The Ding Family Slaughter： A Tragic Case of Revenge

The Ding Family Slaughter： A Tragic Case of Revenge 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
It was a Royal wedding weekend and Britain was enjoying
a public holiday at their home in the English Midlands.
A Chinese family, the Dings, joined in the celebrations. They
had made Britain their home.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
They opened a Chinese medicine shop, and they had three
shops across the UK, and that was quite successful, and
that represented that we're doing well financially and that they
were quite proud of their businesses.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
The Dings had set up a partnership with another Chinese family.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Ang Changdu and his wife came to this country from
China in nineteen ninety eight. They were both doctors of
traditional Chinese medicine and they started a family and after
a short while they met the Dings. She was a
businesswoman and he was a lecturer at the University of Manchester.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
But all was not what had seemed between the couples.
The picture perfect at Ding family were about to be
killed one by one, the eldest daughter desperately phoning police
for help as her assassin walked towards her.

Speaker 4 (01:08):
It was the kind of thing that just makes your
blood run cold in your veins, you know. It's that
thing where you forget to breathe where you are chilled
throughout your whole body, and you just think, if I'm
witnessing somebody die a violent death, there's nothing to describe

(01:29):
the horror when you know what those screams represent and
what those poor children are going through.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Detectives gather evidence until the picture of a suspect emerges.
Which piece of a puzzle will reveal Ansiang do as
guilty of murder? What would be a killer's mistake. Nobody

(02:20):
should die that way. I've never seen anything that herd
of the duties of a pathologist is to determine the
cause of death.

Speaker 5 (02:26):
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Speaker 6 (02:33):
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Speaker 1 (02:43):
The scene, which meant officers as they arrived at the
home of the Ding family in a quiet English village,
was horrific.

Speaker 4 (02:51):
My reaction was incredulity, because not so much in the
sense that two adults had been murdered. I mean, sadly,
you know, we all know that happens. I think the
ferocity of the attack, the fact that it was a
knife related killing with multiple stab wounds, blood everywhere. But

(03:16):
I think the thing that tipped it over the edge
for me was the slaying of the two girls in
the upstairs bedroom. To go and kill two defenseless girls
carrying in their bedroom in their own home, beggers Belief.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
Zing and Anis Ding, both talented violinists quite literally knew
what was coming. Their attacker had begun with their father.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
He confronts jeff Ding, produces his knife and attacks him.
Jeff Ding tries to fight off the attack to ward
off the stab wounds, sustains defense wounds to his hands,
and jeff Ding dies of these stab wounds.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
The attack was in the kitchen of the house. Jeff
Ding's killer had only just begun.

Speaker 3 (04:04):
It's believed that Helen Ding hears the commotion in the
kitchen and she comes in and do immediately attacks her.
She has no defense wounds, she hasn't had time to
shield herself from the blows, but she stabbed thirteen times
down the left side of her body, fatal blows. It's
killed them both, but he's not finished. He then turns

(04:26):
his attention to their two daughters.

Speaker 4 (04:30):
One eighteen one just twelve, and mercilessly and brutally in
front of each other, stabbed them to death.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
Before she died, the oldest ding daughter managed to use
her mobile phone to call the police.

Speaker 4 (04:48):
It came to light that there was a telephone call
that was made horrifically enough from one of the girls
who had a mobile phone, so they tried to wring
the police. It went through on the nine nine nine system,
but it's what they call a dropped call, so when
the emergency operad to receive the call, they just heard
some screams on the end of the phone and then

(05:11):
the call dropped because he'd ended.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
Events elsewhere had an influence on the possibilities of why
the call had been made.

Speaker 4 (05:24):
It was bank holiday afternoon, so I think there was
an element that people thought it was some kind of
prank corps.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
Holiday high spirits.

Speaker 4 (05:35):
Nevertheless, the police were sent to the location that was
indicated from mobile phone tracking that goes with a nine
nine nine call, but unfortunately, because of the nature that
track in the police was sent to the wrong location.
So we know from that phone call which had received
it about just after half three in the afternoon, that

(05:58):
was when the murders were taking place somewhere around the
half remark. But the girls never got to make their
request for assistance.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Phone tracking is not an exact science.

Speaker 4 (06:12):
So it took the officers to a location at least
a mile distant from where the actual murders had occurred.
And of course having turned up, and there's nothing here
and it doesn't appear to be any problem. Would probably,
you know, add to this idea that, oh, it's just
a prank call. Sadly, you know, the nine nine to
nine service fire ambuls and police do get prank calls.

(06:35):
This chillingly was not. This was a real call, and
those were probably the last human sounds that those two
poor girls made.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
There can be little doubt that the Ding family will
have squeamed, but neighbors heard nothing. Their home overlooked the
landscaped area free from other properties. It's probable that within
minutes of Anziang Dou arriving at the house in Pioneer Close,
all four had been killed.

Speaker 7 (07:09):
The daughters were found upstairs in their bedrooms. One of
the daughters was curled up in a ball. And you
get stabbed repeatedly, especially in the stomach, it's extremely painful.
So maybe she was curled up in a ball because
she was in so much pain, and she then lost
consciousness in that position. Another of the daughters was found

(07:30):
in a prayer position, with.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
All four dead. The killer had completed what appeared to
be a mission, wiping out an entire family.

Speaker 4 (07:43):
What we now know that he did was that, having
murdered the family in cold blood, he washed the murder
weapon a knife and his hands and left it at
the sick I think the court records will say that
he then some kind of physical reaction to having committed
the murders, and actually slept for a while at the

(08:06):
house where the murders had been committed.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
The slaying of the Ding family was over by three
point thirty on the afternoon of Friday, April twenty ninth.
Forty two hours would pass before their slaughter would be uncovered,
time enough for their killer to be a long way
from the scene of their murder. Detectives know that most

(08:38):
murders are carried out by someone who knows the victim well.
Suspecting someone is, however, a far cry from having the
evidence to prove a case. Seasoned investigators tend towards routine
when trying to first find and then see a killer convicted.
That routine generally starts with getting a phone call the

(09:02):
man who would lead the hunt for the killer of
the Ding family is Glynn Timmins. He too was enjoying
the Royal Wedding Bank holiday when he heard of their death.

Speaker 4 (09:11):
On the night of the first of May. When the
murders came to light, my colleague was the on call
senior Investigating Officer for Northamptonshire and he'd been sent to
the discovery of bodies at a house in the Wooden
area of Northamptonshire and because they appeared to be the

(09:33):
bodies of four family members within their family home. As
the senior detective for Northamptonshire and I was put on
alert to go and oversee the inquiry.

Speaker 8 (09:46):
The family were murdered at the home on Friday, the
twenty nighth of it well last year. The bodies weren't
discovered till late Sunday afternoon early Sunday evening on the
first of May.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
One step at a time, evidence is gathered amongst the
first pieces of the picture of a killer to emerge.
As Timmins and his team began their investigation the time
of death Friday afternoon, science provided that information.

Speaker 7 (10:15):
When you die after about two hours, between two and
four hours, you get this kind of stiffening of the muscles.
It starts off in the face and the neck and
these little muscles, and then it spreads to these bigger muscles.
And what's happening is a kind of chemical process in
the muscle fibers where they're becoming cross linked and stiff
and rigid.

Speaker 9 (10:34):
That rigor mortis. That stiffness will.

Speaker 7 (10:37):
Be maintained for about two days, after which the muscle
fibers begin to disintegrate and then they.

Speaker 9 (10:44):
Become floppy again.

Speaker 7 (10:45):
So you can use the stiffness of different parts of
the body to get some sort of estimation of how
much time has elapsed.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
Establishing time of death was a straightforward enough conclusion for pathologists.
For detectives, arranged theories now had to be considered. One
immediately occurred to the lead investigator.

Speaker 4 (11:06):
Your first reaction is, well, you know, do we have
a murder or do we have some kind of murder suicide,
which you know does happen from time to time.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
This, however, was not a case of murder suicide. That
was a theory soon dismissed. For it to be the case,
the body of one of the four dead would offer
no signs of having struggled.

Speaker 4 (11:28):
I think we reached that conclusion fairly quickly because of
the positions that the victims were found in, and it
was clear that there had been a very violent struggle,
and both the adult victims had been murdered as opposed
to having a struggle between themselves, So it's pretty it
was clear fairly quickly that we were dealing with a

(11:51):
third party murderer.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
What about the nationality and culture of the victims? Investigators,
we learn that revenge always a possible motive in any
murder inquiry, is one which has a long history in
Chinese society, where loss of face has been known to
lead to vendettas against whole families. Was that what was
behind the killer's actions was he taking revenge on an

(12:19):
entire family for having lost face over something.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
In Chinese culture, there is a point where oh, yes, okay,
I need to seek revenge in some way because he's
done that to me, ding has done that to me.
Therefore I need to sort of challenge that I want
him to lose face as well. He needs to do
something about this family.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Sunday, May one, twenty eleven fell into two phases for
the police. Before the discovery of the bodies police in
Northampton here of an alert issued to all forces for
a missing person. A Chinese national called Anziang Do. Do
was the co owner of this herbal medicine business in Birmingham,

(13:06):
and he had not been heard from since calling into
the store on the public holiday two days earlier, where he.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
Went into the shopping center and left in the appointments
book there at a note to his family in Mandarin
Chinese which said things like eternal blessings and were clearly
kind of phrases that thought he was not going to
see them again.

Speaker 7 (13:32):
He left a message for his wife basically telling her goodbye,
I'm going. What he didn't really realize was that his
wife would then contact the police to report him missing.

Speaker 4 (13:44):
It was on the Saturday the thirtieth she'd gone to
the shop that they owned in Birmingham and found what
appeared to be a suicide note. In actual fact, when
you read the note, it read more as a good
bye note than potentially a suicide note as he was.
That's how the note was interpreted, and as such, Ang
Xiang Do was circulated by Westmindon's police quite rightly as

(14:08):
a vulnerable missing person.

Speaker 7 (14:10):
An alert goes to his local police force in the
West Midlands saying this man has gone missing, he's in
an agitated state, we're worried about him. That missing person's
alert in the West Midlands will go centrally, so the
police in Northampton who are coming across this slaughtered family
will also have that information that a man, a Chinese national,
has gone missing and as an agitated state.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
A trawl of people who might know an Xiang Dou
turned up the name of Jeff Ding.

Speaker 4 (14:41):
It is quite common for the police to visit known
associates of the missing person, and the Ding family were
one of the few known associates of Ang Ziang Do.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
So that Sunday morning of May first, an officer was
sent to the Ding family home in an effort to
find out if mister Dou had been in touch with them.

Speaker 4 (15:03):
The police were called that morning to visit the Dean
families if they'd seen Do, and of course they knocked
the door, got no reply early on a Sunday morning,
nothing unusual in that, and left a calling card for
them to contact the police. Obviously, the offices there is
no way they could have known what was inside that
quiet suburban house on a quiet, nice estate in a

(15:28):
nice part of Northamptonshire.

Speaker 1 (15:32):
Outside the house, no car, it was possible they were away,
so with their bodies inside, the officers attending the scene,
oblivious to what had happened left.

Speaker 4 (15:44):
It is incredible and I mean, you know that there
are occasions when this inquiry for me, was marked more
by extraordinary coincidences, missed opportunities, frustrations, barriers than it was
to you know, normal detective work. I mean, it was
literally a case of one step forward, two steps back.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
Phase two of how police viewed events of May one,
twenty eleven. Followed the eventual discovery of the bodies.

Speaker 3 (16:17):
A neighbor of the Dings realizes that she hasn't seen
the family about for a day, goes over and peers
through the windows of their house and sees the carnage inside.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
After the discovery of the bodies, in the arrival of
Murders Quad detectives on the case, it seemed too much
of a coincidence a Chinese family slaughtered on the day
that a Chinese national who knew them is reported missing.
The Dings had owned a Chinese herbal medicine business. Another
Chinese national who owned a herbal medicine business was now

(16:50):
officially a missing person. Why had the police in Birmingham
assumed that the Dings would know anything about Ansiang Do.
It turned out that an Ziyang Do felt that they
had plenty to be resentful about towards Jeff Ding. It
wasn't always the case. The Ding and Do families went
back a long time after the two women introduced their

(17:12):
husbands to each other.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
What we know is that Can Chengdu and g Shwading
became friends. And as they were becoming friends their husbands
obviously they met each other.

Speaker 4 (17:26):
Initially they were friends and they went into business together
to run a herbal medicine company.

Speaker 3 (17:31):
And they in fact opened three of these shops and
things were looking good for them.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
The then young professionals shared an expertise and worked hard
and that was.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Quite successful, and that represented that we're doing well financially
and that they were quite proud of their businesses. That
honor to them was quite what they represented. They can
provide for their families, They can enjoy their lifestyle a
bit more because coming from main life and China, I'm
sure they would have had quite hardships trying to find jobs,

(18:04):
you know, trying to provide for themselves, so when they
came over to Britain, this was an opportunity for success,
you know, to be able to give their families the
lifestyle that they probably didn't have when they were children.

Speaker 1 (18:19):
However, disputes soon emerged between the business partners.

Speaker 4 (18:23):
That relationship went sarah when Angiangdu was asked to leave
the business by the Dings because of allegations of financial irregularity.

Speaker 3 (18:33):
There were no charges, no police involvement, but it was
the first hint that something was going wrong. And then
three years later, in two thousand and four, the Does
were dismissed from the partnership.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
Things were to turn ugly. A complex dispute ended up.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
In course, Do and his wife started legal proceedings against
the Dings on the basis I thought they'd been unfairly
thrown out of their business partnership.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
With the court procedures at the start was they were
quite in favor of the Does, but as time progressed,
the ruling was in favor of the Dings, and that
meant for Do is really spiraling out of control and
there was no hope really for him to go anywhere
to start a business or you know, just to find

(19:25):
the financial means to support his family.

Speaker 3 (19:29):
And at the end of that battle it was the
Dings and not the Does that succeeded.

Speaker 1 (19:36):
The feud which had developed between the two families caused
the Anziangdhu's bitterness to run deep. He now faced paying
eighty eight thousand pounds in legal fees. A complex financial
arrangement meant that the house the Dings were now living
in was part of the business as assets. Do hoped
to sell the house in the village of What in Northamptonshire.

(19:59):
It would help him pay off his legal costs, but
Do did not actually owners. A court order was issued
preventing Done from trying to sell the.

Speaker 4 (20:09):
House, effectively froze the assets until the court made its determination.
But effectively it meant that mister Doo had no access
to his financial assets and the sale of his house
was prevented.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
That order was issued the day before the murders. Detectives
had their motive.

Speaker 3 (20:29):
Who would want to kill these people?

Speaker 1 (20:30):
Why would they be killed like this?

Speaker 3 (20:33):
And because of the legal case, and because of the
bitterness and the rancor that was around the splitting up
of their business, Do would be the obvious suspect.

Speaker 4 (20:41):
I mean clearly the delivery of the court restraining orders
the night before had effectively pushed him over the edge
in terms of anger, rage, the need to hit back,
and I suspect that he spent most of that night
thinking about it, ruminating about it, building it up in

(21:02):
terms of bile, anger, the need for revenge and retribution,
and by the time he went to work on that
Friday morning, Arms convinced there can be that he had
murder in mind, that that was his objective.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
In any culture, what had happened to Ansiyang Do would
cause deep resentment. Some commentators on Chinese culture suggest a
violent reaction was all but inevitable.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
On one side, you've got the financial difficulties because now
he's trying to find another job.

Speaker 9 (21:40):
Do had lost this court case, he was in a
huge amount of debt.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
But more importantly is the loss of face, obviously, because
it's all about pride and how one holds themselves in
the Chinese culture. When something turns as sour as that,
it's almost as if your whole world has upside down.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
There was to Ansiang Do a lot to be angry about.
Two motive boxers were ticked.

Speaker 7 (22:08):
There are a couple of things that come up in
murder cases as common motives. One of them is a
big one is revenge, so you know he wanted revenge.
It's something like three percent of homicide cases in this
country have a financial motive. Forty percent of them the
motive is it's either an argument or a struggle, or
it's a revenge attack.

Speaker 4 (22:30):
We very quickly, we're able to examine the background of
the association between the Ding family and Ang yang Do
and establish this court battle that have been ongoing. So very,
very quickly we were able to pinpoint Do as the
likely murder suspect.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
Displaying a motive to kill so obviously and betrayed Do
as the prime suspect. Police quickly put out appeals.

Speaker 8 (22:59):
For extensive forendsic examination of the scene took place late
Sunday and into Monday, the second of May, all day
Monday the second of May. This led to us name
in Ang Xiangdu as a play suspect in this case.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
On Tuesday, the third of May. The court case which
had so enraged Dan Ziengdu involved a third party, someone
who had become involved in the business. Was he now
at risk?

Speaker 4 (23:28):
We didn't know where this murderer had gone. Clearly wasn't
still at the scene, and obviously your determination at the
outset of any homicide inquiries to bring the offender to justice.
But this was clearly something completely out of the ordinary,
if I can use such a term for homicide.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
Where was an Ziengdu? What mistake had he made to
lead police to him and to prove he was a killer?
And would he kill again? Within hours of the discovery
of the murdered ding family, police begin a painstaking troll

(24:10):
through digital evidence. They needed to find him, but also
to build a case, and they would uncover plenty of sightings.

Speaker 7 (24:20):
The UK is one of the most highly watched places
in the world. There's vast numbers of CCTV cameras which
have been put up by the police, by local authorities,
by private businesses and increasingly private individuals installing CCTV cameras.
So there's rule of this estimated to be more than
I think somewhere between four and six million CCTV cameras

(24:41):
in the UK.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
Police were able to watch step by step dos activities
before the slaughter a pioneer close his mistakes began the
moment that he left his home on the day of
the murders.

Speaker 3 (24:56):
He hadn't really thought through the possibilities as to how
he might be caught because he didn't really take any precautions.

Speaker 4 (25:11):
The timeline of movement for Ang Ziangdu began on the
Friday at about ten o'clockish. He drove to Country Railway station.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
From Coventry. He bought a ticket to get him to
his shop in Birmingham. Cameras gathering information every second. He
headed to his store Natural Care in Birmingham.

Speaker 4 (25:45):
It appears that he wasn't in the shop for very long,
that he gathered at rucksack and wrote this goodbye note
to his wife.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
He picks up a bag which contains a knife, the
murder weapon, and within a matter of minutes left the shop,
went to Birmingham New Street and started that faithful journey
via train to Northampton, transferring at Northampton to the bus station.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
Again he was captured on camera. The journey from Birmingham
to Northampton ended at twelve thirty seven. There he soon
found a bus that would take him to Wooden, the
village where the Dings lived. On the bus, he appeared
perfectly normal to other passengers, just someone else on a

(26:38):
bus ride during the journey. He changed seats as he
alighted an issue to overcome. He was in the right village,
but where is the house?

Speaker 3 (26:55):
He doesn't know the area. He gets lost. He asked
for direct of driver. He's given directions, but they're wrong
as well, so there's quite a bit of chewing and throwing.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
He would arrive at the house around three o'clock. The
fate of the Ding family was sealed.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
The last thing that he expects is his former partner,
former business partner is coming uninvited to his house intent
on revenge. But that's what happens. I thanks Hnggdu comes
into the kitchen later.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
And Zyangdhu would claim he was met with more provocation.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
Ding laughed at Doo and called him a fool. That
is almost like public shaming. It is, you know, one
of the worst things that you can probably do in
Chinese culture, because you're shaming them in front of everyone.

Speaker 3 (27:48):
He confronts Jeff Ding, produces his knife and attacks him.

Speaker 1 (27:56):
Missus Ding seems to have been attacked just outside of
the kitchen, who.

Speaker 3 (28:03):
Turns his attention onto her again, stabs her multiple times.

Speaker 1 (28:09):
And then he ran upstairs to attack the daughters who
were cowering in a bedroom.

Speaker 4 (28:15):
Hang Zang Dou went upstairs in that house, found two
young girls carrying on a bed, and they're.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
Trying to summon help. But Do goes upstairs, finds them
and attacks them both. Stabs them both again multiple times,
again concentrating upon the area of the body where he
knows the vital organs are intending to kill them, and
he does. He kills both the girls, so within a

(28:48):
matter of minutes he's slain the entire family, mother, father,
and both daughters.

Speaker 7 (28:56):
The parents' bodies were found hidden behind a curtain downstairs,
so they'd obviously been moved. The daughters were found upstairs
in their bedrooms. One of the daughters was curled up
in a ball.

Speaker 1 (29:09):
DU's mind, previously entirely dominated by a lust to kill,
now turned to covering his tracks.

Speaker 3 (29:18):
Doo's quite calm collected.

Speaker 4 (29:21):
Having murdered the family in corld blood, he washed the
murder weapon a knife and his hands and left it
at the sink.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
Having first slept after the murders, Du now plots his escape.

Speaker 4 (29:39):
What he found was Jeff Ding's wallet and car keys
and decided, well, that's that's the means by which I'm
going to make my escape.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
The Dinger car one they had hired, was conspicuous by
its absence when a police officer had visited. It was
not there because Ans Yang Do, who had taken it.
It seems likely he waited until dark and left Pioneered
close sometime after eight point thirty on April twenty ninth.
He then headed for a motorway.

Speaker 4 (30:12):
The last sighting was at junction eight A of the forty,
which is some miles distant of London, so he could
have gone pretty much anywhere on that motorway. We were
reliant on finding the stolen Vauxhall cours up.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
Do's escape was haphazard but successful. He heads south and
gets lucky as he drives into London by using your route.
Where there were no cameras capable of automatic number plate recognition,
he went undetected for now.

Speaker 4 (30:43):
The car was abandoned in a side street this Venables street,
and we've got grainy CCTV at about half two in
the morning, after someone matching Hang xiang Dou's description walking
along and looking into a shop front, he leaves the
car behind.

Speaker 1 (31:02):
The illegally parked car gets ticketed again and again and again.
Over nine days, Do once again got lucky. There is
a nationwide hunt for him and for the car that
he was driving, but none of the traffic wardens called
the vehicle in to be towed away. If they had,
it would have alerted police to its whereabouts and given

(31:24):
them hope of finding Do.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
Incredibly, perhaps the car is parked in London and tracks
nine parking tickets, but nobody manages to connect the fact
that this car is the one that was being used
by the wanted man.

Speaker 9 (31:41):
This case highlights the flaw in the system.

Speaker 7 (31:43):
You'd expect that if a car has been parks on
a stretch of roads and amassed nine parking tickets over
a series of days, that that might flag up something
to the local authority that there may be a problem
with this car.

Speaker 9 (31:54):
Maybe it's been instolen and abandoned.

Speaker 7 (31:56):
Maybe something has happened to the owner, because otherwise, how
come they haven't come back and move their car to
stop from getting more parking tickets. That red flag wasn't raised,
and maybe if it had, they might have got more
information sooner.

Speaker 1 (32:12):
The apparent abandon shown by Anziang Dou meant that the
police were getting reports from people who had seen him
on public transport.

Speaker 8 (32:20):
We have had about three hundred and eighty suspect sightings.
The majority of those sitans have been in the UK,
and all of those sightings are dealt with under a
very strict process to make sure we get the optimum
from those sightings.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
In fact, danziang Dou had got lucky for a third time.
He boards a ferry for France and is again not spotted,
so he.

Speaker 3 (32:43):
Makes that journey across to France. He makes his way
down through France into Spain and eventually gets the ferry
from how to Kiras across Tangiers.

Speaker 7 (32:53):
Angs Ziangdu goes off grid in Morocco. He's living there
under a false name, getting what work he can.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
His luck just keeps on coming.

Speaker 3 (33:03):
Once he's in Morocco, Doo's actually arrested. He's arrested on
suspicion of being there illegally and he's released. This is
only five days after the murders. But he's released because
he claims his name is Lee miing that he's from Taiwan,
and he's allowed to stay and he goes on to
get a job. He ends up working as a night

(33:25):
watchman on a construction site and he had nowhere to live.
He was sleeping sort of rough in the construction site,
and some of the other workers kind of took pity
on him and give him food and so forth, because
they thought his life.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
Was so poor.

Speaker 3 (33:38):
But he was still free. He'd managed to escape.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
Dou had made a series of mistakes as he had
set off to murder his victims. The trail of evidence
from his front door to the house where he had killed,
together with the clear motive that he had, was likely
to get police a conviction. But within weeks of the
murders he was two thousand miles away, living almost rough,

(34:05):
with a new name, a new job, a new life.
Police meanwhile, were ramping up their appeals for help.

Speaker 8 (34:13):
The Ding family had been in the UK since about
late nineteen ninety. Jeff was working at Manchester University as
a lecturer. Helen working locally at a school in Northampton
and with the children involved education in the Fountain as well.
Since around two thousand and two, both Jeff and Hell
had been involved in a civil dispute with the Chinese

(34:36):
family or a business issue.

Speaker 1 (34:39):
They knew who they were looking for and why he
had killed. What would be the mistake to ensure that
the police would catch a killer. Detecting who had killed

(34:59):
the Ding family had not taken long, Anziando had hardly
tried to cover his tracks.

Speaker 4 (35:04):
I think by then, my personal opinion is there is
set his mind on a course of action and he
was blind to everything else.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
In the months which followed the murders, police knew they
would need all the help they could get, and they've
traveled far and wide. Our visit to China had three
specific games.

Speaker 8 (35:22):
These were to brief the Ministry of Public Security, which
are essentially the Chinese police in Beijing, and inform them
of the inquiry they work we'd undertaken today, and also
to seek the resistance for further inquiries.

Speaker 1 (35:37):
Unbeknownst to two police, Do's haphazard escape plan had worked,
but he was not in China. He was in North Africa,
free but facing the indignity of sleeping on a construction site,
living on handouts.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
I think De would have found that ameliating, you know,
on a makeshift bed and having food parcels, because he's
so used to having his business being able to provide
for his family, and his lifestyle has drastically changed, you know,
being able to provide for his family, having the means
to go out and socialize with people, and for him

(36:12):
to be isolated in Morocco, for him to have almost
the food parcels given to him and sleeping on the
makeshift bed, that's such a different lifestyle for Do that
he's just not used to.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
He cut an unmistakable figure and it was this which
was to be his undoing. His image had been captured
by cameras throughout the English Midlands. It had taken time,
but his getaway car had been found in London. It
was hard to miss the face of Ansiang Do.

Speaker 3 (36:45):
Ashang Dou becomes the most wanted person on the crime
Stoppers website. He's you know, it's imperative for the police
to find him as soon as possible. This is a
man who's killed four people already and there's a danger there.
He circulates internationally because it's feared that he might have
gone abroad.

Speaker 8 (37:05):
I have to accept that Angjiang Dou may have left
the UK. We still look for him within the UK,
but he may have left the UK, possibly soon after
the murders. Someone must have assisted him, and he's likely
to be still assisting him or aware of where he is.
I emphasize we've now increased the reward to twenty five

(37:26):
thousand pounds, which is a substantial award, and we're looking
for that information to come to us directly as the
investigation team or through Crime Stoppers.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
And that was how do would be cause as sighting
stopped it became clear that he got out of Britain.
His profile so easy to publicize using the images captured
on surveillance made for headline news and international crime Stopper programs.

Speaker 8 (37:50):
I should also stress that today we've had no confirmed
sightings of Angjiang Dou anywhere in the world. This is
one reason why I've fully utilized the Crime Stoppers, for
example throughout the UK, Europe and lately North America to
highlight so a way an audience as possible.

Speaker 1 (38:09):
The availability of Dou's image made it easier to spread
the word.

Speaker 7 (38:14):
What he doesn't realize is that Spanish TV has a
program quite similar to Crime Watching the UK, and they
cover the case and his photo is put onto Spanish
TV and then someone recognizes him in Morocco.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
In July two thousand and twelve, so some fourteen months
after the murders, the man who runs the building site
and employs him as night watchmen realizes that his night
watchmen is actually and going to the wanted quadruple murderer
from the UK. He tells the police, who is arrested

(38:50):
in Morocco when he is finally brought back to the
UK and charged with the murder of the four members
of the Ding family.

Speaker 1 (38:59):
Killers who are which you'd have always made at least
one mistake? Do was first reported to police by his
own wife, anxious at seeing a note showing Do in despair.
Was that his biggest mistake.

Speaker 4 (39:12):
The letter was obviously the precursor to Ang Jiangdu being
treated as what we call a vulnerable missing person. What
that did was elevate his stakes as a missing person
to one of a high priority. So the very fact
that he was identified as potentially being vulnerable through what

(39:33):
appeared to be a suicide threat meant that the police
would make immediate active enquiries to trace his whereabouts. And
it was those immediate active enquirers to trace his whereabouts
that provided the vital link between our murders and the
missing person inquiry?

Speaker 1 (39:52):
Or was the killer's mistake the trail that he left
which made it easy for detectives to know who the
killer was I think do His.

Speaker 7 (40:00):
Biggest mistake was not realizing the extent of surveillance in
this country. Once you become a person of interest, the
police can then go back and look at the CCTV
footage and they can find images of you everywhere. There
were images of him traveling by train. There are images
of him on a bus towards the victim's house. Then

(40:22):
once he steals their car, there's the automatic number plate
recognition cameras that are picking up where that vehicle is traveling.

Speaker 3 (40:30):
Actually, everything he did on the day of the murders
and the day after were recorded, and police were able
to go back to and piece together his entire route.

Speaker 7 (40:39):
Once you become a person of interest, you are watched
and there are photos of you everywhere. And it was
really those photos and those images which helps convict him.

Speaker 1 (40:49):
The lead detective Glenn Timmins, the context of Anziangdou's murders
make him amongst the worst killers that he has come across.

Speaker 4 (40:58):
When you talk about evil, you talk about pre planning,
you talk about there's elements that somebody has deigned that
you were going to die. I don't think it was
evil from that point of view, because this was blind rage.

Speaker 1 (41:16):
Why had he done it? His argument had been with
Jeff Ding and his wife, but surely not the children.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
You might wonder why Do killed the whole of the
Ding's family and not just Ding himself.

Speaker 3 (41:31):
What was more important to him was getting the revenge
that he felt was due for the wrong that had
been done to him and to his family.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
And it's really because the way that the Chinese culture works.
We talked about losing faith in the family name, and
first Do Ding has taken everything away from him. Therefore
Do not only has to kill Ding, but he has
to kill everyone Assoshi with the Ding name, so that

(42:02):
includes his wife and the two children.

Speaker 1 (42:05):
Not something a hard knows detective finds easy to take.

Speaker 4 (42:10):
Nothing, nor ever reconcile me to the mentality of somebody
who goes up to a child's bedroom finds two innocent
young people caring on a bed, having slain their parents.
They're in terror, and then that person goes setting about

(42:34):
them with a knife, stabbing them repeatedly in front of
each other to take their lives. That that is malevolent,
That is evil. There is no way that I can
ever come to terms with that. It just defies every belief.
Oh dear, it's inconceivable.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
In twenty thirteen, An Xiangdu argued in court that guilty
only of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, he
had lost control. His defense was rejected by a jury,
and he was sentenced to life in prison with a
minimum of forty years behind bars. He will be ninety
four when he is eligible for release. A young woman

(43:21):
with a troubled background suddenly controls a million dollar property
in New Hampshire. How she had found a way of
tempting the old man who'd owned the farm.

Speaker 10 (43:30):
She bared her breast, she exposed herself, sent photos of
herself in very sensual positions, and she got a response.
And that's how she ended up in her relationship with
this man who eventually dies, and as a result of
his death, now she has this house.

Speaker 1 (43:50):
Soon after, young vulnerable men down on their luck are
seen coming and going neighbours fear that the farm is
harboring a grim secret.

Speaker 5 (43:59):
Coming down down the wooden path, they saw me and
stumbling and bleeding from the head. Who was Michael Deloge
And he just said one word, Sheila.

Speaker 1 (44:12):
Another young man Kenny County was hooked on the older
woman who had taken him in. His mother appealed for
him to come home.

Speaker 11 (44:19):
You don't want to be with a forty seven or
this ultimotives There no, no, and Kenny said no, she
loves me.

Speaker 1 (44:28):
Kenny County would become the second man killed at the
hands of Sila Lebar. Detectives gather evidence until a picture
of a suspect emerges. Which piece of the puzzle will
reveal Sila Lebar as guilty of murder? What would be
the killer's mistake. On a farm just outside Eppingham, New Hampshire, detectives,

(45:24):
answering a call related to the disappearance of this man,
come across a grizzly site.

Speaker 5 (45:31):
So they went over and took a look inside and
what they found in there was a human bone and
on the knob of the bone was some human flesh.
So now they are very worried about what has happened
to Kenneth County.

Speaker 1 (45:51):
Weeks earlier, Kenny's mother was convinced that her son had
suffered harm at the hands of a woman called Shilah Lebar.
She feared he was possibly dead. She wanted a detective,
a man called Cody, to check that Sheila Lebar had
not killed Kenny.

Speaker 11 (46:08):
Detective Cody said no, there was no reason to. And
I said, she couldn't kill my son because at that point,
and that was in the very beginning, at that point,
I knew something wasn't right. And he said, no, She's
known to the Epin police and she would never do that.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
Who was Sheila Lebar? What had happened to Kenny County?
Why was there a human bone on a bonfire? Questions
which would gradually be answered as police tried to uncover
a killer's mistake. First, they had to find out about
the characters in what appeared a disturbing and bizarre story.
Sheila Lebar had been known as Sheila Bailey during an

(46:49):
unsettled childhood.

Speaker 5 (46:51):
Sheila was born in a very small town in Alabama
named Fort Payne. Sheila's childhood was very troubled. Her older
sisters says that Sheila was the subject of sexual abuse
from her father and from other men.

Speaker 1 (47:11):
Kenny County had a troubled childhood too. When little more
than a baby, his mother noticed he was behind others
in his age range.

Speaker 11 (47:19):
Kenny started having delayman in his arm in his academics.
I brought him to the hospital. I brought him back
and forth to the hospitals to make sure that there
was nothing wrong. At the time he was one and
a half, I noticed that he started doing some clicking
noises in front of the TV. He was taking petite seizures.

(47:43):
So I brought him, brought him to the children's hospital,
and they did a cat skin, and they did an MRI,
and they found out that the left side of the
brain never grew, and so that, you know, added to
Kenny's problems.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
Older, Kenny always appeared timid, despite a tough start and
his learning difficulties, he appeared to many to be a
standard young man, likable too.

Speaker 5 (48:11):
Kenny was a very trusting guy, but he was looking
for his way in the world. He had a very
loving family. His mother really took care of him. She
understood that things were more difficult for Kenny than they
were for other people.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
Sheila Lebar, born twenty years before Kenny, had suffered even
before puberty. She had been sexualized by abusive men.

Speaker 10 (48:37):
She grew up in a very abusive environment, was displayed
as a sexual toy, was passed around to older grown
men friends of her father's as a sexual object.

Speaker 6 (48:51):
Sheila's father was often drunk and frequently violent. Her mother
Ruby did what she could to protect her daughters, but
it wasn't anugh.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
A teenage Sheila Bailey longed to escape this violent, small
town life. She dreamed of becoming an artist, a model,
perhaps a singer, but in the end, she chose an
easier route to financial independence. She found herself a man,
but the abused woman would become a negligent stepmother.

Speaker 12 (49:21):
Chilo was very young at the time.

Speaker 5 (49:23):
She was about I think eighteen or nineteen years old
when she married John, who was alignment for the county,
and he was recently divorced and had a young daughter
named Wendy.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
Already she was showing signs of being a disturbed, damaged individual.

Speaker 12 (49:39):
Chilo not the most maternal person.

Speaker 5 (49:43):
Wendy told her father that when he would go to work,
Sheila would take care of her by making her drink
something brandy, maybe it's cough syrup, something that made her
feel very sleepy. And it was also then that Chilo
would put Wendy in the closet.

Speaker 6 (50:01):
When John found out, he kicked Sheila out. The marriage
lasted just six weeks.

Speaker 1 (50:07):
At this time, Sheila had little trouble ensnaring the men
that she'd set her sights on for many years.

Speaker 5 (50:13):
Sheila had a very curvy body, and she was very
beautiful and was really able to maximize her sex appeal
to get what she wanted.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
Pretty soon after her first marriage ended, Sheila Bailey had
claimed a second husband. It was to be another brief,
unhappy marriage.

Speaker 5 (50:33):
Sheila's second husband was a guy by the name of
Ronnie Jennings. He worked at a restaurant in town, and
Sheila fell hard for him. She basically wants to be loved.
She wants to have a normal life. She thinks that
Ronnie can provide.

Speaker 1 (50:48):
That Sheila becomes Sheila Bailey Jennings. Friends of the happy
couple might have thought that the stage was set for
a long, happy marriage. Perhaps the bride could at last
leave behind her traumatic childhood and her short lived first
marriage settled down for good. It wasn't to be. The

(51:08):
union between Sheila and Ronnie was soon to disintegrate, giving
way to violence and infidelity.

Speaker 6 (51:15):
Trauma in early life can have an impact later on,
and it seems like Sheila was starting to abuse the
people around her in the same ways that she had
been abused herself.

Speaker 5 (51:24):
She takes out her frustrations on Ronnie. She's abusive to him,
and he decides that he doesn't want to be in
the relationship anymore.

Speaker 6 (51:36):
She took pills, sped off and got into a pretty
bad car accident. It looked like she was trying to
kill herself.

Speaker 1 (51:43):
Sheila survived the suicide attempt, but for a while was
very unwell comatose. In fact, when she came round, she
had an extraordinary tale to tell.

Speaker 5 (51:53):
When she came back, she told everybody that she had
died and gone to heaven and God had sent her
back as an avenging angel. And this was the persona
that she carried with her throughout the rest of her life,
and it sort of became the basis of her rationalization

(52:15):
to kill.

Speaker 1 (52:16):
Sheila told anyone who would listen that she was indeed
an avenging angel sent by God to kill pedophiles, and
that she saw herself as a protector of children. Was
this truly what Sheila believed or simply an excuse to
commit unspeakable acts of violence against every man who had
the misfortune to cross her path. One day, a jury

(52:38):
would be asked that very question, as they considered had
she killed Kenny County by the end of her second marriage,
Sheila had committed no crimes that attracted the attention of
the police. She was on No. One's radar screen of investigation.

(53:00):
In nineteen eighty seven, she began looking for husband number
three and set her sights on a doctor, Wilfrid Lebar.

Speaker 12 (53:07):
He was a widower.

Speaker 5 (53:08):
He lived on a horse farm in rural New Hampshire,
and Sheila found a lonely hearts ad in a newspaper
that doctor Lebar had set up. He was very lonely
after losing his wife and wanted companionship.

Speaker 10 (53:26):
She just didn't write and say what she was looking for.
In a man long romantic walks on a beach, She
got right down to the point she bared her breast,
She exposed herself, sent photos of herself in very sensual positions.

Speaker 12 (53:42):
Well, he felt pretty hard for her.

Speaker 5 (53:44):
Sheila immediately got on a plane and began dating Wilfrid Lebar,
and she insinuated herself into his life almost immediately.

Speaker 1 (53:57):
Sheila moved in with Wilfrid to become the mistress of
a one hundred acre horse farm in adylic, rural New Hampshire.
It was the stuff of dreams, A far cry from
the poverty and squalor of her Alabama childhood.

Speaker 10 (54:12):
Sheila was now engaged in a relationship with somebody that
could very well at least be the age of her father.
And as a result, she was able and she's this
beautiful woman at the time, and she's able to manipulate
and control because the older man is looking at Shila.
This is one of life's bonuses. How could somebody like

(54:34):
himself get this beautiful young woman at the time, And
so she used that.

Speaker 12 (54:41):
That was Sheila's web.

Speaker 10 (54:42):
She was able to suck him in and eventually use
that to her advantage.

Speaker 12 (54:47):
She moved to the farm.

Speaker 5 (54:49):
She started to take over his chiropractic business. She became
the office manager and basically ran off all of the
other employees that were you know who could see through her.
She separated doctor Lebar from his grown kids.

Speaker 1 (55:09):
The couple never married, but Sheila took his surname. She
became Sila Labar. She's known around town as something completely different.

Speaker 12 (55:18):
Sheilla is a beautiful woman.

Speaker 5 (55:19):
She immediately gets attention in town for wearing tight clothes.
In fact, people around town gave her a nickname. They
called her Sheila the Peeler. They were always hoping that
she would maybe flash a little this or show a
little bit of that. And she got that reputation because well,
she had no problem coming to the door for deliverymen

(55:40):
wearing almost nothing.

Speaker 1 (55:42):
In the quiet farming community of Epping, Sheila Lebar became notorious.

Speaker 5 (55:47):
Everybody in town knows that Sheila Lebar is an unusual
figure and that she is both treacherous and she is seductive.

Speaker 1 (55:59):
Even a local police department, who over the following years
would have many encounters with Sila Lebar, came to be
wary of her provocative behavior.

Speaker 10 (56:08):
When they would go to call, she would often be
in very scantly dressed clothes and sometimes just drop it
and bear it all to them with everything showing. And
so officers knew when you get a call at Sheila
the Peeler's house, you call for backup, make sure somebody
is there.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
People at first might have worried that she was a
troubled woman who needed help, not censure and gossip, but
Sheila Lebar appeared to be a woman who was very
much in control. The sexual relationship between Sheila and Wilfrid
was short lived. Within a year, she effectively had ownership
of her lover's property and his business.

Speaker 10 (56:46):
When Sheila sucks him in through this relationship, she convinces
him to give her power of attorney to sign over property,
and he does because he doesn't want to lose her.
He perhaps maybe doesn't feel worthy of it. Is have
somebody at the time as beautiful as Sheila, but she's
able to use what she believes is her beauty and

(57:09):
charm to convince him to basically sign over everything.

Speaker 1 (57:15):
She ended up spending seventeen years with Wilfrid, but soon
after she had taken over effective control of the farm
in the business, she told him he was not to
consider himself as her wife or partner. She would be
free to live the life of a single woman. Why
did Wilfred Lebbar continue the letter control his life and
his livelihood.

Speaker 5 (57:34):
One of the questions that's hardest to answer is why
did doctor Lebar stay with Sheila? Why did he keep
her in his life when it seems like it would
be so easy to just push her away. Somebody posed
this question to doctor Lebar, why keep Sheila around? She's
making you miserable, she's taking your money, And all he

(57:56):
could say was, she's got too much on me.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
She ran his chiropractic business with a heavy hand, bullying
patients into paying, scaring off employees that she didn't see
eye to eye with. She also abused the doctor physically.
A lieutenant with Epping Police would later testify that he'd
been called to the farm many times over the years
that she'd have lived there. On one occasion, he was

(58:21):
responding to a call about a domestic disturbance and arrived
to find Bill with deep scratches all over his face
and neck.

Speaker 5 (58:30):
Basically, she worked to isolate doctor Lebar and to take
over his life in his property.

Speaker 1 (58:37):
What hold did she Lebar have over the men that
she abused? How did she make them stay with her,
stop them lashing out at her in retaliation or even
pressing charges against her.

Speaker 5 (58:50):
Sheilla has an interesting habit of recording her telephone calls
in her conversations.

Speaker 1 (58:58):
Something Kenny Kennty's mother was to discover years later when
she played her recordings of conversations that she'd had with Kenny.

Speaker 11 (59:06):
And it was very, very graphic, and I I was
umnphoneded at that time when I got that tape. I
don't want to see him anymore. I don't want to
talk to him because it was just so. It was horrible.

Speaker 1 (59:21):
It was horrible and part of a pattern of behavior.
Catch a man, record him saying things which would incriminate him,
and then control him.

Speaker 10 (59:32):
She wanted to make sure that the people she was
involved in a relationship that she had utter, complete, one
hundred percent control, much like her father had complete control
over her. So she isolated them, almost a brainwashing technique.
You isolate someone and you can have vast influence over

(59:52):
that person. So therefore she would have that ultimate control,
much like a puppet master.

Speaker 1 (59:58):
And all of this kept quiet down on the farm,
her own world one kept free from prying eyes. Even
though they were no longer officially romantically involved. Sheila Lebar
continued to control the home, the business, and the money
of doctor Wilfrid Lebar. She was so confident that he

(01:00:20):
wouldn't kick her out. She started to bring home men.

Speaker 5 (01:00:24):
Wayne Ennis was a handyman. He was a migrant farm
worker from Jamaica. He was doing some work at the clinic.

Speaker 6 (01:00:31):
It wasn't all smooth sailing. In nineteen ninety five, Sheila
followed a report with the Epping Police accusing Wayne Ennis
of attacking her. She got a restraining order against Wayne,
but despite that, the same year they got.

Speaker 5 (01:00:43):
Married, Sheila gets married to Wayne Ennis and brings him
back to the farm and the three of them are
now living on the farm together.

Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
Sheila had kept doctor Labarre's last name, she was living
on his farm, had control over his finances, but now
she wanted him gone.

Speaker 5 (01:01:06):
Wayne is very troubled one day when Sheila approaches him
and says, we need to get rid of doctor Lebar.
If he's gone, we will inherit this property. More specifically,
Sheila will inherit this property. That's because Sheila has wrestled

(01:01:27):
power of attorney from doctor Lebar, so she stands to
inherit anything if something befalls the doctor. And now she's
intimating to Wayne and is that he needs to do
something to hasten doctor Lebar's death. Wayne is very troubled
by this, so he goes to doctor Lebar and tells
him what Sheila is planning, and he's fearful as well

(01:01:50):
for his own safety. Doctor Lebar then drove Wayne to
a bus station, got him on a bus, and he
got out of town and Sheila never saw again.

Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
Wilfrid Lebbar had voluntarily given up the running of his
home and farm. Wayne Ellis had gone without reporting what
she had asked him to do, so Sheila remained living
on the farm, simply waiting for her next victim to
come along.

Speaker 6 (01:02:17):
James Brackett had a low IQ and his speech was slow.
He was ten years younger than Sheila, and he was
one of doctor Lebar's patients, but it didn't take long
for Sheila to move him onto the farm.

Speaker 5 (01:02:27):
Sheila is, you know, coquettish. She's manipulative. She knows how
to get what she wants that of a man. But
she is also cruel and that is one of the
things that she demonstrates with James Brackett. She ends up
being very abusive to him. She strikes him in the
face with a scrubbing brush.

Speaker 6 (01:02:48):
It was horrific abuse, and like all of the others,
he was too afraid to leave.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
James Brackett stayed on the farm almost five years. Midway
through that time, Wilfrid Lebar done.

Speaker 5 (01:03:01):
Doctor Lebar died in two thousand. Sheila told doctor Lebar's
family that just one day it had a heart attack
and died on the kitchen floor, and she insisted that
he be cremated. It wasn't until later that people thought
that this was suspicious. At the time, nobody thought much
about doctor Lebarre's death that it was anything other than

(01:03:24):
natural causes.

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
The autopsy showed that Wilfred had died of a massive
heart attack, hypertension, arterial sclerosis, and high blood pressure. Little wonder, perhaps,
given the abuse that he had suffered for over twenty
years at Sheila's hands, but there was no apparent crime.
His death marked a turning point in Shila's treatment of men.

Speaker 5 (01:03:46):
When doctor lebar passed away, there was nobody there to
keep her in check.

Speaker 6 (01:03:52):
Sheila now owned the farm out right, She could control
who came and went. There was no one to witness
what she was doing, and there was no one to
stop her intervene. Her abuse of James Brackett continued and
got worse.

Speaker 5 (01:04:05):
She one time chased him off the property and fired
a shot over his head. She even chased him into
a horse trailer that was in the barn, and she
chased him with an axe and tried to chop her
way through the trailer where he is huddled up inside.

Speaker 12 (01:04:24):
That's like a scene out of the Shining.

Speaker 1 (01:04:27):
Sila Laba's life was never normal, but her behavior after
Wilfrid's death was increasing the out of control. She spoke
marijuana every day, sometimes too tranquilize us.

Speaker 6 (01:04:40):
She got involved with sex chat lines, recording the conversations,
and she would often force James to listen to them
to share in her sadistic and unusual fantasies. She was
violent towards him on a daily basis. On one occasion
she gouged his eye, leaving him bleeding, and on another
occasion she drove a car ried at him.

Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
Then frequently came and went to Silver Leopard Farm as
Sheila had renamed it, or at least they arrived. They
came as farmer hands or as Sheila's latest love interest.
After a while, Chida would tell anyone who'd listened that
they just uped and left, that she had no idea
where they'd gone, but had they Some were never seen again.

(01:05:22):
James Brackett made several attempts to leave, once even hiking
through a blizzard to a local homeless shelter. Eventually he escaped.

Speaker 5 (01:05:31):
It wasn't until much later that he was essentially rescued
from the farm by his relatives and James Brackett considers
himself lucky to be alive today.

Speaker 1 (01:05:45):
The next young man to be ensnured by Sheila wouldn't
be so lucky. He was called Michael Delge.

Speaker 12 (01:05:52):
Michael Deloge was drifter.

Speaker 5 (01:05:55):
He came from Connecticut and wound up in a homeless
shelter in New him I'm sure.

Speaker 10 (01:06:01):
She was able to suck those men in, almost like
a spider in a spider web, bringing them into their
cave where she eventually would kill them.

Speaker 6 (01:06:14):
Michael was estranged from his ex wife and young child.
He had substance abuse problems, He was unemployed. He was desperate,
alone and vulnerable.

Speaker 5 (01:06:23):
The prospect of staying in a homeless shelter or going
with this woman to a farm where he could get
a nice worn bed and steady job and sex, well,
that's a very easy decision to make.

Speaker 1 (01:06:44):
Last than a year, Laser Michael disappeared. What had happened
to His parents had become worried. What little contact they'd
had dwindled to almost nothing. They were right to worry.

Speaker 6 (01:06:55):
There were fears for Michael's safety and rumors of violence.
On one occasion, she attacked him and almost severed his ear.

Speaker 5 (01:07:03):
The neighbors describe an incident in the winter where coming
down the wooden path from the horse farm, they saw
a man stumbling and bleeding from the head. He was
Michael Deloge and he just walked right past a neighbor
and said one word.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):
Sheila, terrified for his safety, Michael's mum, Donna, pleaded with
her son to leave. Sheidah was furious. What she did
next would shed some light on a mystery how she'd
been able to keep beaten and abused men like Michael
under her thumb for so long.

Speaker 6 (01:07:41):
Sheila then sent Donna a video in which Michael accused
Donna of allowing him to be sexually abused as a child,
but in the video his face is scratched and bruised.

Speaker 10 (01:07:53):
Sheila has isolated Michael from his family, therefore he wouldn't
be missed.

Speaker 5 (01:07:59):
Not only is she isolating him from his family, but
she's also poisoning the relationship and getting into his head
until he believes it.

Speaker 12 (01:08:07):
He actually believes that he is a.

Speaker 5 (01:08:09):
Child molester because she has told him that so many times.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
None of this was true. The men she had snared
had not committed crimes, but making incriminating recordings had become
part of Sheila's m O the way she kept her
victims compliant.

Speaker 5 (01:08:24):
Chilla has an interesting habit of recording her telephone calls
and her conversations. At one point she had over three
hundred cassette tapes of things her on the telephone.

Speaker 1 (01:08:38):
Was this what Wilfred Labar had meant all those years
ago when he told a friend, she has too much
on me? Either way, Wilfred had died of apparently natural causes.
Another man had run as fast as he could away
from the farm. Now Michael had gone. Men just didn't
seem to last very long down on the farm with
Sheila Lebar. In two thousand and five, Sheet at the

(01:09:10):
Bar was alone again. She didn't like that, so she
started looking for a new, younger man.

Speaker 5 (01:09:15):
She was using telephone dating services, where he would leave
a message in somebody's voicemail box, and Sheila had a
habit of screening the calls, and if the man sounded confident,
if he sounded like he really had it all together,
she would delete those messages. If the guy sounded meek,
if he sounded like he might not be of high intelligence,

(01:09:40):
if he sounded like he was somebody that she could manipulate,
she kept those messages and contacted those.

Speaker 1 (01:09:45):
Guys, Guys like Kenneth County. Kenneth was a young man
looking for love, acceptance, and dependence. It was this longing
that drew him to chet at a bar, and within
just a month of that first meeting him to his
brutal death at the age of twenty four. His journey
began with a need to be independent.

Speaker 6 (01:10:08):
Kenny's mother, Carolyn, had always tried to do her best
for him, and as he got older, that meant letting
him go his own way and make his own decisions,
even if she worried desperately about him.

Speaker 11 (01:10:18):
He decided, well, I'm going to join the army. I'm
going to protect my country. And he said to me,
can you take me down to Lowell. I'm going to
sign up for the army. And I couldn't believe he
was going to do this. And I said no, no, honey,
you don't want to do this. And he said, no, Mom,
I'm going to.

Speaker 1 (01:10:37):
Kenny enlisted, and Carolyn prayed that had long last, something
would go right for her son. For a while, it
seemed like his luck had changed.

Speaker 11 (01:10:46):
I went up to a soldier and I tapped him
and I said I said, do you know Kenneth County.
I said, I'm looking for Kenneth County and his mother.
And he looked at me. He said, MA, it's me.
I don't even recognize him. He had muscle, he was handsome,
and he stood proud, and he did everything that a

(01:11:09):
soldier did. I could see the life in his eyes.

Speaker 1 (01:11:13):
But it wasn't to be. Kenny didn't graduate. It was
to be the beginning of the end for his short,
troubled life.

Speaker 11 (01:11:21):
The day before his graduation, I got a phone call
from a Captain P. Squally saying that Kenny wasn't graduating.
And the day of graduation, my son was director in
traffic and at that point I looked in his eyes
and they were dead.

Speaker 13 (01:11:42):
They were dead.

Speaker 5 (01:11:43):
One of the most disappointing things in his life was
that he couldn't graduate with his class and got drummed
out of the army. You know, it really could have
changed his life for the better. Instead, he had to
move back to Massachusetts and try to make a go
of it.

Speaker 6 (01:12:00):
Kenny was at his lowest EBB. He had become severely depressed.
He'd attempted suicide. He was at his most vulnerable and
for Sheila. He was right for the picking.

Speaker 1 (01:12:10):
When Kenny spoke of his meeting with Sheila, Karen and
knew straight away something was wrong.

Speaker 11 (01:12:16):
They met on a chat line. Come to find out
when I found on court, it was a sex chat line.

Speaker 5 (01:12:23):
Kenny meets Sheila at a fancy bar overlooking the ocean
and they have a few drinks and they moved from
the bar to the backseat of Sheila's car, where they
have sex. A few days later, Kenny goes to his

(01:12:45):
roommate and says, I'm moving now. I'm moving to New
Hampshire to live on this horse farm with my new girlfriend.

Speaker 11 (01:12:53):
He was only twenty four. She was in a Fordy's
forty seven. She drank, she was loud, she was She
went to his place in Wilmington and she told the
roommate that she just wanted him to come to her
place for dinner and that she returned him. So he
didn't take any clothes, he didn't take anything, and once

(01:13:14):
he got into the car, that was the end. He
never returned.

Speaker 1 (01:13:21):
Kenneth County's mother would never see him again. How long
did it take Kenny to realize what a grievous error
he had made in getting into that car. Carolyn was
alarmed enough that she immediately contacted Epping police. A female
officer took the call.

Speaker 11 (01:13:38):
She sent the police to Sheila's house, and Sheila didn't
like that because of the fact that I sent the
police to her house for a while being jack.

Speaker 5 (01:13:50):
When Kenny is not returning mom's phone calls, that's a
red flag. Kenny's mom has to find out what is
going on?

Speaker 12 (01:13:59):
Is he okay?

Speaker 5 (01:14:00):
So she contacted the police in Epping, New Hampshire. So
the patrolman go to Sheila's farm and they knock on
the door and they say, we want to talk to Kenny,
and she says he can't come to the door, he's
taking a bath. They insist, and so Kenny comes to
the door. He's wearing a towel, he's wet, but he

(01:14:21):
seems to be okay.

Speaker 1 (01:14:24):
Kenny might have been physically fine on that first visit
by police, but Sheilah was livid. How dare Karen and reporter?
How dare local cops challenge her on her own property.
She was not going to take the intrusion.

Speaker 5 (01:14:37):
Lying down, Kenny has moved to Sheila's farm and Sheila
is doing the same pattern as she had for all
the other men, and that starts with cutting him off
from her family.

Speaker 6 (01:14:48):
Sheila's response to this, when Kenny had been on the
farm just a couple of days, was to make a
shocking tape which she played on the phone for his mother.

Speaker 11 (01:14:55):
She had him saying all these horrible things about me.
There I sexually molested him when he was a baby,
that I continued to do that when I went to England.

Speaker 1 (01:15:13):
Once again. As with Michael Deloze, James Brackett, and perhaps
Wilfred Lebarre, Sheila was using accusations of pedophilia to control
her victims and isolate them from their families, and.

Speaker 11 (01:15:24):
It was very, very graphic. I think at that time
it was for me to back off, oh definitely, because
I sent the police to her host.

Speaker 1 (01:15:33):
Carolyn was devastated that if Sheila had hoped that she
would back off, she was mistaken. Carolyn continued trying to
call her son at the farm. When she couldn't get
hold of him, she repeatedly contacted local police, begging them
to check on him, to remove him from the farm,
anything to protect him from this scheming woman. That's the
way she saw it. On one occasion, local police denied

(01:15:56):
outright that Sheila was dangerous.

Speaker 11 (01:16:00):
Told me that she would take young mentor her farm
and they'd work the farm, and then she called the
police department to say that they left. Well, I found
that pretty bizarre, and I said, well, how do you
know they left? How do you know she didn't hurt them?
She could have killed them? Did she kill them? And
they started off? And he said no, no, that's not
Chilo's m a.

Speaker 10 (01:16:19):
There's nothing stronger in life often than a mother's love.
And because of a mother's love for her child and
refusing to accept the answers that were being given to her,
she pushed and pushed and pushed and stayed in touch
with the police and just wasn't satisfied with the answer

(01:16:41):
she was hearing.

Speaker 1 (01:16:43):
When the police had first visited Kenny a few days
after arriving at Sheila's farm, he seemed to be doing fine,
but the next time he was seen in public, his
mental and physical well being had dramatically deteriorated.

Speaker 5 (01:16:56):
Weeks later, when these officers see Kenny at the Walmart,
Chila took Kenny to Walmart and he was unable.

Speaker 12 (01:17:07):
To walk through the aisles himself. She was pushing him
in a wheelchair.

Speaker 5 (01:17:12):
His face was a weird color, and he had bruises
and cuts and burns.

Speaker 11 (01:17:21):
His face was all cut up. His hands were all
cut up. One of them was immobile. His head was down,
he was ashen in collar. He was all cut up,
and he was in a wheelchair and he couldn't walk.

Speaker 1 (01:17:36):
What had happened to Kenneth County? And what did Sheila
Lebar have planned for him next? Her sinister shopping list
that day should perhaps have given officers who spoke to
her a clue. She certainly hadn't popped in for a
few groceries.

Speaker 5 (01:17:49):
Sheila was there shopping with Kenny, and the thing that
she was buying were diesel fuel cans, and she made
Kenny hold these fuel cans as she shopped.

Speaker 11 (01:18:02):
They escorted her and they'll laughing, and she told when
they said, they asked Kenny if he was all right.
His head was hanging, he was drooling, and she told
him to shut the f up. At that point the
police should have taken him. They didn't. They watched her

(01:18:23):
take him to the car and lift him from from
the wheelchair into the car.

Speaker 1 (01:18:31):
When effing police told karenin about the sighting of Kenny,
she was beside herself with fear. Once again, she pleaded
with them to do something to save her son.

Speaker 11 (01:18:41):
And I said, and you let her take him? Knowing
that I was looking for him, seeing the way he looked,
I said, you let she'll take my son. She's going
to kill him. And he said, I'm sorry, there's nothing
we can do, and she killed him.

Speaker 1 (01:19:00):
Two days later, on March twenty third, two thousand and six,
Shila Lebar called the local police chief and told him
that Kenny had left her. Over the phone, she played
cops and audio recording of Kenny confessing to a long
list of truly disturbing crimes.

Speaker 5 (01:19:18):
And Sheila says, he left, and I can prove it,
and I can tell you why he left. And so
she plays over the telephone a tape recording that she
made of Kenny, and what the officer heard was Sheila
berating Kenny and getting him to confess that he was
a child molester and that he had abused kids. On

(01:19:38):
the tape, the officer could hear Kenny becoming weaker, and
at one point he heard Kenny vomit, and then he
thought he heard Kenny faint because Sheila was saying, get up,
you can't fake fainting.

Speaker 6 (01:19:53):
Kenny was clearly really unwell. When the recording was made,
she claimed to have identified a dangerous pedophile and was
forcing Kenny need to confess to things that he'd never done.

Speaker 1 (01:20:04):
Panic stricken, Carolyn filed another missing person's report, but it
was too late. When police the next day visited Sheila's place,
they found strong evidence that Kenny hadn't simply walked away
from the farm. Carolyn's worst nightmare appeared to have come true.

Speaker 10 (01:20:20):
The detectives go back to the property and they see
a fire and it's personal items being burned. It's clothing,
it's other items. But one thing that stands out to
them is they believe that they see bones.

Speaker 1 (01:20:36):
And they appeared to be human bones, specifically a toe.
It was the key mistake in the timeline of the
case against Sila LeVar.

Speaker 6 (01:20:45):
They also found kenny sneakers lying around. Would he really
have left barefoot?

Speaker 1 (01:20:50):
The evidence was everywhere that something truly horrific had happened
at the farm, but Sheila Lebar showed no fear of
being caught. She'd made no attempt to hide what she
was doing. She berated police for doing to trespass on
her land, brazenly joked about the horrifying fines that they'd made.

Speaker 6 (01:21:07):
When asked what was burning in the barrel, she said
it could be a rabbit, or it could be a pedophile.
When I asked about a plastic bat and philled with
soot and to breathe, she laughed and said that was Kenneth.

Speaker 1 (01:21:19):
When police returned with the warrant to search the property,
they made even more horrifying fines. There was no doubt
multiple acts of extreme violence had been committed.

Speaker 10 (01:21:29):
They spray what's called LCV. It's a type of spray
that it's with dark lights and when you spray this,
if it glows purple and purple tone to it, it
indicates the presence of blood. That perhaps that was blood.
And when the detectives used this technique inside of Sheila's home,

(01:21:50):
the hole inside this one room lit up purple, an
indication that there was an extremely large amount of violence
that took place inside that room.

Speaker 1 (01:22:02):
Detectives also finally had an answer to the fate of
Michael Deloze, you disappeared without a trace a year before.

Speaker 12 (01:22:08):
One of the things they did was they flushed the
septic tank.

Speaker 5 (01:22:12):
What they found in the septic tank when they searched
it was Michael Deloje's driver's license.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
There's another piece of evidence on earth at the farm
remains a mystery to this day.

Speaker 10 (01:22:24):
We don't know how many victims that are out there
that Shila actually was able to suck into her web.
What it still haunts the detectives.

Speaker 1 (01:22:34):
Is a toe.

Speaker 10 (01:22:35):
A single toe. A single toe was found on that property.
That toe is unidentified.

Speaker 5 (01:22:41):
One of the things later about the human toes was
that they didn't belong to Kenny and they didn't belong
to Michael Deloge, So who is it?

Speaker 1 (01:22:54):
Detectives now knew the terrible things had happened at the
isolated horse farm in rural New Hampshire, and Karen and
County knew that her efforts to save Hell the Sun
had been in vain.

Speaker 13 (01:23:07):
That was my son, That was my son, could have
been stopped.

Speaker 1 (01:23:22):
Finally, one mistake having been uncovered. Under other evidence now plentiful,
a warrant was issued for Silda Laba's arrest. But still
she thought she was above the law. From under the
noses of local police, she went on the run.

Speaker 6 (01:23:36):
Sheila took eighty five thousand dollars with her and hitched
her ride with a man called Steve Martello.

Speaker 5 (01:23:41):
She wanted to hitchhike her way down to Boston, so
Steve picks her up in his car, and after having
some breakfast together, they continue down to Boston and she
gets a hotel room with him and the two of
them have sex and then he leaves, and it isn't

(01:24:02):
until he sees the news that Sheila is a wanted
woman that he realizes who he had picked up.

Speaker 6 (01:24:08):
She seduced him and he let her hole up in
his apartment for a couple of days.

Speaker 5 (01:24:12):
He realizes who he has led into his home and
he calls the police and essentially sets up her capture.

Speaker 1 (01:24:22):
Sheila Lebar was behind bars at last. When the case
went to trial, Sheila finally admitted killing Kenneth County and
Michael Deloge, but asked for clemency on the grounds of insanity.

Speaker 6 (01:24:36):
She changed her story several times about how her victims
had died. She kept going back again and again to
that same story that she was an avenging angel sent
to kill pedophiles and that all the men in her
life were child molesters.

Speaker 1 (01:24:48):
The jury rejected Sheila's plea there was too much evidence
of calculation, control, manipulation not only of her victims, but
of everybody that she came into contact with, and.

Speaker 10 (01:24:59):
The burn on the defense in this case Sheila that
they didn't know what they did was wrong. Why this
story would unravel with Sheila is because of the amount
of planning that went into her murders and the cover up.
Somebody who's crazy isn't going to try to burn evidence.
Somebody who's crazy isn't going to try to cover up

(01:25:20):
the amount of blood that was inside the house. Somebody
who is crazy isn't going to methodically pick the most
vulnerable of victims.

Speaker 5 (01:25:29):
Silo Lebarr is a disturbed person, but she knew what
she was doing when she killed those men and when
she hid the evidence.

Speaker 1 (01:25:41):
Michael Deloze's mother was in court to see lebar found
guilty sentenced to two life tariffs without Barol Carolyn County
was there too, the mother who never gave up. She
wasn't able to save her son, but she did ensure
that his killer was brought to justice for her evil crimes.

Speaker 11 (01:25:59):
I promise Kenny that I'd fight for him, because nobody
did that. He wouldn't be forgotten. When Sheila murdered him,
she burnt everything in the pit. I never had a body,
I never had closure, I never had anything. So he

(01:26:23):
could walk through the door now and I expecting him,
and I promised him his name would not be in vain.
She wasn't used to being confronted by anybody. Sheila had
the roe of epping, which Sheilla said when she you know,
she'd be able to say anything to the police. They

(01:26:45):
didn't want to deal with her, so they just backed down.

Speaker 6 (01:26:49):
Sheila thought that she was invincible. She thought that she
could do what she wanted and get away with it,
and she never thought that anyone would have the guts
to confront her.

Speaker 1 (01:26:58):
Sheila Labar was so brash that she didn't cover her
tracks as she left a human bone sticking out of
a burning barrel in her yard. It gave the police
the opportunity they had been waiting for to finally investigate
her crimes. That was the mistake made by a killer,
Sheila Lebar