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.