With his mop of blond hair and gregarious, in-your-face nature, Gary Alderdice was nothing less than a character. Among Hong Kong's then tight-knit legal community in the early 1990s, he stood out - a smart lawyer, mad-keen racegoer, formidable tennis player and, most glaringly, a massive ball of fun.
Those attributes were on full display in Alderdice's leisure-time job of author. His sharp wit shone through in books with titles like Let's Kill all the Lawyers and The World's Greatest Horseracing Book Ever.
Such a person attracts many friends and the senior lawyer from New Zealand who arrived in Hong Kong in 1973 was blessed with plenty - a good number of them in high legal places.
Eleven years ago this week, a large swathe of Hong Kong's elite society was in shock when word filtered through from Vladivostok that Alderdice, 49, and a Russian prostitute 29 years his junior had been found dead in a shabby little flat on the wrong side of town.
In the following days, the story would get increasingly bizarre, with the revelation that the beautiful young woman was his lover from Macau and that they had been shot dead and possibly tortured. Claims emerged that he had been carrying US$150,000 to either buy her freedom from the Russian mafia, or a McDonald's franchise or property.
His closest friends were confused. Although he frequently went to Macau, especially after separating from his second wife five months earlier, no one was aware of the new woman in his life.
Russian authorities arrested three men, but they were later freed. In 2001, a written confession emerged from a jailed woman who later died of a heroin overdose, but the two men she named as having helped her carry out the killings are now also thought to be dead.