Perhaps Rurik George Caton Jutting would rather avoid the sounds and smells of the city of his mother’s birth and where he made his final descent from a HK$2.5 million-a-year job at Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) to the self-indulgent cesspit of paid-for sex, drugs and alcohol into which he metaphorically dumped the bodies of his victims, 23-year-old Sumarti Ningsih and Seneng ­Mujiasih, 26.

Whatever his reasons, the sex-killer who went into Lai Chi Kok Remand Centre after his arrest a fat, bloated and bemused-looking loser and appeared in court to be handed his sentence as a slimmed down, buffed-up version of that shambles, is to apply to serve the bulk of his jail time in Britain under a transfer agreement signed between Hong Kong and the UK in 1997.

For the women he tortured and killed, who had come to Hong Kong to provide for their impoverished families in Indonesia, the last and only choice they didn’t have was to submit as Jutting reduced them to sex slaves before cutting their throats.

Over that hellish three-day period inside a flat in a Wan Chai high-rise in late October 2014, Jutting subjected Sumarti to what his defence counsel, Tim Owen QC, told the High Court was “unbelievably brutal and savage violence” to satisfy his “growing obsession with violent sadistic pornography”.

This, the defence argued, was because their client’s ability to control his actions had been ­diminished substantially due to mental disorders involving drug and alcohol addiction, narcissism and sadistic tendencies.

It wasn’t murder, they said, it was manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

The jury, whom the judge, Mr Justice Stuart-Moore, had directed to put aside their emotions and feelings of disgust over what Jutting had done as they made their decision on this legal point, found him guilty of murder after listening to 10 days of harrowing evidence in one of Hong Kong’s most shocking murder trials.

The nine-member (four-woman, five-man) jury had to watch and listen to the self-confessed “insane rantings” of a naked, blood-splattered and knife-wielding Jutting as he filmed both his unspeakable acts of violence and sexual perversion and his apparent confession in real time, on his smartphone.

So where did it all go wrong for the archetypally English, public school-educated teenager who had the world at his feet?

The grieving families of the two young women whose throats Jutting cut with vicious abandon could be forgiven for feeling it all started going wrong decades ago when the mother who gave birth to the man they regard as a “monster” was born in Hong Kong.

Helen Jutting, who has spent most of her life in Britain, is the daughter of Mary Ching-man and the late decorated Royal Hong Kong Police superintendent Paul Eustace Smith. The couple were married at St John’s Cathedral in Central in January 1962 and Smith went on to become a superintendent in the force gaining the Colonial Police Medal for service in 1991 before retiring to Vancouver with his wife.

During the defence summing up in court, Tim Owen QC read from a psychiatric report on Jutting in which the killer told his interviewer that his grandfather had been dismissed from the Hong Kong police force “due to corruption” and “taking money from the triads”.

It is not known why Jutting said this but what may have been to him an innocent throwaway line has sparked anger among former officers who served in the force.

Former colleagues expressed shock this week that Mr Smith, a quiet teetotaller and an enthusiastic squash player who died in 2004, could be the grandfather of Jutting. The contrast in their lives, they say, could not have been more dramatic.

The Jutting family is comfortably off and friends describe them as hardworking. Rurik Jutting’s father, Graham, who as a millwright worked in the installation of industrial machinery and equipment, has an interest in vintage motorcycles and his entrepreneurial mother, a former nurse and playgroup leader, runs an American-style milkshake bar franchise in Surrey, England.

Jutting was privately educated, first at a prep school near the family home in Cobham, Surrey, then at Abberley Hall, a preparatory boarding school in Worcestershire. From there he won a coveted scholarship to Winchester College and then went to Cambridge, where he read history.

His contemporaries at Winchester and Cambridge speak of Jutting as well-adjusted and modest with a passion for cross-country running, rowing and football. After a brief flirtation with a US law firm, he was snapped up by Barclays in 2008, telling friends that money had tempted him into banking. Two years later, he moved to BAML.

When sent to Hong Kong by his employers in July 2013, Jutting was tanned and slim, a brilliant young man with the world at his feet. In the space of barely a year, he turned into an overweight, suicidal, self-confessed “insane psychopath”.

According to evidence heard in court, by all accounts Jutting had a happy childhood. The worst things got were when he fell out with his mother Helen – described in court as an ambitious and driven woman – after he decided to go into the vulgar world of post-Gordon Gecko banking and finance instead of taking the more respectable path which the law degree he walked away from Cambridge’s prestigious Winchester College had offered him.

At first, it all went well, as Jutting moved up in the banking world before eventually being headhunted from Barclay’s Bank by BAML and given a position on a crack team composed of just a handful of people focusing on complex international deals.

But then came the crash. BAML disciplined him after problems emerged with a deal he was working on that could have damaged them – and he was sent to Hong Kong in July 2013.

Jutting – who the court heard had difficulty dealing with the consequences of not being top dog – had begun to hire sex workers and use cocaine in London prior to his disciplinary posting to Hong Kong and was drinking, the court heard “a bottle of vodka to get to sleep at night”.

By the time he stepped off the plane into the hot, humid air of the Fragrant Harbour that fateful July, he was already leading what jurors were told by QC Owen was an “extraordinarily secret life behind a facade of being able to cope”.

The man, whose nickname as a student at Cambridge was “Killer” because Rurik backwards resembled it, might well have been conscious of the old acronym, FILTH: “failed in London, try Hong Kong”.

To donate

The Asian Migrants’ Coordinating Body is raising funds for the two victims’ families over two weeks. You can donate at:

Account name: Association of Indonesian Migrant Workers in Hong Kong

Account address: Nathan Road, Jordan, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR

Account number: 127-7-027379

Bank name: HSBC

Please SMS or Whatsapp your receipt to 6992 0878.