Bad blood that led quiet man to slay family of 4 and disappear

People who met Anxiang Du thought of him as a quiet man who ran his Chinese herbal medicine shop and walked his pet white poodle near the home he had worked hard to buy after coming to England over a decade ago. His poor command of English did not help him make many friends, but he seemed a very ordinary man who lived an ordinary life with his wife Dr Can Chen. He was best known for always wearing a baseball cap which covered his bald head.

On Friday last week, this ordinary man wrote an apparent suicide note, locked the door of his shop in Birmingham and boarded the 11.33am train to the town of Northampton, less than an hour away. Once there he caught a bus to the leafy village of Wooton.

But what happened there inside a detached house in a quiet upmarket cul-de-sac was far from ordinary and transformed the 52-year-old into a wanted man suspected of brutally butchering a family of four in their own home.

Du had been a partner in a herbal remedies store with Helen Chui, the schoolteacher wife of university lecturer Jifeng 'Jeff' Ding. Last Sunday, the couple were found stabbed to death along with daughters Nancy, 18, and Alice, 11.

Behind the horror is a story of bad blood and legal wrangles over a number of years that was played out again in court just hours before the horrific rampage.

Now police hunting the prime suspect believe the suicide note was a lie and Du, who had a considerable amount of cash with him, is in hiding. Officers have not ruled out the possibility that he may have left Britain and fled to his native Hunan province.

Last night Detective Superintendent Glynn Timmins, the man leading the investigation, said it was possible Du had slipped out of the country.