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[suspenseful music] [gunshot cracking] - When a murder's committed, it's always a race against time,
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to find the truth, to
separate fact from fiction, to catch the killer, and to make sure that
justice is served.
00:00:20
What happens when the truth
vanishes with the victim? I'm Dr. Richard Shepherd,
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and I've spent my entire career
as a forensic pathologist, performing nearly
23,000 autopsies,
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including on some of the
most high-profile cases of recent times. I've learnt that the dead
don't hide the truth,
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and they never lie. Through me, you'll be hearing
directly from the victim from a state-of-the-art
laboratory
00:00:45
with groundbreaking technology that uses digitally
scanned sample bodies. I'll be investigating a
series of intriguing murders
00:00:53
where, from the victim's bodies, I'll be revealing
to you the truth behind those horrific crimes.
[camera shutter clicking]
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[somber haunting music] [birds chirping] On 10th of October, 2016, a dismembered and badly
burnt body was found dumped
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at the side of the road in the
Peak District National Park. The police investigation would
reveal a trail of deception
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and greed that led
to this murder. But what could the victim's
body reveal about their death?
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- I was working as a
detective chief inspector, and I was in charge of a
team that was responsible
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for the investigation
of homicides. The call came in that a body
had been found on the A628,
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and that is the most
northerly part of Derbyshire. [engrossing music]
[birds chirping]
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[truck humming] The A628's a main road that
goes between Manchester and Sheffield, so
it's a very busy road.
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But here into the Peak District, it's a very scenic,
very picturesque area, certainly nowhere that
you would consider
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to be a crime hotspot. So it's a most
unusual call to get. [suspenseful music]
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Probably took about
two hours to get there, and there's quite a lot
of things rolling around
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in your head as you're driving, what I'm going to
do, what my plan is. Is this exactly as
it's reported to be?
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- [Richard] Up in
the Peak District, the crime scene manager was
already securing the site.
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- So we turn up at the scene. It's basically a small
car park that's used
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by people going out for
a walk across the moors, so, hill walkers, so not sort of normal
dog-walking territory.
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We've cordoned off the area, so police officers at the front to make sure that people
aren't gonna be pulling up,
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turning up, et cetera. To the left of the car park
is basically a burnt mound, which is the remains
of this burnt torso.
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And we then go through a
process of clearing that area, putting up some
tents, et cetera,
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to protect some of
the bits of evidence that we might need
to worry about later but with the objective
to get up to that body
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to see what's actually
going on here. - [Richard] Tony had to
secure any vital evidence
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that might uncover the truth. - We've got a small parking
area off a main road,
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so we've got other vehicles. Do these other vehicles
belong to a suspect or not?
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Have I got tire marks? Has a vehicle turned
up to dump a body here? Have I got footwear marks
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that everybody's busily
going to go and stand on? So those are all things
that I need to protect.
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So finally we got
to the position where we got up our
approach to basically go and look at the body to see
if that told us anything.
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- When I arrived at the scene, I was presented with
the torso of a man. The head had been removed.
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The arms or parts of the
arms had been removed, and parts of the legs
had been removed.
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The body was in what
appeared to be a suitcase, and it had been set on fire. - [Richard] The burnt-out
remains of the body
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were obviously going to
be difficult to identify. However, the way
it had been left
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still gave the
police information. - What was very clear to me
was that this was unlikely
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to be the site where the
murder had taken place. So this was gonna be
a deposition site,
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somewhere where the
body had been placed after the murder
had been committed. [solemn intriguing music]
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[water splashing] - At the start of
the investigation, the burnt suitcase was found
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to contain the dismembered
torso and upper legs. The head, arms, and lower legs had been removed using
a sharp implement.
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We know it wasn't a saw because that would've
left specific marks in the bones cut through.
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So there's been
a serious attempt to prevent identification
of the body by removing the teeth
and the fingerprints.
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Clearly this points to
a murder investigation with dismemberment and attempt
to destroy the body by fire.
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The police had a body. They didn't know who it was, but they could see
that it was a male.
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We don't yet have an
established cause of death, and that is where they begin
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on this really difficult
dismembered and burnt body. [troubling music] Crime scene manager Tony
Coombes was progressing
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with the investigation. - Just from a very
general point of view, starting to think
about the scenarios
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as how has this guy
come to be here, one of the obvious
questions there is, "Okay, so where's the
arms, legs, and head?"
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I'll be looking for
another suitcase. You know, is there any other
fires that are going on?
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- My concern was there
were other body parts that had been disposed in
the immediate vicinity,
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and what I really
didn't want was a member of public finding those. So they were quite
substantial land searches.
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We used drones to try and
cover large areas in the hope that if there had been a
secondary deposition site,
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then we would be able to find it and recover further body parts. - A pathologist is faced with
a whole series of problems
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when there's a body like this that's been
dismembered and burned. Initially, you're going to try
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and work out who
the person might be. No teeth, no fingerprints, so DNA here is clearly
going to be crucial
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in establishing that identity
at some point in the future. Then the full
postmortem will look
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for any injuries on the surface. And of course injuries could
be partly hidden by smoke,
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damage by deep
burning of the bodies 'cause when the skin is burned, it starts with the
external surface,
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and it goes deep,
deep into the tissues. And we can look at the sample
body on the table here,
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how this fire will
actually work its way through the body if it
continues long enough.
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So initially the
skin is burnt off, and then the
muscles are damaged. Then the holes appear
in the abdominal wall.
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The bowel can
herniate through that. The internal organs are
increasingly damaged
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as the process of
incineration continues. In this case, I don't
think the fire was too bad,
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so the body was
burnt externally, possibly obscuring
some injuries. [mysterious haunting music]
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- One of the main
lines of inquiry to look at who the victim was was the National
Police DNA Database.
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And generally you are, as a
senior investigation officer, you're quite optimistic
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that that person's DNA
might be on that database. [somber music] - [Richard] Unfortunately
there wasn't a match,
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but the body had
still left something that might help identify him. - Well, one of the sort
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of breakthroughs that
we had forensically was that there was a small protected
area underneath the body
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where the torso had pressed
onto the soil underneath. We found out there was
a small fragment of skin
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that came back definitively
being Chinese in ethnicity. So suddenly we're looking
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at somebody perhaps
from that community or at least who's
associating with this person.
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And obviously
we've got some work that we then can look
at around this suitcase.
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So, you know, have we
got a type of suitcase? And we already know
it's a Samsonite.
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We've got a black strap, and we found some wheels. That's a wheeled suitcase.
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We found some red fibers, which were noted as
a bit of an oddity, doesn't fit with
this environment.
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So why have we got, you know, red fibers on a burnt suitcase? - First we heard about this
case was a brief statement
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from Derbyshire Police, but
there's enough detail in it to pique the media's interest.
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I mean, it's not often you
come across a case as memorable or gruesome as this, with a
torso, headless and limbless,
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in a suitcase dumped
in a beauteous park. When I went to the scene,
there was police forensics
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and scenes-of-crimes officers
there, lots of police vans, lots of unmarked police cars.
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You could tell this was
a major investigation. Obviously someone
had been murdered,
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and police at the time
didn't know the identity of the murder victim and didn't
know who the culprit was.
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[suspenseful music]
[vehicle humming] - [Richard] The police turned
to the public for help.
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They set up checkpoints
along the road where the body was dumped and asked for motorists to
come forward with information.
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- We put out lots of requests
for things like dash cams that people may have
in their vehicles
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or people who were
in the vicinity. What we did find out was that
somebody had seen a fire set,
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which was very late into
the evening the day before, and that really
helped us understand
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when the body might
have been there and the narrowing down
the times that we'd got.
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- [Richard] They also pursued
missing persons records in the hope they would
provide some leads,
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but there would be a
lot of ground to cover. - Is this somebody who's
missing from Derbyshire,
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or is it somebody who's missing from the Greater
Manchester Police area, or is it somebody who's missing
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from South Yorkshire
Police area? Or is it somebody that's missing from somewhere completely
different in the country?
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- [Richard] But over
the coming days, the lines of inquiry
dwindled considerably.
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- The DNA work, the
missing person work, hadn't resulted in anything
positive that'd allow us
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to make an identification
of the victim. Got to a point where
I was wondering where the inquiry was going
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and where I was gonna be
able to reinvigorate it and make some progress with it.
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- [Richard] Just
as David thought the investigation was stalling, he received some
game-changing information.
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- Out of the blue, we got a phone call from
South Yorkshire Police that absolutely threw
the case wide open.
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[dramatic music] [haunting music]
[fire crackling] - A burnt, dismembered
body had been found
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in the rural beauty of the
Peak District National Park. Though the body
would give some clues
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about what had happened, it wasn't possible to identify
the victim at autopsy.
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At this stage, we don't have
an established cause of death. Was there any natural disease?
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Could something normal have
happened to this person? That doesn't seem
to be the case.
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Next thing is to
exclude the possibility that there had been
fire before the death.
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And that's done by
taking blood samples looking for carbon monoxide. Despite the burns
caused by fires,
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most people actually
die as a result of inhaling the noxious
fumes as the fire is burning.
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The most important poison that's breathed in
is carbon monoxide, and this blocks the
transport of oxygen
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by the hemoglobin in
the red blood cells, which stops oxygen getting
to the brain and the heart,
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and that results in
the individual's death. The other thing we look for
very carefully is the evidence
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of inhalation of fumes and soot. The lungs themselves
may be blackened, but most importantly,
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throughout the trachea
and the bronchi, there's little particles
of black soot deposited
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that show someone was alive at the time the
fire was burning. On this burnt torso,
the airways were clear,
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and that proved the
victim was already dead before the fire started. But with the autopsy unable
to identify the body,
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Senior Investigating
Officer David Cox was quickly coming
to a dead end. Then a week after
the body was found,
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he received a phone call
that could change everything. - South Yorkshire Police told us
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that there was an ANPR
camera that was on the A628, [traffic humming]
[intriguing music]
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and they gather data about
vehicle that are passing. But this one camera
in particular didn't
actually belong
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to Derbyshire Constabulary, even though it was on Derbyshire
Constabulary's force area.
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It belonged to South
Yorkshire Police. They'd put a camera on the A628 in 2012 because of the Olympics,
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and the cycling road
race was in that area at that particular time. Unfortunately, the first
results I got back from it
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was that the camera
hadn't been recording, and there was no data on it. So I asked that the
camera get removed,
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and it get taken away and
get forensically examined. - [Richard] David's
persistence paid off.
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Further analysis retrieved data from the night the
body was dumped, and there were hundreds of hits.
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- There was simply
too much data on there to go through it line by line. So what we decided to do
was to set some parameters
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around the information that
that camera was able to give us. [flames roaring] We knew that a fire had
been set the night before,
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so that gave us
some sort of idea as to when the body
had had been put there. What I did notice
was that this road
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between Sheffield
and Manchester, there wasn't a great deal
between those two points.
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There was some cottages
and some farms, so I took the view
that if somebody had to go into the
vicinity of the scene
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and then come out of the
vicinity of the scene, then there must
have been a reason
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for them to go in there
in the first place. So I decided to, instead of just looking at the
vehicles that had hit once,
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to look at the vehicles
that had hit twice on it around about the time that
the fire had been set.
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[jarring music] - [Richard] And that highlighted
one vehicle in particular, an uninsured car from the
Manchester area belonging
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to a man called Ming Jiang. - So that gave me something to sort of go and
explore a little bit,
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and it gave me something
by which I could go and examine that vehicle. [suspenseful music]
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- [Richard] With the assistance of the Greater
Manchester Police, the vehicle was
tracked down, seized,
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and forensically examined.
[siren wailing] - With cars, you might take
sweepings from footwells.
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You might look for
fingerprints everywhere. And you might look on the
tires and in the wheel arches
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for signs of a
particular kind of soil if the car's supposed have
been driven somewhere.
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And in relation to tire tracks, you might make reference tracks from reference tire
marks from the wheels
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and see if they matched
anything you'd found at a scene that you were particularly
interested in.
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So there are all sorts
of things that you can do with vehicles that
are really important.
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And so if you were looking to see whether or
not the the body or the torso had
been carried in it,
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then obviously you'd
be very interested in things like whether there
was any blood in there.
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That would be one of the
first things you'd look for. [jarring music] - This is when the case really
started to come together.
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There was a single blood spot
in the boot of this vehicle, and straightaway I was
really excited about that.
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And what we've
got an opportunity to do there is
fast-track the DNA. I want to compare that
with the body of the man
00:17:45
that we've got at
the deposition site. Even at this point now, I
don't know who my victim is,
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but all of a sudden now
we've got something tangible that might be able to
help me with the inquiry.
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- When someone has
spent so much time dismembering the body
the way we can see on the digital table
and then burning it,
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clearly they've
worked really hard to try and hide the
identity of the person.
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And that's where even
the smallest amount of blood can be crucial. In this case, a smear
of blood was found
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in the boot of the car, and when that blood was sampled and analyzed by the laboratory,
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it was possible to link
the DNA that was present in that blood smear in the car to the body that was
found dismembered
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and burnt in the suitcase. [plaintive music] - That was the longest day
you could ever imagine.
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It was sat by a telephone
waiting for it to ring. I go walking into the office
asking if anybody's rung,
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as if somebody would've
rung and given the result, and nobody would've told me.
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Of course they would. Just really, really impatient pacing up and down the corridor
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'cause I was so
excited about this, and I really wanted to
get that information back.
00:19:01
- Basically another
eureka moment. We've got a small trace
of blood, fantastic.
00:19:06
You know, again, this may
not be our deceased's blood, so let's not get
excited, everybody,
00:19:13
but this is a potential
breakthrough moment. - The great news was that
this came back positive.
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The blood spot in the
boot matched the body that we'd found at
the deposition site.
00:19:26
So this was really great
information for me, and it told me Ming Jiang was
now a suspect in this inquiry,
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and he wasn't just somebody that may have been in the
vicinity at the same time.
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The body from the
deposition site had been in the boot of the car, and that was really
important news for us.
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- [Richard] Forensic
investigators also revealed some evidence
that was of particular interest
00:19:47
to crime scene
manager Tony Coombes. - They said there
were red fibers on the carpet inside the boot.
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That takes me back to my initial
observation at the scene, these odd red fibers on
the inside of the suitcase.
00:20:05
This is a gray
carpeted Mercedes. Why has that got red
fibers on the bottom? Is there, you
know, a link there?
00:20:14
- [Richard] With Ming
Jiang now a suspect, could this help
identify the victim? - We found some documentation
in Ming Jiang's vehicle
00:20:24
to a guy called Yang Liu, who lived in Salford, and we started to make
inquiries there at his apartment
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to see if we could locate him. Unfortunately, we
weren't able to find him, and we made the decision that
we were gonna force entry
00:20:44
into his apartment. We found nothing particularly
remarkable in there, but what it did give
us was the opportunity
00:20:56
to take some things where we
might be able to get DNA from, so, toothbrush, hairbrushes,
that sort of thing.
00:21:03
And I added that
to the requirements around the DNA profiling. - [Richard] This was
the breakthrough needed.
00:21:11
The DNA taken from the apartment
was a match with the torso. It was confirmed the
victim was Yang Liu,
00:21:18
a Chinese national. - Yang Liu was
described as a very kind and gentle and friendly.
00:21:25
He was born in Beijing, and
he was brought up in Beijing, and his family is very,
00:21:31
the whole family is
very well educated. He came to the UK in 2000, and he studied in the
University of Leeds.
00:21:41
And after he finished
his studying, and he decided to
stay in the UK, he owned his flat in MediaCity,
00:21:49
Salford Quays in Manchester. - Yang Liu was a successful
trader in stocks and shares.
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That's how he earned his money. That's what was his job, and he had a very
comfortable life doing that.
00:22:07
Yang Liu regularly went
to casinos in Manchester. There's quite a large Chinese
community in Manchester,
00:22:14
and casinos as well as
the gambling appeared to be something of
a gathering place,
00:22:19
a social setting where lots
of Chinese nationals went. One person who Yang Liu had
a sort of friendship with
00:22:26
at the casino was Ming Jiang. They even shared some tables
sometimes while gambling.
00:22:32
- [Richard] But Ming
Jiang was heavily in debt to the casinos. - Ming Jiang decided
00:22:40
that the only way he can
solve his financial problems is by hatching a plan. [cards fluttering]
00:22:54
[unsettling music]
[fire crackling] - A breakthrough in the police
investigation had put a name
00:23:01
to the burnt and dismembered
body found dumped on a rural road, Chinese national and
Manchester resident Yang Liu.
00:23:11
At autopsy, the body had
shown that Yang was dead before he had been set on fire.
00:23:19
The prime suspect was his
former friend, Ming Jiang. With a wealth of
evidence against him,
00:23:25
it was time for the
police to move in. 10 days after the torso
was found in a suitcase,
00:23:34
police arrested Ming Jiang. [suspenseful music] - I made the decision to get him arrested at
the earliest opportunity
00:23:44
and get him in custody. With the assistance of
Greater Manchester Police, we managed to find him and
track him down to a casino.
00:23:52
[traffic humming] He has some
documentation, passport, some other items of paperwork
00:23:59
in the name of Yang Liu on
him at the time of his arrest. - [Richard] With Ming
Jiang in custody,
00:24:06
they carried out a thorough
forensic search of his flat. - [David] On first look,
it was a clean and tidy,
00:24:14
unremarkable apartment. But as soon as the
forensic guys got to work, there was lots and lots of
traces of blood in that.
00:24:28
- They would be very
interested in blood, and it is extremely difficult
to clean up a crime scene
00:24:34
of all blood, especially where
quite a lot has been shed, and so it proved in
this particular case.
00:24:42
A lot of blood was found. There was evidence of
cleanup, apparently, but there was a lot of
blood found on the floor.
00:24:49
It had seeped into
this laminated flooring and also into the
cushions on the sofa.
00:24:53
So there was, you know, a
remarkable amount of blood. Blood pattern analysis
is incredibly important
00:25:04
in understanding crime scenes
where blood has been spilled, and it can show you, you
know, where the main force
00:25:13
of the attack happened,
obviously, and the
types of injury. For example, if you
breach an artery,
00:25:19
then you can see that from
the kind of arterial spurting that you will get all
over the nearby surfaces.
00:25:26
If they've wondered
about dripping blood,
you can see that. You can see pools of blood
where they may have lain.
00:25:32
If they've been stabbed, then there's another
kind of pattern that you'll get
of blood staining,
00:25:37
perhaps cast-off
droplets of blood that fly onto the wall
and surrounding surfaces
00:25:43
and land there. We have some really powerful blood enhancement
techniques these days
00:25:49
that can show bloodstains and
bloodstained footwear marks, even when they've got too faint
see it with the naked eye.
00:25:55
So some really powerful
techniques are used in connection with some
of these observations.
00:26:03
- [Richard] As well as blood, crime scene manager
Tony Coombes wanted to know whether there was
any evidence of red fibers
00:26:09
at the property
that he could link with those found in the
boot of Ming Jiang's car
00:26:13
and at the dump site. - There was a red
sofa in the address, and when they opened the
zips on the sofa cushions,
00:26:24
these red fibers
came spilling out from inside the cushion cover. But on the foam on the
inside of the cushion cover
00:26:36
there was blood staining, so these cushion covers
have obviously been washed to clean them.
00:26:43
When we looked around
the edges of the sofa, you could still
see blood spatter. It became apparent the
walls had been painted,
00:26:52
and there was potentially
blood underneath there, but there were parts of the
wall which hadn't been painted.
00:26:58
Again, there were small spots
of blood that we could see. - From senior investigation
officer's point of view,
00:27:07
I'm really interested then to know if the blood
in the apartment is the same that's in the car
00:27:13
and is the same that's
at the deposition site. So, DNA samples
taken from there,
00:27:18
and I get the news
that the blood that is in the
suspect's apartment is the same that's in the car
00:27:25
and is the same that's
at the deposition site. And really good
news at this point,
00:27:30
and the investigation's really, really gathering momentum now. And that then starts to
give me some information
00:27:36
that the scene of the murder might be Ming Jiang's apartment. - Ming Jiang dismembered Yang
Liu's body in his apartment,
00:27:48
and that would've resulted in
quite extensive blood losses. The limbs and the
head were cut off.
00:27:54
But the sharp
implement is difficult to use if you don't have
the anatomical knowledge.
00:27:59
And we can see this
on the digital table. Looking at the head, the
vertebrae had been cut through.
00:28:03
Now these are really
difficult to cut because they're
folded structures that fit together
in a complex way.
00:28:10
At the other end of the
body down at the knees, cutting through those
bones is very difficult
00:28:14
because they're incredibly thick and firm bones that
require a lot of force.
00:28:20
And the same is true
of the shoulder. If you don't know the
anatomy of the shoulder,
00:28:23
it's very hard to
remove the arms. There was nothing to suggest that this killer had any
anatomical knowledge,
00:28:31
and it would've been impossible to contain the amount of
blood lost from the body.
00:28:35
He tried to clear up
as best as he could, and he tried to
redecorate places and cleaned all the surfaces.
00:28:41
But when the head was cut off, and the limbs were removed, their major blood vessels
would've been cut through,
00:28:47
and blood would've leaked
passively out of the body, causing extensive blood
staining of the area.
00:28:53
It was the finding of the
blood in the apartment that was the crucial
clue in this case.
00:28:59
[intriguing music] - We knew who the
people involved were. We knew who the perpetrator was.
00:29:07
We knew who the victim was. We knew perhaps some of
the basic understanding of how it had taken place.
00:29:17
- [Richard] With a wealth
of evidence against him, Ming Jiang was charged with
the murder of Yang Liu,
00:29:22
but Derbyshire Constabulary wouldn't be taking
the case any further. - This was a murder that took
place in Greater Manchester.
00:29:32
[tense music] - [Richard] Two weeks
into the investigation, Greater Manchester Police
took over the case.
00:29:40
It was now down to them to gather all the
extra evidence needed to prove the case in court.
00:29:47
- The investigation was
passed over to me and my team, and we commenced the
important critical inquiries
00:29:53
the needed to be done. The critical issue from
my point of view was time. The closest you are to an
offense being committed,
00:30:02
the more likely you
are to detect it. And 14 days had passed since
the deposition had taken place.
00:30:09
We really had to
get a fast start on the evidence that
was likely to be lost because of the time lapses.
00:30:15
That was particularly
the case around CCTV and telephone evidence. The big area was around CCTV.
00:30:22
Now what we had to do there
was put a team on that, and we worked on two
basic strategies.
00:30:28
That was look at the
movements of the victim and look at the movements
of Ming Jiang, the offender.
00:30:35
- [Richard] They knew
Yang Liu's address. They knew Ming Jiang's address.
00:30:38
And they knew the casino
they both went to. - So we would pick up
CCTV from those locations
00:30:45
and try and work out routes
that have been taken, particularly on the
night of deposition.
00:30:50
We're able then to
track the offender pretty much all the way up to the scene of
the deposition site
00:30:56
and pretty much
all the way back. And on top of that, the most
important thing was making sure
00:31:04
that the family were
informed in China. - [Richard] They also
needed to understand
00:31:10
who Ming Jiang was and
what his motive was. - Ming Jiang was
43 years of age. He was a Chinese national
living in Beswick
00:31:22
in East Manchester. He had quite a
transient lifestyle. He moved around
from place to place.
00:31:31
He mainly worked in
the travel industry. He'd worked for Lufthansa,
the German airline.
00:31:37
He'd been convicted of
credit card fraud in 2002 while working in Germany. In this period, he'd
also worked in Scotland
00:31:46
and been involved
in identity theft and credit card fraud there, but he wasn't convicted
of those crimes.
00:31:53
- The other interesting factor about him was that
he didn't work, and he didn't claim benefits.
00:31:58
So the big question there was, well, where was he
getting his income from? [ominous music]
00:32:07
- I suppose the outstanding
feature about him is that he was a
bad habitual gambler
00:32:15
who gambled almost every day. - We knew that he
was a big gambler. He was kind of a Jekyll and
Hyde in relation to that.
00:32:26
So in some casinos he was
banned because of his behavior. When he lost money,
he was quite abusive,
00:32:31
and as a result of that,
they kicked him out. However, in others, he
was treated as a VIP guest
00:32:39
due to the fact that he
spent a lot of money there. - [Richard] It was Ming
Jiang's gambling habit
00:32:45
that would put
Yang Liu in danger. - Ming Jiang had an
insatiable thirst for cash.
00:32:52
He had a severe
gambling addiction. He was gambling thousands of
pounds each day in casinos.
00:32:59
He had accumulated losses
across several casinos in Manchester amounting
to 273,000 pounds.
00:33:08
He was being chased
by creditors, and he was having to pawn some of his designer
watches to raise money.
00:33:15
He pawned 16,000
pounds worth of watches just to raise a bit of cash. - [Richard] But that was just
a drop in the ocean compared
00:33:22
with what he actually owed. - The reality was, at the
time of Yang Liu's death,
00:33:29
Ming Jiang literally
was teeming in debt, and that was almost
certainly the big motivation,
00:33:36
we believe, for the murder. He simply didn't
have money to gamble, and that seemed to
be his lifeblood.
00:33:43
[ominous music] - Ming Jiang has
obviously looked at his friend who's wealthy
00:33:51
and decided that the only way he can solve his financial
problems is by hatching a plan,
00:33:59
and it's cold and
calculated and ruthless. - [Richard] Ming Jiang had
hatched a plan to kill Yang Liu
00:34:07
and steal his money. Investigations looking
into their phone records showed Ming Jiang arranging
00:34:18
to meet up with Yang
Liu at his apartment five days before
the body was found. - We strongly suspected
that the murder took place
00:34:30
on the 5th of October. The reason for that was because the way we'd
built up the evidence.
00:34:37
CCTV footage showed Yang
Liu leaving his apartment in the afternoon of the 5th. He then took a tram,
00:34:46
and we tracked him to
the VeloPark tram stop, which is close to
the address belonging
00:34:52
to Ming Jiang in Beswick. And then what we saw
on a longer shot CCTV were two figures meeting.
00:35:01
One of them was
clearly the victim because we tracked
him from Beswick CCTV coming off the tram stop.
00:35:07
And then the other figure
clearly matched the description of Ming Jiang both in terms
of his build and his height.
00:35:17
And the two of them then headed
off in the general direction of Ming Jiang's address
on Falconwood Way.
00:35:24
Added to that was information
from the telephones. So what we had just before
the meeting was contact
00:35:29
from Ming Jiang to Yang Liu, again suggesting that there
was gonna be some contact.
00:35:33
And from that point onwards, the phones remained
together for the whole time. - [Richard] This
would be the last time
00:35:41
that Yang Liu was seen alive. - It was quite clear that
Ming Jiang would do anything
00:35:47
to fund his gambling habit. - I suppose in a way it was
the biggest gamble of his life.
00:36:02
[somber music] - Police were close
to solving the case of the burnt torso
found in a lay-by
00:36:10
on a road in the Peak District. DNA from the body had
matched blood found in the boot of the car belonging
to the suspect Ming Jiang.
00:36:20
It had also identified
the victim as Yang Liu, despite the killer's best
attempts to conceal the identity
00:36:25
of the victim by
dismembering the body. But dismembering a body
is really quite difficult.
00:36:31
Ming Jiang used some
sort of sharp object, although we don't know
exactly what he used.
00:36:38
And the complexities of
cutting up the body led to inevitable blood loss, which was easily found by
forensic teams in his apartment.
00:36:46
Police believed this
revealed the truth and would lead to a
conviction backed up by CCTV
00:36:52
and digital forensics, all of which linked Ming
Jiang to the crime scene. As the investigation progressed,
00:37:04
more evidence came to light
when police discovered that after Yang Liu
had been murdered,
00:37:10
Ming Jiang took
over his identity. - Ming Jiang only seemed to
be interested in one thing,
00:37:18
and that was accessing and cleaning out the
funds of Yang Liu in any way that he could.
00:37:25
He'd ascertained all his
bank credit card details and systematically started
emptying his accounts.
00:37:31
He would be going in
buying various items, often with Yang
Liu's credit cards.
00:37:36
So for example, he'd
go into Selfridges, or he would go into B&Q. In fact, he actually
used the victim's car
00:37:43
to buy cleaning items and paint in order to cover up the scene. Not only did he seek to remove
every last penny that he had,
00:37:53
he also tried to generate
loans and even sell his house. One thing that was really
interesting from the CCTV
00:38:02
from the victim's home
address was we saw on numerous occasions him
heading down to that flat
00:38:09
and then coming back out again. So, you know, our
inference from that was that he was obtaining
items, personal items,
00:38:15
so that he could
commit his fraud. In addition to that, we saw him coming out
with numerous suitcases.
00:38:21
We knew that Yang Liu had
some quite expensive clothing, and what we discovered was
his flat was almost empty.
00:38:28
So Ming Jiang really went
to great depths and extents to steal every item of
value that Yang Liu had.
00:38:36
It was quite clear that
Ming Jiang would do anything to be able to realize funds
to get back to the casino
00:38:42
and basically fund
his gambling habit. One of the most callous things that Ming Jiang did was
once he'd taken possession
00:38:51
of Yang Liu's phone, he'd
obviously gone through it and discovered a message
00:38:54
from Yang Liu's
mother over in China. As a result of that,
to cover his tracks,
00:39:00
he sent a message back saying
just the words, "I okay," effectively to say that
there was nothing wrong
00:39:06
with Yang Liu. But at that point, he was
almost certainly dead. - [Richard] The evidence
just kept piling up
00:39:16
against Ming Jiang. When police analyzed
Yang Liu's phone data, they discovered there
was regular contact
00:39:22
between the two men
before the murder. But that all stopped
after the 5th of October,
00:39:29
the day police believed
Yang Liu was killed. - When he was arrested, Ming Jiang even had
his victim's passport
00:39:37
and mobile phone on him in
the casino when he was held. - [Richard] And there was
one piece of CCTV footage
00:39:47
that was particularly chilling. - One critical piece of
evidence we got just beforehand
00:39:55
was a trip to a petrol
station where, in fact, Ming Jiang not only
bought a petrol can,
00:40:01
but filled it up
presumably then to use that to set fire to Yang Liu's
body during the deposition.
00:40:13
- [Richard] And when interviewed
by the police in custody, Ming Jiang kept
changing his story.
00:40:21
- Some of the more
disturbing aspects of the interview
involved Ming Jiang explaining Yang
Liu's background,
00:40:26
which were completely false. So he claimed that they
were in a relationship, which they weren't.
00:40:32
He claimed that Yang Liu was
an escort, which he wasn't, and he often went off
with older Chinese men.
00:40:38
Again, completely untrue. But this was the kind of
explanation that he was making
00:40:44
to explain the
disappearance of Yang Liu. He also used that relationship
status in order to suggest
00:40:51
that that's why he had access
to his funds and his property. And again, it was just a way
of him covering up his lies.
00:41:00
- [Richard] One of the
key lines of questioning the police put to Ming Jiang
related to the blood found
00:41:04
in the back of his car, and this is when he came up with a new story involving
a mysterious character
00:41:10
by the name of John Wong. - His explanation was that
he'd come back to the flat,
00:41:18
and suddenly he found
two men in there. One's a guy called John Wong, and the other one is
somebody he doesn't know.
00:41:24
So he had John Wong and
another Chinese male, and he had two suitcases. Again, the inference was
00:41:30
that one suitcase
contained the torso and one suitcase almost
certainly contained
00:41:35
the other body items. And this is his explanation, which went some
way to mitigating
00:41:42
that this was these two
people who were involved in this crime instead of him. - [Richard] Ming Jiang continued
00:41:49
to frame the
mysterious John Wong, saying he had put the suitcase
in the back of his car.
00:41:55
- He went on to explain
that John Wong ordered him to take his car and
directed him to a location,
00:42:02
which presumably
the inference was that that was in Derbyshire
at the deposition point.
00:42:07
He said at that point, John
Wong got out of the car, took the suitcase out, and
he was directed to leave.
00:42:13
The reality was, once you
pieced together the evidence, the CCTV said it was
solely Ming Jiang.
00:42:20
We got him filling
up with petrol. We got him always on his own. We never detected another male
00:42:25
at all involved in the offense. We worked very hard to establish
that person's identity,
00:42:31
but quite frankly,
John Wong never existed except in Ming Jiang's mind. - [Richard] On the
3rd of April, 2017,
00:42:43
Ming Jiang faced trial
at Minshull Crown
Court in Manchester for the murder of Yang Liu.
00:42:51
- Ming Jiang came across in
court as being completely cold and emotionless throughout.
00:42:57
He didn't betray any
sort of any feelings, and he certainly didn't
show any remorse.
00:43:07
And he came up with
some quite ridiculous and bizarre alibis. He claimed that he
and Yang were lovers,
00:43:16
that they were in
a relationship, that the reason why he was
transferring so much cash
00:43:23
from his victim's
bank accounts to his was because they were
planning a civil partnership,
00:43:31
that Yang was in trouble with some Malaysian
betting syndicates. And there wasn't a shred of
evidence for any of this.
00:43:42
- [Richard] The prosecution
presented to the jury that Ming Jiang invited
his friend Yang Liu over
00:43:47
to his flat with
the sole purpose of killing him for
financial gain. - Even after he had
murdered Yang Liu,
00:43:56
he carried on gambling. In fact, if anything,
his gambling accelerated. He was betting bigger
and bigger sums.
00:44:03
And using his victim's money, he spent around 185,000
pounds on casino chips
00:44:10
in the two weeks
after the murder. - He maintained his
account that John Wong, this mysterious John Wong,
was responsible for the crime.
00:44:20
And even when he was given
evidence during the trial, he maintained that account.
00:44:25
But it just simply was
incredulous and bizarre. And in fact, the jury,
having sat for four weeks,
00:44:32
only took four hours
to give their judgment. It's quite unusual. You would normally expect
one day's deliberation
00:44:39
for each week, and, in fact, instead
of taking four days, the jury took just four hours.
00:44:45
That just shows you
the overwhelming amount of evidence that he
faced at the trial.
00:44:50
[jarring music] - [Richard] On the
2nd of May, 2017, Ming Jiang was convicted
of the murder of Yang Liu.
00:44:59
He was sentenced
to life in prison. The judge said if parole
was ever to be considered,
00:45:04
they must look at the danger
Ming Jiang presents to society. - I watched Ming
Jiang's reaction,
00:45:13
and there was simply nothing. He was completely
cold and emotionless, and it was almost like
it was just another day,
00:45:19
nothing had happened. - Ming Jiang never
admitted what he'd done. He maintained his
innocence throughout.
00:45:28
He's never given a full account of what took place in his flat. And before his arrest, he just
continued to gamble, in fact.
00:45:36
This murder was motivated
completely and totally by greed. - To this day, Yang
Liu's hands, head,
00:45:47
and feet haven't been found. Would these discoveries have
changed the investigation?
00:45:52
The complete body could have
established a cause of death, but in the end, how
he was killed could
only be speculation.
00:46:00
But the body gave enough truth, even in its dismembered state. You don't always need to know
exactly how someone died.
00:46:08
Parts of a body can be enough to seal a conviction for murder. [dramatic music]