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On March 11, 2011, Andy van den Hurk published a disturbing admission on his Facebook page: "I will be arrested today [for] the murder of my sister, I confessed."

Sixteen years before, his cherished step-sister Nicole, 15, had disappeared while cycling to her shift at a nearby shopping centre in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

However, she never turned up for work. Later that same evening, officers discovered her rucksack and bike in the vicinity.

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A month afterwards, her body was discovered assaulted and savagely stabbed with a knife in the neighbouring woodland. Nobody was ever convicted and, as time passed, the case grew cold.

Van den Hurk's killing was a nationwide sensation in the Netherlands. Hundreds participated in the hunt for her and thousands attended her funeral on November 20 1995.

Developments in the case frequently made national headlines.

In February 1996, officers believed they had finally cracked the case when an acquaintance of the van den Hurk family was detained for drug trafficking.

He maintained he had been coerced into smuggling heroin by the people responsible for the teenager's death. But the police didn't believe him and no advancement was achieved.

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As time went on, people's memories of Nicole's killing faded. Detectives moved onto other cases.

Those who remained reopened a cold case inquiry in 2004, but no fresh evidence emerged.

Seeing all of this and becoming increasingly frustrated, Andy decided to act. Now living in the UK, he admitted to the killing and was detained 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 quickly retracted his confession, stating: "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."

Incredibly, Andy's audacious plan worked. In September 2011, with renewed interest in the unsolved mystery, police exhumed Nicole's body and conducted a DNA test.

They discovered 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 previous convictions was related to a case strikingly similar to Nicole's. De G had previously attacked 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. However, 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.