Nicole van den Hurk was born in Erkelenz, Germany, on July 4, 1980. She was raised by a single parent. When Nicole was only 3 months old, her mother started dating a Dutchman. They moved to the Netherlands together, where they got married. In 1989, Nicole’s mom and stepdad broke up, and Nicole’s stepdad got custody of her. Nicole’s mother killed herself in Tilburg in April 1995. Nicole was living with her grandmother in Tongelre when she went missing.
In 1995, Nicole van den Hurk, then 15 years old, rode her bike to work from where she lived with her grandmother. The next day, her bike was found in a nearby river. She never came back.
People were sent out to look for her, and her bag was found after about a week. Finally, her body was found a long way away near a road. The person died because they were stabbed. The police looked into a lot of leads, but none of them turned out to be true. One of them was a man who called the police and said he knew who the murderer was, but then hung up on them. No one was able to track down the call.
Even though there were clues and a reward for information, no one knew who did it.
Andy, Nicole’s brother, didn’t forget about his stepsister, though. Andy was a suspect at first, but the police couldn’t find any proof against him.
But in 2011, he was arrested again because of something he wrote on Facebook. He said that he had killed his sister in a Facebook post. Many people told the police about this, and he was soon arrested and sent to The Netherlands.
Only five days were spent holding him. He came out as a free man, showing that he was not guilty. The police said that the only proof they had was a Facebook post, which is not enough.
Why did he do that?
Andy, the stepbrother of the victim, had moved to England. In a Facebook post on March 8, he said that he had killed the man. The British police then arrested him. He was sent to the Netherlands on March 30, but he was freed five days later because the only proof against him was a Facebook post. Later, he took back what he had said and said that he thought his father was the murderer. In an interview in 2016, Andy said that he had lied about confessing to the murder to bring attention back to his stepsister’s death and get her body dug up for DNA testing.
What happened next!
It turned out that no DNA test had ever been done on the body at the crime scene. Andy said that he was upset that the investigation wasn’t going anywhere, so he agreed that Nicole’s body should be dug up and tested for DNA.
They found a man’s DNA on the body, so they knew it was him. Andy wasn’t the killer.
In January 2014, police charged a 46-year-old man with the case with having a history of rape convictions. His DNA was the same as what was found in Nicole’s body. After they had a fight, the man’s ex-girlfriend said that he had gone out in the afternoon and evening of the day he was killed.
Trial:
He was finally found guilty after a long trial. The suspect said he was crazy, so he was put in jail for the less serious crime of rape.
Andy got justice for his dead sister by telling a lie to the police.