Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
revealing look at how police brought Anxiang Du to justice for murdering a family of four after losing a legal case which left him facing an £88,000 bill.
It was a royal wedding weekend an britain was enoying a public holyday.
at their home in the english midlands a chinese family -the Dings joined in the celebrations they had made britaun their home .
they opened the chines medicine shop and theyy had three shops across the UK and that was quite successful and that represented that we’re doing right well financially and that they were quite proud of their businesses the Dings had set up a partneship with another chinese family.
Anxiang Du and his wife. came to this country from china in 1998 , they were both doctors of traditional medicine and they started a family .after short while they met the Dings. she was a businesswoman and he was a lecturer at university in manchester
but all was not what it seemed. between the couples . the picture perfect Ding family were about to be killed one by one.
the eldest daughter desperately phoning police for help
as her assassin walked towards her.
detectives gather evidence until a picture of a suspect emerges.
which piece of the puzzle will reveal….
Anxiang Du as guilty of murder
the scene which met officers as they arrived at the home of the ding family in a quite english village, was horrific.
xing and alice ding both talented violinists quite literally knew what was coming..there attacker had begun with their father .
he confronts Jifeng ding produces his knife and attacks him .Jifeng ding tries to fight off the attacker to ward off the stab wounds sustains defense wounds to his hands and Jifeng ding dies of these stab wounds.
the attack was in the kitchen of the house,Jifeng ding’s killer had only just began .It’s believed that helene hears the commotion in the kitchen and she comes in and the killer immediately attacks her . she has no defense wounds, she hasn’t had time to shield herself from the blovs but she stabbed 13 times down the left side of ther body. fatal blows , he’s killed them both but he’s not finished.
he then tuns his attention to their two daughters.one 18 one just 12 and mercilessly and brutally in front of each other stabbed them to death.
before she dies the oldest daughter managed to use her mobile phone to call the police.
it came to light that there was a that was made horrifically from one of the girls, it went through on the 999 system
but it’s what they call a drop call.so when the emergency operator received te call they just som screams on the end of the phone and the call dropped because it ended.
events elsewhere had a influence on the possibilities on why the call had been made.
it was was bank holiday afternoon, detectives thinks there was an element that people thought it was some kind of prank call or holiday high spirits nevertheless the police were sent to the location that was indicated from mobile phone tracking that goes with a 999 call
but unfortunately because of the nature of that tracking ,the police sent to the wrong location .
so the detectives know from that phone call which they received at babout just after half 3 in the afternoon that was when the murders were taking place somewhere around the half three mark but the girls never got to make their requests for assistance .
phone tracking is not an exact science so it took the officers to a location at least a mile distant from where the actual murders had occurred and of course having turned up and there’s nothing and there dosen’t appear to be any problem would probably add to this idea that it’s just a prank call .
the 999 service fire ambulance and police do get prank calls this chillingly was not .this was a real call and those were probably the last human sounds that those two poor girls made.
there can be little doubt that the ding family will have screamed but neighbors hears nothing. their home overlooked a landscape area free from other properties .
it’s probable that within Anxiang Du arriving at the house in pioneer close all four had been killed.
the daughters were found upstairs in their bedrooms one of the daughters was curled up in a ball and gets stabbed repeatedly especially in the stomach.
she then lost consciousness in that position .
another of the the daughters was found in a prayer position
with all four dead the killer had completed what apaear to be a mission. wiping out an entire family.
what we now know that he did , was that having murdered in cold blood,he washed the murder weapon a knife and his hands and left it in the sink .
court recors will say that he then felt some kind of physical reaction to having committed the murders and actually slept for a while at the house the murders have been committed.
the slaying of the ding family was over by 3:30 on the afternoon of friday april 29 th.
42 hours would pass before their slaughter would be uncovered , time enough for their killer to be a long way from the scene of their murder.
detectives knows that most murders are carried out by someone who knows the victim well. suspecting someone is however a far cry from having the evidence to prove a case. investigators end towards routine when trying to first find and then see a killer.
that routine generally starts with getting a phone call.
the man who would lead the hunt for the killer of the ding family is Glen Timens he too was enojoying the royal weeding when he heard of their death.on the night of the 1 of may when the murders came to light , Timmins colleage was on call senior investigating officer for northampton shire.
and he’d been sent to the discovery of bodies a house in the wooden area of nortghampton shire and because they were appeared to be the bodies of four family members within their family home .
as the senior detective for northampton chire timmins was put put on alert to go oversee the inquire .
one step at a time evidence is gathered ,amongs the first pieces of the picture of a kiler to emerge as Timmins and his team began their investigation .
the time of death friday afternoon , science provided that information.
when you die , after about two hours between two and four hours you get this kind of stiffening of the muscles, it starts off in the face in the neck and these little muscles and then it spreads to these bigger muscles. what’s happening is a kind of chemical process in the muscle fibers where they’re becoming cross-link and stiff and rigid.
that rigamortis , that stiffness will be maintained for about 2 days after which the muscle fibers begin to disintergrate and then they become floppy again .
so you can use the stiffness of different parts of the body to get some sort of estimation of how much time has elapsed.
establishing time of death was straightforward enought concluson for pathologist .
for detectives a range of theories now had to be considered.one immediately occurred to the lead lead investigator. their first reaction was is it a murder or do they have some kind of murder suicide. which happen from time to time.
this however was not a case of murder suicide,that was a theory soon dismissed.for it to be the case the body of the four dead would offer no signs of having struggled.
detectives reached that conclusion fairly quickly because of the positions that the victims were found and it was clear that that had been a very violent struggle. and both the adult victims had been murdered as opposed to having a struggle between themselves .
it was fairly quickly that detectives were dealing with a third party murderer.
what about the nationality and culture of the victims.investigators would learn that revenge always a possible motive in any murder inquire is one which has a long history in chinese society where loss of face has been known to lead to vendettas against whole families
was that what was behind the killer’s actions was he taking revenge on an entire family for having lost face over something.
In chinese culture there is a point where:” oh yes okay, i need to seek revenge in some way because he’s done that to me.therefore i need to sort of challenge that ,i want him to lose face as well”.he needs to do something about this family
sunday may 1 st 2011 fell into two phases for the police, before the discovery of the bodies police in northampton hear of an alert issued to all forces for a missing person .
a chinese national called Anxiang Du
Du was the co-owner of this herbal medicine business in birmingham and had not been heard from since calling in to the store on the public holiday
two days earlier detectives went into the shoping center and left in the appointments book there and note to his family in mandarin chinese which said things like “eternal blessing” and were clearly kind of phrase that tought he was not going to see them
he left a message for his wife basically telling her” goodbye i’m going”.
what he didn’t realize was that his would then contact the police to report him missing.
it was on the saturday on the 30th, she’d gone to the shop that they owned in birmingham and found what appeared to be a suicide note .
when you read the note it read more as a goodbye note than a potentially suicide note.but as it was that’s how the note was interpreted and as such Anxiang Du was circulated by west midland police quite rightly as a vulnerable missing person.
alerts goes to his local force in westmidland saying this this man has gone missing he’s in an agitated stated we’re worried about him .that missing person’s Alert in the west midlands will go centrally so the police in northampton who are coming across this slaughtered family will also have that information that a man a chinese national has gone missing and is in an agitated state.
a troll of people who might know Anxiang Du, turned up the named of Jifeng “Jeff” Ding
it is quite common for the police to visit known associates of the missing person and the ding family were one of the few known associates of Anxiang Du.
so that sunday morning of may 1st an officer was sent to the ding family home in an efffort to find out if mr Du had been in touch with them.
police were called that morning to visit the ding family see if they’d seen du and of course they knocked the door ,got no reply on a sunday morning nothing unusual in that and left a calling card for them. to contact the police.
outside the house , no car, it was possible they were away ,so with their bodies inside the officers attending the scene oblivious to what had happened left.
phase two how police feuded events of may 1st 2011 followed the eventualy discovery of the bodies .
a neighbor of dings realizes she hasn’t seen the family about for a day , goes over and peers through the windows of their house and sees the carnage inside.
after discovery of the bodies and the arrival of murder squad detectives on the case it seemed too much of a coincidence a chinese family slaughtered on the day that a chinese national who knew them is reported missing.
the dings had owned a chinese herbal medicine buisness, another chinese national who owned a herbal medicne business was now officially a missing person.
why had the police in birmingham assumed that the dings would know anything about Anxiang Du.
it turnesd out that Anxiang Du felt that he had plenty to be resentful about towards Jifeng Ding.
it wasn’t always the case the ding and du’s families went back a long time after the two women introduced their husband to each other.
initially they were friends and they went into business together to run a herbal medicine company.
and they in fact opened three of these shops and things were looking good for them. then the young professionals shared an expertise and worked hard.
and that was quite successful and that represented” that we doing well financially ” and that they were quite proud of their businesses that honor to them was quite what they represented.
they can provide for their families, they can enjoy their lifestyle a bit more cuz coming from mainland china, they would have had quite hardships trying to find jobs ,trying to provide for themselves.
so when they came over to britain ,this was an opportunity for success to be able to give their families the lifestyle that they probably didn’t have when they were children.
however disputes soon emerged between the business partners.
that relationship went sour when Anxiang Du was asked to leave the business by the dings,because of alligations of financial irregularity.
there were no charges, no police involvement,but it was the first hint that something was going wrong .
then 3 years later in 2004 the dus were dismissed from the partnership.things were to turn ugly .a complex dispute ended up in court .
du and his wife started legal proceedings against the dings on the basis they thought they’d been unfairly thrown out of their business.
with the court procedures at the start dus was quite in favor of the dus but as time progressed the ruling was in favor of the dings.
and that meant for du is really spiraling out of control and there was no hope really for him to go anywhere to start a buisness.just to find the financial means to support his family.
and at the end of that battle it was the dings and not the du’s that succeded.
the feud which had developed between the two families caused Anxiang Du’s bitterness to run deep , he now faced paying £88,000 in legal fees .
a complex financial arrangement meant that the house the dings were now living in was part of the business’s assets du hoped hoped to sale the house in the village of Wootton, Northampton it would help him pay off his legal costs.but Du did not actually own it.
a court order was issued preventing Du from trying to sell the house.effectively it froze the assets until the court made its determination ,but effectively it meant that mr Du had no access to his finanical assets and the sale of his house was prevented.
that order was issued the day before the murders
detectives had their motive. hwo wante to kill these people,why would they be killed like this? and because of the legal bitterness and the ranker that was around the splitting up of their buisness Du would the the obvious suspect.
clearly the delivery of the court straining orders the night before had effectively pushed him over the edge in terms of anger and rage , the need to hit back and detectives suspect that he spent most of that night , thinking about it .
ruminating about it,building it up in terms of while anger the need for revenge and retribution and by the time he went to work on friday morning,detectives are convinced as thy ban be that he had murder in mind.
in any culture what happened to Anxiang Du would cause deep resentment, some commentators on chinese culture suggest a a violent action was all but inevitable.
on one side you’ve got the financial difficulties because now he’s trying to find another job.
Du had lost this court case, he was in a huge amount of debt, but more importanly is the loss of face, obviously because it’s all about pride how one holds themselves in the chinese culture when when something turns as sour as that .it’s almost as if your hwole world has turned upside down
there was to Anxiang Du a lot to be angry about ,two motives were ticked.
there are couple of things that come up in murder cases as common motives.
one of them is a big is revenge .
Du wanted revenge, it’s something like 3 % of homicide cases in this country have a financial motve. 40% of the motive is either an argument or struggle or it’s a revenge attack.
detectives were able quickly examine the background of the association between the ding family and Anxiang Du and established this court battle been ongoing.
so very quickly they were able pinpoint Du as the likely murder suspect.
despaying a motive to kill so obviously had betrayed Du as the prime suspect. police quickly put out appeals for information.
extensive forensic examination of the the scene took place late sunda and into monday the 2nd of may all day monday 2nd of may.
this led to the plice naming Anxiang Du as a prime suspect in this this case on tuesday th 3rd of may.
detectives didn’t know where this murderer had gone clearly wasn’t still at the scene and obviously your determination at the outset of any homicide inquires to bring the offender to justice .
but this was clearly something out of the ordinary such a term of homicide.
where was Anxiang Du? what misstake had he made to lead police to him? and to prove he was a killer ? and would he kill again?
within hours of the discovery of the murdered ding family police begin a p painstaking troll through digital evidence.
they needed to find him but also to build a case and thy would uncover plenty of sightings.
the UK is one of the most highly watched places in the world there’s wast numbers of CCTV cameras which have been put up the police , by the local authorities, by private businesses and increasingly private individuals are installing CCTV cameras
it’s estimated to be more than somewhere between four and six million CCTV cameras in the UK. Police were able to watch stepbystep Du’s activities before the slaughter at pioneer close.
his mistakes began the moment that he left his home on the day of the murders.
he hadn’t really thought through the possibilites as to how he might be caught, because he didn’t really take any precautions.
the timeline of movement for Anxiang Du began on the friday at about 10:00 clock he drove to the station.
he bought a tiket to get him to his shop in birmingham, cameras gathering information every second.
he headed to his store. natural care in birmingham.
it appears that he wasn’t in the shop for very long that he gathered a rook sack and wrote this goodbye note to his wife
he picks up a bag which contains a knife. it was the murder weapon and within a matter of minutes, left the shop went to birmingham new street and started that fatefule journey via train to north hampton.
transfetring at northhampton to the bus station, again he was captured on camera .
the journey from birming hm to northampton ended and at 12 :37, there he soon found a bus that would take him to Wootton, the village where the dings lived.
on the bus he appeared perfectly normal to other passengers ” just someone else” on the bus ride .
during the journey ,he changed seats as he alighted an issue to overcome he was in the right village but were was the house ?
he doesn’t know the area ,he gets lost, he asked for directions for a driver he’s given direction but they’re wrong as well. so there’s quite a bit of toing and frowing.
he would arrive at the house around 3:00 .
the fate of the ding family was sealed. the last thing that he expects is his former partner, former business partner is coming uninvited to his house intent on revenge. but that’s what happens .Anxiang Du comes into the kitchen.
later Anxiang Du would claim he was met with more provocation.
ding laughed at Du and called him a fool ,that is almost like public shaming, it is one of the worst thing that you can probably do n chinese culture because you’re shaming them in front everyone.
he confronts Jifeng “Jeff” Ding,produces his knife and attacks him.mrs ding seems to have been attacked just outside of the kitchen, Du turns his attention to her again stabs her multiple times.
and then he ran upstairs to attacks the daughters who was cowering in a bedroom. du finds them and attacks them both stabs them boths again multiple times.
again concentrating on the area of the body where he knows the vital organs are, intending to kill them . and he does.he kills both the girls.
within a matter of minutes he slain the entire family , mother , father and both daughters.
the parents bodies were fo found hidden behind the curtain downstairs. they’d obviously been moved. the daughters were found upstairs in their bedrooms . one of the daughters were curled up in a ball.
Du’s mind previosly entirely entirely dominated by a lust to kill now turned to cover his tracks. du’s quite calm collected having murdered the family in cold blood .
he washed the murder weapon- the knife and his hands and left it at the sink. having first slept after the murders Du now plot his escape.
what he found was Jifeng “Jeff” Ding wallet and car keys and decided that’s how he going to make his escape.
the ding car , one they had hired was conspicuous by its absence when police officer had vistied,it was not there because Anxiang Du had taken it.it seems likely he waited until dark and left pioneer close sometime after 8 :30 on april 29th.
he then headed for a motorway .
the last sighting was at junction 8A of the M40 which is some miles distant of london so he could have gone pretty any where on that motorway.
detectives were reliant on finding the stolen car.
du’s escape was haphazard but successful he heads south and gets lucky as he drives into london by using a rout where there were no capable of automatic number plate recognition. he went undetected for now.
the car was abandoned in a side street ,this venable’s street.
and detectives got grainy CCTV at about half 2 in the morning after someone matching Anxiang Du’s description walking along and looking into a shop front as he leaves the car behind
the illegally parked car gets ticketed again and again over 9 days.Du ones again got lucky.
there is a nationwide hunt for him and for the car that he was driving but none of the traffic wardens call vehicle in to be towed away.if they had it would have alerted to its whereabouts and given them hope of finding du.
incredibly perhaps, the car is parked in london and attracts nine parking tickets but nobody manages to connect the fact that this car is the one that was being used by the wanted man .
this case highöights a flaw in the system ,you’d expect that if a car has been parked on a stretch of roads and amassed 9 parking tickets over series of days, that might flag up something to the local authority that there may be a problem with his car.
maybe it’s been stolen and abandoned , maybe something happens to the owner .
because otherwise ,how come they haven’t come back and moved their car to stop getting more tickets?
that red flag wasn’t raised and maybe if it had detectives might have got more information sooner.
the apparent abandon shown by Anxiang Du meant the police were getting reports from people who’d seen hin on public transport
police have had over 380 suspect sighthings ,the majority of those sightings have been in the UK and all of those sightings are dealt with under a very strict process to make sure police get the optimum from those sightings.
Anxiang Du had got lucky for a third time ,he boards a ferry for france and is again not spotted.
on 30 april Du bought a one -way coach ticket to paris using his own passport . sometime that day his wife reported him missing .
Du travelled through france and spain, and took a ferry from algeciras to tangier in morocco .
Anxiang Du goes off grid in morocco,he’s living there under a falls name and getting what work he can.his luck just keeps on coming.
ones he’s in morocco du ‘s arrested on suspicion of being there illegally and he’s released ,this is only 5 days after the murders.
but he’s released because he claims his name is lee ming that he¨s from tawain and he’s allowed to stay and he goes on to get a job .
he ends up working as a night watchman on a construction site and he had nowhere to live,he was sleeping sort of rough in the construction site and some of the other workers kind of took pity on him and give him food and so forth because they thought his life was so poor.
Du had made a series of mistakes as he had set off to murder his victims .the trail evidence from his front door to the house where he had killed .
together with the clear motive that he had, was likely to get police a conviction ,but within weeks of the murders he was 2,000 miles away.
living almost rough with a new name, a new job , a new life.
police meanwhile where ramping up their appeals for help.
the ding family had been in the UK since about late 1990.Jifeng “Jeff” was working at manchester university as a lecturer.
helene working locally at a school in northampton and with the children involvedin education in the northampton as well.
since around 2002 both Jifeng “Jeff” and helen had been involved in a civil dispute with a chinese family over business issue.
they knew who they were looking for and why he had killed what would be the mistake to ensure the police would catch a killer.
detecting wqho had killed the ding family had not taking long Anxiang Du had hardly tried to cover his tracks.
the detectives personal opinion is that he set his mind on a course of action and he was blind to everything else.
in the months which followed the police and wide.
there visit to china had three specific aims. these were to brief the ministry of public security which are essentially chinese police in bejing.
and informed them of the inquiry the work the UK police underaken and also seek assistance for further inquiries.
unbeknownst two police Du’s haphazard escape plan had worked but he was not in china ,he was in north Africa.free but facing the indignity of sleeping on a construction site , living on handouts.
he got an unmistakeable figure and it was this which was to be his undoing.his image had been captured by cameras throughout the english midlands.
it had taken time but his getaway car had been found in London .
Anxiang Du becomes the most wanted person on the crimestoppers website.
it’s imperative for the police to find him as soon as possible this is a man who’s killed four people already and there ‘s a danger there.
he curculates internationally because it’s feared that he might have gone abroad.
detectives have to accept that Anxiang Du may have left the UK detective still look for him within the UK but he may have left the UK possibly soon after the murders.
and that someone must have assisted him and is likely to be still assisting him or aware where he is.
detectives emphasize they’ve now increased the reward to 25 , 000 pound which is a substanial award.
they look for that information to come to them directly or through crimestoppers.
and that is how Du would be caught as sighting stopped it became clear that he got out of Britain,his profile so easy to publicize using the images captured on surveillance made for headline news and international crime stopper programs.
the availability of du’s image made it easier to spread the word.
what he doesn’t realize is that spanish TV has a program quite similar to crime watch in the UK and they cover the case and his photo is put onto spanish TV.
and someone recognizes him in morocco.
in july 2012 ,14 months after the murders,the man who runs the building site employs him as night watchman realizes that his night watcher is actually Anxiang Du.
the wanted Quadruple murderer from the UK. he tells the police . du is arrested in morocco when he is finally brought back to the UK and charged with the murder of the four members of the ding family
killers who are captured have always made at least one misstake.
Du was first reported to police by his own wife, anxious at seeing a note showing du in despair.
was that his biggest misstake?
the letter as obviously the precusor to Anxiang Du being treated as what the polic call a vulnerable missing person. what that did was elevate his status as a missing person to one of a high priority.
so the very fact that he was identfied as potenially being vulnerable through what appeared to be a suicide threat meant that the police would make immediate active inquiries to trace his whereabouts and it was those immediate active enquiry traces whereabouts that provided the vital link between the murders and the missing person inquiry.
or was the killer’s mistake the trail that he left which made it easy for detectives to know who the killer was.
Du’s biggest mistake was not realizing the extent of surveillance in the UK country. once you become a person of interest, police can then go back and look at the CCTV footage and they can find images of you everywhere.
there were images him traveling by train,there were images on him on a bus towards the victims house.
once he steals their car there’s the automatic number plate recognition cameras of picking up where that vehicle is traveling.
virtually everything he did on the day of the murders and the day after were recorded and police were able to go back to and piece together his entire route.
once you become a person of interest, you are watched and there are photos of you everywhere .and it was really those photos and those images whiched helped convicted him.
for lead detectrive glen timmins the context of Anxiang Du’s murders make him amongst the worst killers that he has come across.
” this was blind rage”
– Glen Timmins
so why had he done it ,his argument had been with Jifeng “Jeff” Ding ad his wife.
but surely not the children.
you might wonder why Du killed the whole of the ding’s family and not just ding himself.
what was more important to him was getting the reveng ,that he felt was due for the wrong that had been done to him and his family .
it’s really because the way that the way the chinese culture works. we talked about losing face in the family name and for Du ,Ding has taken everything from him.
therefore Du not only has to kill ding but has to kill everyone associated with the ding name so that includes his wife and the two children.
evidence released in court.
in 2013,Anxiang Du arguedi n court that he was guilty only of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility ,he had lost lost control.
his defense was rejected by a jury and he was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 40 years behind bars.
he will be 94 when he is eligible for realise.