and up to 10 times that of the national average in many locations. Just in California, the Yurok Tribe and the Sovereign Bodies Institute found 18 cases of missing or murdered Native American women in the past year or so.

In the months before Mary Johnson disappeared, her sister said she wasn't herself.

Johnson and her husband, who had been living in the home of her sister Gerry Davis in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, abruptly left and moved to Marysville about 40 miles away, Davis said. She rarely answered her phone when Davis called, and only occasionally responded to texts. Then one day, Johnson's estranged husband contacted Davis to say he hadn't seen his wife in weeks.

The last time anyone said they saw Mary Johnson — also known as Mary Davis — was on Nov. 25, 2020. Johnson, an enrolled citizen of the Tulalip Tribes and then 39 years old, was walking on a road in Western Washington, en route to the house of some friends in a nearby town. She never made it there.

It's been nearly 10 months since Johnson was reported missing. A billboard on Interstate 5 and local media coverage have yielded few credible tips, and tribal police have yet to make an arrest in the case. Only last week did the FBI announce it would offer a reward of up to $10,000 for information about Johnson's disappearance. While family members and advocates welcome the move, they also wonder what took so long.

"If that was a little white girl out there or a white woman, I'm sure they would have had helicopters, airplanes and dogs and searches — a lot of manpower out there — scouring where that person was lost," Nona Blouin, Johnson's older sister, said. "None of that has happened for our sister."

Those feelings ring especially true this week, as the case of missing 22-year-old Gabby Petito captured the attention of the internet. Meanwhile, at least 710 Indigenous people — more than half of them women or girls — were reported missing between 2011 and September 2020 in Wyoming, where Petito's remains were found this week, according to a University of Wyoming report. While about half were usually found within a week of going missing, as per the report, family members and advocates said none received the same level of media coverage nor the same urgency in law enforcement's response as missing white people.

Too often, that means families like Johnson's are left waiting without answers.

Johnson's disappearance remains unsolved

There's a lot unknown about the circumstances under which Johnson disappeared last year.

The following sequence of events, based on a CNN interview with Tulalip Tribal Police Department Detective David Sallee and a local news report in The Everett Herald, is what authorities have pieced together based on cell phone records and conversations with people who saw her.

At the time Johnson disappeared, she and her husband weren't in a good place, Sallee said. She was staying mostly with friends, returning to the couple's shared house every few days to pick up her mail and take a shower before heading out again.

On Nov. 24, a day before she was last seen, Sallee said her estranged husband dropped her off with a suitcase at a friend's house on the Tulalip reservation. Johnson stayed there overnight, and planned the next day to head to the house of a couple she knew in Oso about 30 miles away.

The friend she was staying with was supposed to give her a ride to a nearby church, where someone else would pick her up and take her to the couple's house in Oso. A second man, who had been staying at the same house as Johnson, wanted a ride, too.

But things went awry on Nov. 25, and Sallee said Johnson's friend backtracked on the offer to give her and the second man a ride. Johnson set out toward the church on foot around 1:30 p.m., and the second man also started walking away from the house.

A third man who was set to pick Johnson up at the church and take her to Oso eventually drove by and saw her walking on Fire Trail Road with the man who also wanted a ride, Sallee said. He indicated he only had enough room in his vehicle for one person and kept on going, ultimately declining to give her a ride.

Johnson never made it to the couple's house in Oso, Sallee said. But before she disappeared she left that couple a voicemail, desperation in her voice as she urged them to pick up, according to records obtained by The Everett Herald. She also made another call around 2:30 p.m. — the woman who picked up reportedly said to police that she told Johnson she was too busy to speak.

Police believe that someone may have picked Johnson up at some point, because cell phone records indicate that about an hour after her last call, her phone connected to a tower in the Oso area — too great a distance for her to have walked so quickly. The phone then went offline for a period of time, Sallee said, before again connecting to a tower in the Greater Marysville Tulalip area that night. It remained in that location until the next morning, when it eventually powered off.

The man who was supposed to pick Johnson up from the church reportedly told police that he hadn't seen or heard from her since Nov. 25. The man who had been walking with her said the two went their separate ways and that he'd had no sign of her either.

On Dec. 9, 2020, Johnson's estranged husband reported her missing.

In the nearly 10 months since, there has been little movement in the investigation, which Sallee said remains "open and active." He said the police department had identified multiple persons of interest, though it has yet to make an arrest.

Because a body hasn't been recovered, Sallee said it's difficult to establish the probable cause necessary to seek specific search warrants. Because Johnson's disappearance was reported weeks after the fact, he said surveillance footage or precise location information that could offer clues has likely been overwritten. And because authorities don't know for sure whether Johnson disappeared on or off the reservation, he said it's unclear whether they can leverage federal grand jury subpoena powers or not.

"We don't know if she was kidnapped, held against her will, if she has been murdered. It could be argued maybe she just wandered off in the woods and got lost. Maybe she overdosed and passed away somewhere in a remote area and we don't know where she's at. Maybe she's just hiding, maybe she's in treatment," Sallee said. "There's a lot of maybes."

Authorities are often slow to act, advocates say

To advocates who work on the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, however, such challenges and uncertainties come off as excuses.

Abigail Echo-Hawk, chief research officer for the Seattle Indian Health Board and an enrolled member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, says one of the primary barriers in addressing this crisis is the "maze of jurisdiction" in Indian Country. Cases of missing Indigenous women are often mired in bureaucracy, with prosecutors and law enforcement having to establish whether the authority rests with the federal government, the state or the tribe. The time it takes to determine the jurisdiction of a case can ultimately affect whether those women live or die, she said.

"This maze of jurisdiction that exists — that is, who does what investigations and who's responsible for what — is part of this system of inequity," Echo-Hawk said.

It's why so many cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women remain unsolved, says Annita Lucchesi, executive director of the research group Sovereign Bodies Institute and a descendant of the Cheyenne tribe. Jurisdictional issues can limit tribal authorities from successfully prosecuting non-Native people for crimes committed on tribal lands except in some cases, and the federal government -- who typically does have that authority -- has often declined to act.

Another piece of the problem, as some advocates see it, is that Indigenous women are often blamed for their own disappearances, resulting in a lack of empathy for victims from authorities and the general public.

"They are assumed to have been killed, murdered or disappeared. They're assumed to have run away, to have had substance abuse issues, to have done something that caused them to go missing or to be murdered," Echo-Hawk said.

Those attitudes only perpetuate the problem and make it easier for perpetrators to avoid accountability, Lucchesi said.

"That kind of narrative about Indigenous people just lends itself to more violence so that when this violence does happen, it's not a disruption of the social fabric the way it would be when it happens to somebody else," she said. "Because we're already perceived as not part of the social fabric, because we're either dead and disappeared. We're less than human. We're so far away on some remote reservation that we're not part of the rest of the community."

The full scale of the problem is unknown

Johnson is just one of countless missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls in the U.S. — a nationwide crisis for which there are no definitive statistics.

The numbers that do exist are likely an undercount, in part because Indigenous women and girls are sometimes misclassified as white, Hispanic or Asian. Adding to the data problem is a historic distrust of law enforcement by Indigenous communities, which can lead some cases to go unreported.

About 1,500 missing persons cases of American Indian and Alaska Native people have been recorded across the U.S. by the National Crime Information Center, while approximately 2,700 homicide cases have been reported to the federal government's Uniform Crime Reporting Program.

A database maintained by Lucchesi's Sovereign Bodies Institute puts the count higher, with more than 4,500 cases of missing Indigenous women and girls dating back to the 1900s, she said. There are nine such cases just in her own family, Lucchesi said.

"That shadow of death is always there," she added.

That's why advocates are pushing leaders and policymakers to do something about the issue.

The attorney general in Washington state, where Johnson was last seen and which has the second highest number of missing and murdered Indigenous women cases, announced a 21-member task force to examine the systemic inequities behind the problem of missing Indigenous women and girls. Echo-Hawk's organization recently completed a project in the state with the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, reforming database systems and training staff to properly collect racial identity and tribal affiliation information for victims. And on the national level, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced a new unit earlier this year that would investigate the killings and disappearances of Indigenous people.

Advocates say such actions, however, are just a first step.

"There has to be money allocated. It can't just be a checkbox for some politicians [to say], 'We did this,'" Echo-Hawk said. "It has to be more than that."

The New Mexico Missing, Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives task force is still figuring out ways to solve missing cases. A big part of this is making sure a lot of these cases are known.

The MMIWR Task Force Project Coordinator, Jessica Gidagaakoons Smith said, “Family members who have share their stories of the issues that they have been facing or they have faced in the past and that is helping us to better formally ideas on legislation.”

In a 2017 report by the Urban Indian Health Institute, New Mexico is the state with the highest number of MMIW cases.

Smith said one thing to overcome is the attention that missing person cases get.

“It's crucial especially if somebody is missing today. Do you know if someone goes missing today I believe that it is very crucial to get any type of coverage of that missing person out,” Smith said.

Smith said the response for cases like Gabby Petito is far different from how MMIWR cases are investigated.

"It could really make a huge difference for our people. I meant she was found in like 8 days I think it was," Smith added. "We don't see that with many cases of our MMIWR."

Johnson's family hasn't given up hope

Johnson's sisters, Davis and Blouin, are trying to stay positive — though they're also mentally preparing for the worst.

They're heartened by all the people who have shared the poster with Johnson's picture on their social media accounts. They're asking everyone to keep their eyes out for a 5-foot-6, 115 pound woman with black hair and brown eyes, a sunburst tattoo on her upper right arm and a beauty mark on the back of her neck. And they want law enforcement to deploy every possible resource at their disposal -- because Native women deserve the same respect and compassion as anyone else.

"My sister is a wonderful person and we all love her dearly," Blouin said. "If you have any information, please just reach out to your local law enforcement, the Seattle FBI or the Tulalip PD. Bring her home. We miss her."

KOAT contributed to this report.

Authorities are searching for a New York college sophomore who disappeared over a week ago.Saniyya Dennis, 19, was last seen on the SUNY Buffalo State College campus on April 24, the University Police Department (UPD) told CNN."Our one and only goal in this investigation is to locate Saniyya and reconnect her with her family," UPD Chief Peter Carey said in a statement Saturday. "Understandably, emotions are high right now, but I want to be clear that our department will not rest until Saniyya is found."Campus police are working with a variety of local, state and federal agencies to locate Dennis, according to UPD.Carey said during a news conference Friday that investigators have found no cell phone, electronic or financial activity since Dennis disappeared.Investigators initially said she may have remained in the area or traveled to Yonkers, near New York City, according to a news release updated on April 28.Dennis had not been in contact with her family, according to Carey."This is not like her," Dennis' sister said at the press conference Friday, CNN affiliate WKBW reported. "This is not of her nature."Officials are asking anyone with information regarding the investigation to contact the University Police Department at Buffalo State College.