Xing Ding was eighteen years old, and she had just been accepted to study medicine at the University of Nottingham. Her younger sister Alice was twelve, a talented musician. Their parents, Jeff and Helen, had built a life in England from a business they had once shared with a man named Anxiang Du. On the afternoon of 29 April 2011 — while most of Britain was watching a royal wedding — all four of them were killed at their home in Pioneer Close, Wootton, a suburb two miles south of Northampton.
The Ding family were of Chinese descent: Jifeng, known as Jeff, his wife Helen Chui, and their daughters Xing and Alice. Anxiang Du had run a Chinese herbal remedy shop in Birmingham with the Dings, and when their partnership collapsed, the fallout ran on for ten years through the courts. By April 2011, Du had lost his final appeal. He owed around £88,000. On 28 April, a court order was served preventing him from disposing of his assets. The following morning he boarded a train from Coventry to Birmingham carrying a knife and his passport, leaving behind a farewell note for his family.
Du arrived in Wootton by bus at around 1:35 pm. At 3:32 pm, a 999 call was made from Alice Ding's mobile phone, during which the screams of both girls could be heard. The call was mishandled by Northamptonshire Police, who sent officers to a different address. When nothing was found there, the call was considered closed. The family was not found until Sunday evening, 1 May, when police attended the house and discovered all four had been stabbed to death. They had almost certainly been killed on the Friday afternoon, while the country's attention was elsewhere. Du fled in the family's car, drove to London, took a coach to Paris, and continued south through France and Spain before reaching Morocco.
Du lived in a partly built block of flats in Morocco for fourteen months while a worldwide manhunt was underway. He was arrested at Oujda, near the Algerian border, as a suspected illegal immigrant. Moroccan police initially released him, unable to confirm his identity. It was not until July 2012 that he was confirmed as the chief suspect and extradited to the UK in February 2013. The trial at Northampton Crown Court began in November 2013. On 27 November, the jury returned guilty verdicts on all four counts of murder. Du was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 40 years. An appeal against the sentence was later rejected.
After Xing Ding's death, the examination boards used her existing coursework and school record to award her four posthumous A* grades in Chemistry, Latin, Mathematics, and Biology — the grades they projected she would have achieved had she sat the exams she never took. She had been due to begin studying medicine that autumn. Alice, at twelve, had been due to compete in a national music contest on the day her body was found. The Ding family home was on a street built on the grounds of the former Simpson Barracks — a development marketed as a new beginning. The mishandled 999 call, in which two children's cries for help went unanswered, remains one of the documented failures of the case.
Located at 52.21°N, 0.90°W in Wootton, a southern suburb of Northampton, England. The site is within residential streets south of Northampton town centre. Nearest airports: Northampton-based general aviation at Sywell Aerodrome (EGBK), approximately 8 miles northeast. Recommended viewing altitude 2,000 feet for suburban Northampton context. The area is flat East Midlands terrain, easily identified by the M1 motorway running to the west.