wiped out by their unwelcome guest
It took just minutes for one man to wipe out an entire family...
With their festive, red hats and beaming smiles, Christmas 2010 was clearly a happy one for the Ding family of Wootton, Northamptonshire.
Heartbreakingly, that Christmas was to be their last.
Not, of course, that they knew that.
Fast forward to a sunny Friday afternoon in April 2011, and Royal Wedding fever was in the air.
But, rather than watching Prince William and Kate Middleton’s nuptials, dad Jifeng ‘Jeff’ Ding was pottering about in his kitchen when he spotted Anxiang Du walking up his garden path.
Jeff, 46, probably wasn’t
thrilled to see his former business partner. They had history. A senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University’s School of Chemical and Environmental Science, Jeff was well-respected and popular with his students.
He was also devoted to his wife Ge ‘Helen’ Ding, 47, and their two daughters Xing, 18, and Alice, 12.
Years earlier, Jeff and Helen had been in business with Anxiang Du, 52.
They’d run a Chinese herbal medicine shop in Birmingham with a fourth business partner, Paul Delaney.
But things had turned sour, resulting in a costly 10-year court battle.
A few days before, the court case had come to a close, with the judge ruling in the Dings’ and Delaney’s favour.
It left Du liable to pay court costs of £88,000. But Du was not prepared to pay. In fact, the businessman was determined to make Jeff pay – in blood.
After telling his wife he was going to work that April day, Du made his way to the Ding family home by train and then bus, from his home in Coventry.
He had a kitchen knife hidden in his backpack.
On arrival, he stormed into the kitchen from the back garden and demanded money from Jeff and Helen.
But the couple refused, ordered him to leave and threatened to call the police.
Then a crazed and angry Du pulled out the knife, plunged it into Jeff ’s chest over and over.
Helen watched in horror as Du stabbed her husband 23 times, before turning the knife on her.
He stabbed her 13 times. Around the same time, at 3.30pm, the couple’s terrified children, Alice and Xing, called 999 from an upstairs bedroom.
Minutes later, Du stormed in, stabbing Xing 11 times and her younger sister Alice four times.
Their terrified screams were heard, recorded through the open phone line to the emergency services.
But no police or ambulance arrived.
The call was mishandled, resulting in officers being sent to the wrong address.
After his frenzied attack on the Dings, Du lay down and slept at the family home for up to six hours while the two adults and two children lay dead.
Later, Du fled, stealing the family car, and stopping at a service station along the M1 in Northampton.
Buying a map of Northamptonshire and a banana milkshake, he then travelled to the home of former
The couple’s terrified children called 999 from upstairs
He was eventually recognised in Morocco, living rough
business partner Paul Delaney, only to find he wasn’t there.
Du then drove to St John’s Wood in London, where he abandoned the Dings’ car.
The next morning, Du bought a one-way coach ticket to Paris with £61 cash and his own passport.
That day, Du’s wife reported him missing, after discovering a suicide note in the shop they owned in Birmingham.
Everyone has to say farewell some day, it read.
The Dings’ bodies were finally found on 1 May, after a neighbour went round to check on the family, after not seeing them over the Bank Holiday.
‘I rang the doorbell and they didn’t answer. I called out their names – no response,’ he remembered later.
‘I unbolted the gate and looked in the kitchen window. I could see like a brown gunk on the floor. At first I thought a radiator had probably fallen off the wall.
‘But then I looked harder and I noticed what looked like a leg. I ran straight back home and called police.’
The police broke into the house and found the bodies of Jeff and Helen slumped in their kitchen.
Running upstairs, an officer then discovered the two dead children.
They’d stumbled on a massacre, an entire family stabbed to death on a bankholiday weekend.
Tributes poured in for the family.
Jeff ’s students quickly set up a Facebook page, which they called the Jeff Ding Appreciation Society.
Members described him as ‘the nicest chemistry lecturer’, ‘ helpful and friendly’ and ‘a good man’.
The entire community was left in utter shock, following the brutal killings.
A friend of the family said that neighbouring children who’d been playing outside were kept huddled in a back garden as police cars and ambulances filled the cul-de-sac.
‘Every community will get a tragedy at some time but it was like a nightmare, worse than any nightmare you’d thought of,’ she said. Post-mortems showed that all of the family had suffered multiple stab wounds, with those to their chests proving fatal.
Ding and his eldest daughter had suffered selfdefence wounds, as they’d tried to fight off their attacker. Meanwhile, it took another 14 months for police to catch up with Du.
The search for him was one of the biggest manhunts in Northamptonshire Police’s history, with more than 240 police officers deployed.
Following a newspaper appeal, Du was eventually recognised in Morocco – living rough on a building site – by a British construction worker.
Du was brought back to the UK and charged with four counts of murder.
Finally, in November 2013, Anxiang Du, then 54, appeared at Northampton Crown Court.
While he admitted the killings, he denied murder, claiming that he’d been depressed at the time.
His lawyer also stated Du had suffered 10 years of stress, as a result of the legal battle between him and the Dings.
However, the jury rejected his defence of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Anxiang Du was found guilty of the murders, and sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum term of 40 years.
Mr Justice Flaux told Du his sentence would ‘mean that you will grow old, if not die, in prison’.
The judge added, ‘I’m quite satisfied that it was hatred, anger and your desire for revenge that motivated you to act as you did on the 29 April, not the moderate depression you suffered.’
Zuyao Cui, Helen’s father, sat at the back of the court room every day of the trial, listening to the proceedings through a translator.
‘When the two families heard about this, it was like the whole sky has fallen down,’ he said. ‘We all cried together.’
Steve Chappell, the Chief Prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service in the East Midlands added, ‘The Ding family were honest, hard-working and well-liked people. It is a tragedy that their lives were cut short in this way.’