Original subtitles

When a murder's committed,

it's always a race against time to find the truth,

to separate fact from fiction,

to catch the killer and to make sure that justice is served.

But what happens when the truth vanishes with the victim?

I'm Dr Richard Shepherd and I've spent my career as a pathologist

performing nearly 23,000 autopsies,

including on some of the most high profile cases of recent times.

I've learnt that the dead don't hide the truth and they never lie.

Through me you'll be hearing directly from the victim.

From a state-of-the-art laboratory with ground-breaking technology

that uses digitally scanned sample bodies,

I'll be investigating a series of intriguing murders

where, from the victim's bodies,

I'll be revealing to you the truth behind those horrific crimes.

On the 10th October 2016,

a dismembered and badly burnt body was found

dumped at the side of the road in the Peak District national park.

The police investigation

would reveal a trail of deception and greed

that led to this murder.

But what could the victim's body reveal about their death?

I was working as a detective chief inspector in charge of a team

responsible for the investigation of homicides.

The call came in that a body had been found on the A628.

And that is the most northerly part of Derbyshire.

The A628's a main road that goes between Manchester and Sheffield,

so it's a very busy road.

But when you're into the Peak District, it's a very scenic,

very picturesque area,

certainly nowhere that you would consider to be a crime hotspot.

So it's a most unusual call to get.

Probably took about two hours to get there,

and there's quite a lot of things rolling around in your head.

Erm... What I am going to do. What my plan is.

Is this exactly as it's reported to be?

'Up in the Peak District,

the crime scene manager was already securing the site.'

(man) So we turn up at the scene.

It's a... basically a small car park

that's used by people going out for a walk across the moors.

So hill walkers. So not, sort of, normal dog walking territory.

We've cordoned off the area so police officers at the front

to make sure that people aren't going to be pulling up,

turning up, etc.

To the left of the car park is basically a burnt mound,

which is the remains of this burnt torso.

And we then go through a process of clearing that area,

putting up some tents 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

to see what's actually going on here.

'Tony had to secure any vital evidence

that might uncover the truth.'

We've got a small parking area off a main road.

So we've got other vehicles.

Do these other vehicles belong to a suspect or not?

Have I got tyre marks?

Has a vehicle turned up to dump a body here?

Have I got footwear marks that everyone's busily going to stand on?

So those are all things that I need to protect.

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.

When I arrived at the scene, I was presented with the torso of a man.

The head had been removed,

the arms, or part of the arms had been removed,

and part of the legs had been removed.

The body was in what appeared to be suitcase

and it had been set on fire.

'The burnt out remains of the body

were obviously going to be difficult to identify.'

'However, the way it had been left still gave the police information.'

What was very clear to me was that this was unlikely to be the site

where the murder had taken place.

So this was going to be a deposition site,

somewhere where the body had been placed

after the murder had been committed.

At the start of the investigation,

the burnt suitcase was found to contain the dismembered torso

and upper legs.

The head, arms and lower legs

had been removed using a sharp implement.

We know it wasn't a saw,

because that would have left specific marks

in the bones cut through.

So there's been a serious attempt

to prevent identification of the body

by removing the teeth and the fingerprints.

Clearly this points to a murder investigation with dismemberment

and an attempt to destroy the body by fire.

The police had a body, they didn't know who it was,

but they could see that it was a male.

We don't yet have an established cause of death,

and that is where they begin on this really difficult dismembered

and burnt body.

'Crime scene manager Tony Coombes

was progressing with the investigation.'

Just from a very general point of view,

starting to think about the scenarios.

How's this guy come to be here?

One of the obvious questions that was there,

is, OK, so where's the arms, legs and head?

Er... Are we looking for another suitcase?

Is there any other fires that are going on?

My concern was there were other body parts that had been disposed

in the immediate vicinity.

And what I really didn't want was a member of the public finding those.

So there were quite substantial land searches.

We used drones to try and cover large areas

in the hope that, if there had been a secondary deposition site,

then we would be able to find it and recover further body parts.

A pathologist is faced with a whole series of problems

when there's a body like this that's been dismembered and burnt.

Initially, you're going to try and work out who the person might be.

No teeth, no fingerprints,

so DNA here is clearly going to be crucial

in establishing that identity at some point in the future.

In the full postmortem, we'll look for any injuries on the surface.

And of course injuries could be partly hidden by smoke damage,

damage by deep burning of the bodies.

Because when the skin is burnt, it starts with the external surface

and it goes deep, deep into the tissues.

And we can look at the sample body on the table here,

how this fire will actually work its way through the body

if it continues long enough.

So initially the skin is burnt off. And then the muscles are damaged.

Then the holes appear in the abdominal wall,

the bowel can herniate through that.

The internal organs are increasingly damaged

as the process of incineration continues.

In this case, I don't think the fire was too bad.

So the body was burnt externally, possibly obscuring some injuries.

One of the main lines of enquiry to look at who the victim was,

was with the National Police DNA Database.

And generally you're, as a senior investigating officer,

you're quite optimistic that that person's DNA

might be on that database.

'Unfortunately, there wasn't a match.'

'But the body had left something that might help identify him.'

Well, one of the breakthroughs that we had forensically,

was that there was a small protected area underneath the body.

So where the torso had pressed onto the soil underneath,

we found there was a small fragment of skin

that came back definitively being Chinese in ethnicity.

So they were looking at somebody perhaps from that community,

or that at least is associating with this person.

And we've got some work that we then can look at around this suitcase.

So have we got a type of suitcase? We already know it's a Samsonsite.

We've got a black strap, and we found some wheels.

So it's a wheeled suitcase.

We found some red fibres, which were noted as a bit of an oddity,

doesn't fit with this environment.

So why have we got, you know, red fibres on a burnt suitcase?

(man) First we heard about this case

was a brief statement from Derbyshire Police,

but there was enough detail in it to peak the media's interest.

It's not often you come across a case as memorable,

or gruesome as this,

with a torso, headless and limbless,

in a suitcase dumped in a beauty spot.

When I went to the scene, there was police forensics

and scenes of crimes officers there,

lots of police vans, lots of unmarked police cars.

Could tell this was a... this was a major investigation.

Obviously, someone had been murdered,

and the police, at the time,

didn't know the identity of the murder victim

and didn't know who the culprit was.

'The police turned to the public for help.'

'They set up checkpoints along the road where the body was dumped

and asked for motorists to come forward with information.'

We put out lots of requests for things like dash cams

that people may have in their vehicles,

or people who were in the vicinity.

What we did find out was that somebody had seen a fire set,

which was very late into the evening the day before.

And that really helped us understand when the body might have been there,

and narrowing down the times that we'd got.

'They also pursued missing persons records

in the hope they would provide some leads.'

'But there would be a lot of ground to cover.'

Is this somebody who's missing from Derbyshire?

Or somebody from the Greater Manchester area?

Somebody who's missing from South Yorkshire?

Or is it somebody that's missing from somewhere completely different?

'But over the coming days the lines of enquiry dwindled considerably.'

The DNA work, the missing person work,

hadn't resulted in anything positive

that would allow us to make an identification of the victim.

It got to a point where I was wondering

where the enquiry was going

and where I was going to be able to reinvigorate it

and make some progress with it.

'Just as David thought the investigation was stalling,

he received some game changing information.'

Out of the blue we got a phone call from South Yorkshire Police

that absolutely threw the case wide open.

A burnt dismembered body had been found in the rural beauty

of the Peak District National Park.

Though the body would give some clues about what had happened,

it wasn't possible to identify the victim at autopsy.

At this stage we don't have an established cause of death.

Was there any natural disease?

Could something normal have happened to this person?

That doesn't seem to be the case.

Next thing is to exclude the possibility

that there had been fire before the death,

and that's done by taking blood samples looking for carbon monoxide.

Despite the burns caused by fires,

most people actually die as a result of inhaling the noxious fumes

as the fire is burning.

The most important poison that's breathed in is carbon monoxide.

This blocks the transport of oxygen

by the haemoglobin in the red blood cells,

which stops oxygen getting to the brain and the heart,

and that results in the individual's death.

The other thing we look for very carefully

is the evidence of inhalation of fumes and soot.

The lungs themselves may be blackened,

but, most importantly, throughout the trachea and the bronchi,

there's little particles of black soot deposited

that show someone was alive at the time the fire was burning.

'On this burnt torso, the airways were clear,

and that proved the victim was already dead

before the fire started.'

'But with the autopsy unable to identify the body,

senior investigating officer David Cox

was quickly coming to a dead end.'

'Then a week after the body was found,

he received a phone call that could change everything.'

South Yorkshire Police told us

that there was an ANPR camera that was on the A628.

And they gather data about vehicles that are passing.

But this one camera in particular

didn't belong to Derbyshire Constabulary,

even though it was on Derbyshire Constabulary's area.

It belonged to South Yorkshire Police.

They'd put a camera on the A628 in 2012 because of the Olympics,

and the cycling road race was in that area at that particular time.

Unfortunately, the first result I got back from it

was that the camera hadn't been recording

and there was no data on it.

So I asked that the camera get removed

and get forensically examined.

'David's persistence paid off.'

'Further analysis retrieved data from the night the body was dumped

and there were hundreds of hits.'

There was simply too much data on there to go through it line by line,

so what I decided to do was to set some parameters

around the information that that camera was able to give us.

We knew that a fire had been set the night before,

so that gave us some sort of idea

as to when the body had been put there.

What I did notice was that this road between Sheffield and Manchester,

there wasn't a great deal between those two points.

There were some cottages and some farms.

So I took the view

that if somebody had to go into the vicinity of the scene

and then come out of the vicinity of the scene,

then there must have been a reason for them to go in there.

So I decided to,

instead of just looking at the vehicles it had hit once,

to look at the vehicles that it hit twice on it

around about the time that the fire had been set.

'And that highlighted one vehicle in particular,

an uninsured car from the Manchester Area

belonging to a man called Ming Jiang.'

So that gave me something to sort of go and explore a little bit, erm,

and it gave me something by which I could go and examine that vehicle.

'With the assistance of Greater Manchester Police,

the vehicle was tracked down, seized and forensically examined.'

With cars you might take sweepings from footwells.

You might look for fingerprints everywhere.

Then you might look on the tyres and in the wheel arches

for signs of a particular kind of soil,

if the car's been driven somewhere.

And in relation to tyre tracks, you might make reference tracks

from reference tyre marks from the wheels

and see if they matched anything you found at a scene

that you were interested in.

So there are all sorts of things that you can do

with vehicles that are really important.

And so if you were looking to see whether or not the body or the torso

had been carried in it,

then you'd be very interested if there was any blood in there.

That would be one of the first things you'd look for.

(Cox) This is when the case really started to come together.

There was a single blood spot in the boot of the vehicle

and straight away I was really excited about that.

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 that we've got at the deposition site.

Even at this point now, I don't know who my victim is,

but all of a sudden now we've got something tangible

that might be able to help me with the enquiry.

When someone has spent so much time dismembering a body,

the way we can see on the digital table, and then burning it,

clearly they've worked really hard

to try and hide the identity of the person.

And that's where even the smallest amount of blood can be crucial.

In this case, a smear of blood was found in the boot of the car.

And when that blood was sampled and analysed by the laboratory,

it was possible to link the DNA

that was present in that blood smear in the car

to the body that was found

dismembered and burnt in the suitcase.

That was the longest day you could ever imagine.

It was sat by a telephone waiting for it to ring,

walking into the office, asking if anybody's rung,

as if somebody would have rung and nobody would have told me.

Of course they would!

Just really impatient, pacing up and down the corridor,

because I was so excited about this

and I really wanted to get that information back.

Basically another eureka moment.

We've got a small trace of blood. Fantastic, you know.

Again, this may not be our deceased's blood,

so let's not get excited everybody.

But this is a potential breakthrough moment.

The great news was that this came back positive.

The blood spot in the boot

matched the body that we'd found at the deposition site.

So this was really great information for me,

and it told me Ming Jiang was now a suspect in this enquiry,

and he wasn't just somebody that may have been in the vicinity.

The body from the deposition site had been in the boot of the car

and that was really important news for us.

'Forensic investigators also revealed some evidence

that was of particular interest to crime scene manager Tony Coombes.'

They said there were red fibres on the carpet inside the boot.

That takes me back to my initial observation at the scene,

these odd red fibres on the inside of the suitcase.

This is a grey carpeted Mercedes.

Why has that got red fibres on the bottom?

Is there, you know, a link there?

'With Ming Jiang now a suspect,

could this help identify the victim?'

We found some documentation in Ming Jiang's vehicle

to a guy called Yang Liu...

...who lived in Salford.

And we started to make enquiries there at his apartment

to see if we could locate him.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to find him,

and we made the decision

that we were going to force entry into his apartment.

We found nothing particularly remarkable in there,

but what it did give us

was the opportunity to take some things

we might be able to get DNA from.

So toothbrush, hairbrushes, that sort of thing.

And I added that to the requirement around the DNA profiling.

'This was the breakthrough needed.'

'The DNA taken from the apartment was a match with the torso.'

'It was confirmed the victim was Yang Liu, a Chinese national.'

Yang Liu was described as very kind and gentle and friendly.

He was born on Beijing and he was brought up in Beijing,

and his family is very... whole family is very well educated.

He came to the UK in 2000

and he studied in the University of Leeds.

And after he finished his studying, he decided to stay in the UK.

He owned his flat in Media City, Salford Quays in Manchester.

Yang Liu was a successful trader in stocks and shares.

That's how he earned his money, that's what was his job.

And he had a very comfortable life doing that.

Yang Liu regularly went to casinos in Manchester.

There's quite a large Chinese community in Manchester,

and casinos and gambling appear to be something of a gathering place,

a social setting where Chinese nationals went.

One person who Yang Liu struck up a friendship with at the casino

was Ming Jiang.

They even shared some tables sometimes while gambling.

'But Ming Jiang was heavily in debt to the casinos.'

Ming Jiang decided that the only way he can solve his financial problems

is by hatching a plan.

A breakthrough in the investigation

had put a name to the burnt and dismembered body

found dumped on a rural road.

Chinese national and Manchester resident, Yang Li.

At autopsy,

the body had shown that Yang was dead before he had been set on fire.

The prime suspect was his former friend Ming Jiang.

With a wealth of evidence against him,

it was time for the police to move in.

'Ten days after the torso was found in a suitcase,

police arrested Ming Jiang.'

I made the decision to get him arrested

at the earliest opportunity.

With the assistance of Greater Manchester Police,

we managed to track him down to a casino.

He had some documentation, passport,

some other items of paperwork in the name of Yang Liu

on him at the time of his arrest.

'With Ming Jiang in custody,

they carried out a thorough forensic search of his flat.'

(Cox) On first look, it was a clean and tidy, unremarkable apartment.

But as soon as the forensic guys got to work,

there was lots and lots of traces of blood in there.

They would be very interested in blood,

and it is extremely difficult

to clean up a crime scene of all blood.

Especially where quite a lot has been shed.

And so it proved in this particular case.

A lot of blood was found.

There was evidence of clean-up, apparently,

but there was a lot of blood on the floor.

It had seeped into this laminated flooring

and also into the cushions on the sofa.

So there was, you know, a remarkable amount of blood.

Blood pattern analysis is incredibly important

in understanding crime scenes where blood has been spilt.

And it can show you, you know,

where the main force of the attack happened,

obviously, and the types of injury.

For example, if you breach an artery,

then you can see that from the kind of arterial spurting

that you will get all over the nearby surfaces.

If they've wandered about dripping blood, you can see that.

You can see pools of blood where they may have lain.

If they've been stabbed,

then there's another kind of pattern of blood staining,

perhaps cast-off droplets of blood

that fly onto the wall and surrounding surfaces

and land there.

We have some really powerful blood enhancement techniques these days

that can show up the bloodstained footwear marks,

even when they've got too faint to see it with the naked eye.

So really powerful techniques are used

in connection with some of these observations.

'As well as blood, crime scene manager Tony Coombes wanted to know

whether there was any evidence of red fibres at the property

that he could link with those found in Ming Jiang's car

and at the dump site.'

(Tony) There was a red sofa in the address,

and when they opened the zips on the sofa cushions,

these red fibre... fibres came spilling out

from inside the cushion cover.

But on the foam, on the inside of the cushion cover,

there was blood staining.

So these cushion covers had obviously been washed to clean them.

When we looked round the edges of the sofa,

you could still see blood spatter.

It became apparent the walls had been painted

and there was potentially blood underneath there.

But there were parts of the wall which hadn't been painted,

again there were small spots of blood that we could see.

From a senior investigation officer's point of view,

I'm really interested then to know if the blood in the apartment

is the same that's in the car,

and is the same that's at the deposition site.

So DNA samples are taken from there,

and I get the news that the blood that is in the suspect's apartment

is the same that's in the car,

and is the same that's at the deposition site.

And really good news at this point,

in that the investigation's really gathering momentum now.

And that then starts to give me some information

that the scene of the murder might be Ming Jiang's apartment.

Ming Jiang dismembered Yang Liu's body in his apartment

and that would have resulted in extensive blood losses.

The limbs and the head were cut off.

But the sharp implement is difficult to use

if you don't have the anatomical knowledge,

and we can see this on the digital table.

The vertebrae had been cut through.

Now these are really difficult to cut,

because they're folded structures that fit together in a complex way.

At the other end of the body down at the knees,

cutting through those bones is difficult

because they're incredibly thick and firm bones

that require a lot of force.

And the same is true of the shoulder.

If you don't know the anatomy of the shoulder,

it's very hard to remove the arms.

There was nothing to suggest that this killer

had any anatomical knowledge,

and it would have been impossible

to contain the blood lost from the body.

He tried to clear up as best as he could,

and he tried to redecorate places and cleaned all the surfaces.

But when the head was cut off and the limbs were removed,

their major blood vessels would have been cut through,

and blood would have leaked passively out of the body,

causing extensive blood staining of the area.

It was the finding of the blood in the apartment

that was the crucial clue in this case.

We knew who the people involved were,

we knew who the perpetrator was, we knew who the victim was.

We knew perhaps some of the basic understanding

of how it had taken place.

'With a wealth of evidence against him,

Ming Jiang was charged with the murder of Yang Liu.'

'But Derbyshire Constabulary

wouldn't be taking the case any further.'

This was a murder that took place in Greater Manchester.

'Two weeks into the investigation,

Greater Manchester Police took over the case.'

'It was now down to them to gather all the extra evidence needed

to prove the case in court.'

The investigation was passed over to me and my team,

and we commenced the important critical enquiries

that were needed to be done.

The critical issue from my point of view was time.

The closer you are to an offence being committed,

the more likely you are to detect it.

And 14 days had passed since the deposition had taken place.

We really had to get a fast start on the evidence

that was likely to be lost because of the time lapses.

That was particularly the case around CCTV and telephone evidence.

The big area was around CCTV.

Now what we had to do there was put a team on that

and we worked on two basic strategies.

That was look at the movements of the victim

and look at the movements of Ming Jiang, the offender.

'They knew Yang Liu's address, they knew Ming Jiang's address,

and they knew the casino they'd both went to.'

So we would pick up CCTV from those locations

and try and work out routes that had been taken,

particularly on the night of deposition.

We're able then to track the offender,

pretty much all the way up to the scene of the deposition site

and pretty much all the way back.

And on top of that, the most important thing

was making sure that the family were informed in China.

'They also needed to understand who Ming Jiang was

and what his motive was.'

Ming Jiang was 43 years of age.

He was a Chinese national, living in Beswick in East Manchester.

He had quite a transient lifestyle. He moved around from place to place.

He mainly worked in the travel industry.

He'd worked for Lufthansa, the German airline.

He'd been convicted of credit card fraud in 2002

while working in Germany.

It appeared he'd also worked in Scotland

and been involved in identity theft and credit card fraud there,

but he wasn't convicted of those crimes.

The other interesting factor about him was that he didn't work

and he didn't claim benefits.

So the big question was, where was he getting his income from?

I suppose the outstanding feature about him

is that he was a bad habitual gambler,

who gambled almost every day.

(Terry) We knew that he was a big gambler.

He was kind of a Jekyll and Hyde in relation to that,

so in some casinos he was banned because of his behaviour.

When he lost money he was quite abusive,

and as a result of that they kicked him out.

However, in others he was treated as a VIP guest and he...

Due to the fact that he spent a lot of money there.

'It was Ming Jiang's gambling habit that would put Yang Liu in danger.'

Ming Jiang had an insatiable thirst for cash.

He had a severe gambling addiction.

He was gambling thousands of pounds each day in casinos.

He had accumulated losses across several casinos in Manchester

amounting to £273,000.

He was being chased by creditors

and he was having to pawn some of his designer watches to raise money.

He pawned £16,000 worth of watches just to raise a bit of cash.

'But that was just a drop in the ocean

compared with what he actually owed.'

The reality was, at the time of Yang Liu's death,

Ming Jiang literally was teeming in debt.

And that was almost certainly the big motivation,

we believe, for the murder.

He simply didn't have money to gamble

and that seemed to be his life blood.

Ming Jiang has obviously looked at his friend, who's wealthy,

and decided that the only way he can solve his financial problems

is by hatching a plan.

And it's cold and calculated and ruthless.

'Ming Jiang had hatched a plan

to kill Yang Liu and steal his money.'

'Investigations looking into their phone records

showed Ming Jiang arranging

to meet up with Yang Liu at his apartment...'

'...five days before the body was found.'

We strongly suspected that the murder took place on 5th October.

The reason for that was because the way we'd built up the evidence.

CCTV footage showed Yang Liu leaving his apartment

in the afternoon of the 5th.

He then took a tram.

We tracked him to the Velopark tram stop,

which is close to the address belonging to Ming Jiang in Beswick.

And then what we saw on a longer-shot CCTV

were two figures meeting.

One of them was clearly the victim,

because we tracked him from better CCTV coming off the tram stop,

and then the other figure clearly matched

the description of Ming Jiang,

both in terms of his build and his height.

And the two of them headed off

in the general direction of Ming Jiang's address

on Falconwood Way.

Added to that was information from the telephones.

So what we had just before the meeting

was contact from Ming Jiang to Yang Liu,

again suggesting there was going to be contact,

and from that point onwards,

the phones remained together for the whole time.

'This would be the last time that Yang Liu was seen alive.'

It was quite clear

that Ming Jiang would do anything to fund his gambling habit.

I suppose in a way, it was the biggest gamble of his life.

Police were close to solving the case of the burnt torso

found in a lay-by 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.

It had also identified the victim as Yang Liu,

despite the killer's attempts to conceal the identity of the victim

by dismembering the body.

But dismembering a body is really quite difficult.

Ming Jiang used some sort of sharp object,

although we don't know exactly what he used.

And the complexities of cutting up

the body led to inevitable blood loss

which was easily found by forensic teams in his apartment.

Police believe this revealed the truth

and would lead to a conviction,

backed up by CCTV and digital forensics,

all of which linked Ming Jiang to the crime scene.

As the investigation progressed, more evidence came to light

when police discovered that after Yang Liu had been murdered,

Ming Jiang took over his identity.

Ming Jiang only seemed to be interested in one thing

and that was accessing and cleaning out the funds of Yang Liu

in any way that he could.

He'd ascertained all his bank credit card details

and systematically started emptying his accounts.

He would be going in, buying various items,

often with Yang Liu's credit cards.

So, for example, he'd go into Selfridges or he would go into B&Q.

In fact, he actually used the victim's card

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,

he also tried to generate loans and even sell his house.

One thing that was really interesting from the CCTV

from the victim's home address, was we saw, on numerous occasions,

him heading down to that flat and then coming back out again.

So, you know, our inference from that

was that he was obtaining items, personal items,

so that he could commit fraud.

In addition to that, we saw him coming out with numerous suitcases.

We knew that Yang Lui had some quite expensive clothing,

and what we discovered was his flat was almost empty.

So Ming Jiang really went to great depths and extents

to steal every item of value that Yang Liu had.

It was quite clear that Ming Jiang would do anything

to be able to realise funds to get back to the casino

and basically fund his gambling habit.

One of the most callous things that Ming Jiang did

was once he'd taken possession of Yang Liu's phone,

he'd obviously gone through it

and discovered a message from Yang Liu's mother over in China.

As a result of that, to cover his tracks,

he sent a message back saying just the words "I OK",

effectively to say that there was nothing wrong with Yang Liu.

But at that point he was almost certainly dead.

'The evidence just kept piling up against Ming Jiang.'

'When police analysed Yang Liu's phone data,

they discovered there was regular contact between the two men

before the murder.'

'But that all stopped after 5th October,

the day police believe Yang Liu was killed.'

When he was arrested,

Ming Jiang even had his victim's passport and mobile phone on him

in the casino when he was held.

'And there was one piece of CCTV footage

that was particularly chilling.'

One critical piece of evidence we got just beforehand

was a trip to a petrol station

where, in fact, Ming Jiang not only bought a petrol can,

but filled it up,

presumably then to use that to set fire to Yang Lui's body

during the deposition.

'And when interviewed by the police in custody,

Ming Jiang kept changing his story.'

Some of the more disturbing aspects of the interview

involve Ming Jiang explaining Yang Liu's background,

which were completely false.

So he claimed that they were in a relationship, which they weren't.

He claimed that Yang Liu was an escort, which he wasn't,

and he often went off with older Chinese men.

Again, completely untrue.

But this was the kind of explanation that he was making

to explain the disappearance, if you like.

He also used that relationship status in order to suggest

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.

'One of the lines of questioning the police put to Ming Jiang

related to the blood found in the back of his car,

and this is when he came up with a new story

involving a mysterious character by the name of John Wong.'

His explanation was that he'd come back to the flat

and then suddenly he finds two men in there.

One's a guy called John Wong and the other is someone he doesn't know.

So you had John Wong and another Chinese male

and you had two suitcases.

Again, the inference was that one suitcase contained the torso

and one suitcase almost certainly contained the other body items.

And this is his explanation

which went some way to mitigating that this was...

These two people are involved in this crime instead of him.

'Ming Jiang continued to frame the mysterious John Wong,

saying he had put the suitcase in the back of his car.'

He went on to explain that John Wong ordered him to take his car

and directed him to a location,

which presumably the inference was that that was the deposition point.

He said at that point John Wong got out of the car,

took the suitcase out, and he was directed to leave.

The reality was, once you've pieced together the evidence,

the CCTV said it was solely Ming Jiang.

We got him filling up with petrol, we got him always on his own.

We never detected another male at all involved in the offence.

We worked very hard to establish that person's identity,

but, quite frankly, John Wong never existed,

except in Ming Jiang's mind.

'On 3rd April 2017, Ming Jiang faced a trial

at Minshull Crown Court in Manchester

for the murder of Yang Liu.'

Ming Jiang came across in court

as being completely cold and emotionless throughout.

He didn't betray any sort of, er... any feelings.

And he certainly didn't show any remorse.

And he kept up with some quite ridiculous and bizarre alibis.

He claimed that he and Yang were lovers,

that they were in a relationship.

That the reason why he was transferring so much cash

from his victim's bank accounts to his

was because they were planning a civil partnership.

Erm... that, er,

that Yang was in trouble with some Malaysian betting syndicate.

And there wasn't a shred of evidence for any of this.

'The prosecution presented to the jury

that Ming Jiang invited his friend, Yang Liu, over to his flat

with the sole purpose of killing him for financial gain.'

Even after he had murdered Yang Liu, he carried on gambling.

In fact, if anything, his gambling accelerated.

He was betting bigger and bigger sums,

and using his victim's money.

He spent around £185,000 on casino chips

in the two weeks after the murder.

He maintained his account that John Wong,

this mysterious John Wong, was responsible for the crime.

And even when he was giving evidence during the trial

he maintained that account.

But it just simply was incredulous and bizarre.

And in fact, the jury, having sat for four weeks,

only took four hours to give their judgement.

It's quite unusual.

You would normally expect one day's deliberation for each week.

And in fact, instead of taking four days,

the jury took just four hours.

That just shows you the overwhelming amount of evidence

that he faced at the trial.

'On 2nd May 2017, Ming Jiang

was convicted of the murder of Yang Liu.'

'He was sentenced to life in prison.'

'The judge said if parole was ever to be considered,

they must look at the danger Ming Jiang presents to society.'

I watched Ming Jiang's reaction and there was simply nothing.

He was completely cold and emotionless.

And it was almost like it was just another day,

nothing had happened.

Ming Jiang never admitted what he'd done.

He maintained his innocence throughout.

He's never given a full account of what took place in his flat.

And he... before he was arrested, he just continued to gamble.

In fact, this murder was motivated completely and totally by greed.

To this day, Yang Liu's hands, head and feet haven't been found.

Would these discoveries have changed the investigation?

The complete body could have established a cause of death,

but in the end, how he was killed could only be speculation.

But the body gave enough truth even in its dismembered state.

You don't always need to know exactly how someone died.

Parts of a body can be enough to seal a conviction for murder.

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