‘Socially awkward’ British banker charged with grisly HK killings

HONG KONG — A 29-year-old British banker charged yesterday with two counts of murder in Hong Kong attended an exclusive boarding school as a youth and studied history and law at Cambridge University, where former classmates said he excelled academically and athletically.

Rurik Jutting, a 29-year-old securities trader who until recently worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, also had an eye for Asian beauties. He was shown in online postings with bar girls from Hong Kong’s Wan Chai entertainment district and was said to have wined and dined other beautiful women across the globe.

Before his arrest, Jutting (picture) had been in a relationship with an Asian woman called “Yanie”, based on posts on his Facebook page. He also “liked” a Facebook page with photos of provocatively dressed Asian women.

What emerged over the weekend was something far darker, said the police and media reports. Jutting called the police to his home in Wan Chai in the early hours of Saturday morning and when they arrived, they found two women brutally murdered, with one said to have been nearly decapitated, and the flat a sea of blood. The police said they found thousands of photos of the dead women and others on his mobile phone.

Following initial investigations, the police yesterday charged him with killing two women, one possibly an Indonesian. Both women are believed to be sex workers.

Looking stony-faced, unshaven and wearing a black T-shirt and dark-rimmed glasses, Jutting told the court he understood both charges against him, but did not enter a plea. The brief hearing was adjourned until Nov 10.

Jutting’s profile on LinkedIn shows he began his career at Barclays in 2008 after graduating from Cambridge University. He joined Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s London office in July 2010 and moved to the firm’s Hong Kong office in July last year. A person familiar with the company said Jutting had resigned a week ago but he remained in the company’s telephone directory.

Bloomberg News reported that an automated email reply from Jutting’s work account said he was out of the office “indefinitely” and urged the sender to contact someone who was not “an insane psychopath”. The report added that the automated reply also said: “For escalation please contact God, though suspect the devil will have custody.”

Said one former Cambridge acquaintance: “He seemed like a normal guy, although he kept pretty much to himself. The thing that stood out about him was that he was academically extremely talented.” She described him as “very, very ambitious”.

The son of an engineer father and a nursery teacher mother, Jutting was described by one colleague in Hong Kong as someone who “talked very loud and made loads of money”.

Jutting, who attended Winchester College, an independent boys school in Hampshire, grew up in Chertsey, Surrey, where his family lived in a Grade II listed manor house set behind wrought iron gates and said to be the inspiration for Ernest Shepard’s illustration of Kenneth Grahame’s children’s classic The Wind In The Willows.

Classmates also said he was intensely athletic and had been a member of the prestigious rowing club at Cambridge. “He was a tough guy. He had a rower mentality of pushing himself,” said one former pupil at Winchester. “A classic banker, I guess.” Another Winchester classmate described him as “clever but socially awkward”.

Hong Kong police were scouring the thousands of photographs stored on Jutting’s mobile phone, including some showing one of the corpses wrapped in a carpet inside a suitcase on the balcony.

The apartment where the bodies were found is on the 31st floor of a building popular with financial professionals, where average rents are about HK$30,000 (S$4,980) a month.

“It’s very shocking because we never expected something like this to happen in Hong Kong, especially in the same building that I’m living in,” said banker Mina Liu. Another woman who lives down the corridor from the flat where the bodies were found said she had seldom seen anyone come and go from the apartment.

A resident on the 11th floor also said a “disgusting” smell had been emanating from the building. “It was the smell of a dead body,” said the resident, who refused to give his name. AGENCIES