Ding family murders

Jifeng "Jeff" Ding, his wife Helen Chui, and their daughters Xing (18) and Alice (12) were found dead at their home at 10 Pioneer Close, Wootton Fields, a suburb of Northampton, England, at 6:00 pm on Sunday 1 May 2011. All four had been stabbed to death. Investigators concluded the killings had actually occurred roughly two days earlier, between about 3:00 pm and 4:00 pm on Friday 29 April 2011 — the same day as the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Xing had been a strong student and musician who had already accepted a place at the University of Nottingham to study medicine; she was later awarded posthumous A-level grades based on predicted attainment. Alice was also described as a talented musician.

Northamptonshire Police named Anxiang Du, a Coventry businessman, as the prime suspect. Du and the Ding family had run a Chinese herbal remedy shop together in Birmingham, and since 1999 Du and his wife had been locked in a decade-long legal dispute with the Dings after their business partnership failed. Du faced a legal bill of around £88,000 after losing his final appeals, and on 28 April 2011 he was served with a court order preventing him from disposing of his assets.

On the morning of 29 April 2011, Du left his family a farewell note and travelled by train from Coventry to Birmingham and on to Northampton, carrying a knife and his passport, before taking a bus to Wootton. He killed Jeff and Helen Ding in the kitchen before going upstairs and killing Xing and Alice in a bedroom. A 999 call was made from Alice's phone during the attack, but police response was misdirected to a different address and the call was treated as closed.

Du fled in the family's stolen car to London, abandoning it in St. John's Wood, then travelled by coach to Paris and onward through France and Spain before crossing to Morocco. He was briefly detained there as a suspected illegal immigrant but released before UK authorities could establish his identity. He spent roughly 14 months living in a partly built block of flats in Morocco before being recognised from a newspaper photograph and arrested on 7 July 2012. He was extradited to the UK on 20 February 2013 and charged with the four murders.

Du's trial at Northampton Crown Court began on 12 November 2013. On 27 November 2013 a jury found him guilty of all four murders. On 28 November 2013 he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 40 years. His subsequent appeal against the length of the minimum term was rejected.