Killing of Nicole van den Hurk

Nicole van den Hurk was born Nicole Tegtmeier on 4 July 1980 in Erkelenz, Germany. Her mother, Angelika Tegtmeier, began a relationship with a Dutch man; the family moved to the Netherlands, where Angelika married him and Nicole took his surname. Her mother and stepfather divorced in 1989, and her stepfather was awarded custody of Nicole. In April 1995, Angelika died by suicide in Tilburg. By that autumn, fifteen-year-old Nicole was living with her grandmother in the Tongelre district of Eindhoven.

That October, Nicole was working a seasonal position at the Woensel shopping centre in Eindhoven. On the morning of Friday, 6 October 1995, she left by bicycle for her shift and never arrived. Police recovered her bicycle from the river Dommel that same evening, and her rucksack was found near the Eindhoven canal on 19 October, prompting a search of the canal and its south bank. On 22 November, a passerby discovered her body in woodland between the towns of Mierlo and Lierop. An autopsy recorded a fatal stab wound to the ribs, along with jaw fractures and other injuries to her head and fingers. About a thousand people attended her funeral on 28 November.

The early investigation produced few results. An anonymous caller told police in October 1995 that he could identify the person responsible, but the call was cut short; a recording was broadcast on national television in January 1996 to trace him. Police assessed a separate account from a family friend, then in custody on drug trafficking charges, as unreliable. A magazine offered a reward for information, and in 1996 Nicole's stepbrother and stepfather were both arrested in connection with the case and later cleared. A 2004 cold-case review did not identify a suspect.

In March 2011, Nicole's stepbrother, who had since moved to England, posted a confession to the killing on Facebook and was arrested by British police. He was extradited to the Netherlands but released days later, since the post was the only evidence against him; he later retracted the confession and said he had made it so that Nicole's remains would be exhumed for renewed DNA testing. A new cold-case team took up the investigation, and her remains were exhumed that September to collect fresh DNA samples.

Investigators eventually connected the case to a similarly patterned attack in Valkenswaard in September 2000, in which a young woman was taken from her bicycle and raped at knifepoint; its perpetrator had been convicted in 2001. Comparing his DNA profile to an unidentified profile recovered from Nicole's remains led police to arrest a 46-year-old man, Jos de Graaf — referred to in Dutch media by the privacy pseudonym "Jos de G." — on 14 January 2014. His DNA matched semen recovered from her remains and mitochondrial DNA from a hair found on her jacket; he had previously been convicted of three rapes. De Graaf's trial opened in November 2015 and centered on expert testimony about the degraded, mixed DNA samples, exposed to nearly seven weeks of decomposition before recovery in 1995. In November 2016, he was convicted of rape but acquitted of manslaughter and sentenced to five years' imprisonment; the court cited unresolved uncertainty in the DNA analysis and found that he had been legally insane at the time of the crime. Prosecutors appealed the acquittal, and in October 2018 an appeals court convicted de Graaf of both rape and manslaughter, raising his sentence to twelve years. The Dutch Supreme Court rejected the defense's alternative-contributor theory in April 2020 and upheld the sentence on 16 June 2020.