Quiet, ordinary man who exacted murderous revenge
After a decade living and working in Britain, Anxiang Du spoke very little English and had few friends outside the Chinese community in central England.
He seemed like a quiet man: he ran a herbal medicine shop, lived an ordinary life with his wife, Dr Can Chen, and walked his pet white poodle near his home in Coventry.
But on Friday April 29 last year, this ordinary man wrote an apparent suicide note, locked the door to his shop in Birmingham and boarded the 11.33am train to Northampton, less than an hour away.
Once there he caught a bus to the leafy village of Wootton where his former business partner Helen Chui, the schoolteacher wife of university lecturer Jifeng 'Jeff' Ding lived with their two children. What followed was callous, cold-blooded murder.
Back in 2004, Du had opened an herbal medicine shop with Chui in Northampton. Both hailed from Hangzhou in Zhejiang province and they went on to own at least two other shops.
But within a couple of years the partners fell out and became embroiled in a bitter legal battle over debts said to have amounted to tens of thousands of pounds.
In November 2007, Chui and Ding were ordered to pay Mr Du and his wife GBP30,000. Six months later, a court in Bristol ordered them to make a further 'interim payment' of GBP30,000.
Their former partner then won another court order securing the debt against the Dings' house, but the following day the couple attempted to sell their home to businessman and friend Paul Delaney for GBP210,000.
Du and his wife attempted to prevent the sale, claiming the Dings were deliberately undervaluing their home to put the family's assets beyond their reach.
They then launched a civil suit against Delaney to stop the sale and initially won a district court ruling blocking the sale, but that was finally defeated in the High Court in a landmark case in 2010.
Then, hours before the killings, Du was handed an injunction which froze his assets. Police say that was the 'final straw' that sparked his murderous rampage.
Cryptically, the short message he left behind, said: 'There is always a time to say goodbye.' Police were never convinced it was a suicide note and their instincts were right.
