Nicole van den Hurk’s murders was one of the Netherlands’ most infamous cold cases, until the murdered girl’s sister devised a brave plan
On March 11, 2011, Andy van den Hurk posted a chilling confession to his Facebook page: “I will be arrested today [for] the murder of my sister, I confessed.”
Sixteen years earlier, his beloved step-sister Nicole, 15, had vanished while cycling to her job at a local shopping centre in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
But she never arrived for her shift. Later that evening, police found her backpack and bicycle nearby.
A month later, her body was found assaulted and brutally stabbed with a knife in the nearby woods. No convictions were ever made and, over the years, the case went cold.
Van den Hurk’s murder was a national sensation in the Netherlands. Hundreds joined the search for her and thousands attended her funeral on November 20, 1995. Updates about the case regularly broke national news.
In February 1996, police thought they had finally solved the case when a friend of the van den Hurk family was arrested for drug trafficking.
He claimed he had been forced to smuggle heroin by the men responsible for the young girl’s killing. But the police didn’t buy it and no progress was made.
As the years rolled by, people forgot about Nicole’s murder. Detectives moved on. Those who didn’t, relaunched a cold case investigation in 2004, but no new evidence came to light.
Watching all of this and frustrated, Andy decided to take action. Now living in the UK, he confessed to the murder and was arrested by British police, who extradited him to the Netherlands.
Five days later, he was released as no further evidence linking him to the crime could be found.
He soon extracted his confession, and said: “I wanted to get [Nicole] exhumed and get DNA off her. I kind of set myself up and it could have gone horribly wrong.
“She is my sister. I miss her every day.”
Miraculously, Andy’s daring plan worked. In September 2011, with renewed interest on the unsolved mystery, police dug up Nicole’s body and tested the DNA.
They found traces belonging to two men – her boyfriend at the time and another that couldn’t be accounted for.
This was the DNA of a 46-year-old man known as Jos de G, a former psychiatric patient and convicted rapist.
One of his three prior convictions was in connection with a case remarkably similar to Nicole’s. De G had previously assaulted a young woman cycling around a nearby town and raped her at knifepoint.
In April 2014, charges for the rape and murder of Nicole were brought against de G. But the defence suggested that the semen, belonging to de G, found on Nicole and her coat could have been from a consensual encounter.
De G’s charges were reduced to manslaughter, but even then – and after two years in court – he was acquitted and sentenced to just five years for rape.
His sentence was upheld by the Dutch Supreme Court in June 2020.
