Ten-day trial of British banker paints gruesome picture of double homicide fueled by sex and drugs

Warning: the following article contains graphic descriptions of violence

When British banker Rurik Jutting called the “999” emergency line at about 3.55am on November 1, 2014, officers on the line seemed to have difficulty understanding his English.

“You are speaking too fast,” an officer said during the brief exchange with the Briton. The officer was then told where the caller lived.

Though the officer thought the call was a noise complaint, policemen were nonetheless sent for immediately.

The subsequent early morning check in Jutting’s Wan Chai flat by the force eventually unveiled a gruesome double murder which rocked Hong Kong – a city widely considered to be one of the safest in the world – two years ago.

The Cambridge-educated banker, with an IQ of 137, called police to turn himself in after he allegedly murdered two young Indonesian women five days apart while high on cocaine.

Six weeks before his surrender, Jutting, now 31, began using more cocaine as his “golden life” started to spiral downwards.

“From Monday to Friday, I would essentially phone up [a drug dealer] and obtain large amounts of cocaine, taking it, getting high, and drinking ... having sex workers visit me,” the Briton told police after he was arrested.

His sexual desire showed no signs of abating. On October 25, 2014, Jutting asked Sumarti Ningsih, a 23-year-old Indonesian national whom he met less than three weeks before, to spend some time with him.

On a previous occasion, Jutting took the woman, who was in Hong Kong on a visitor’s visa, to a hotel in Wan Chai for sex. He had been rough with her and she ended the session early, refunding half the money he had given her.

When Jutting asked to see her again, Sumarti was hesitant. But she changed her mind and went home with him after the Briton offered to pay her well – HK$8,000 to HK$10,000 for the night.

Over the next three days, he subjected her to increasingly cruel acts of violence using his belt, sex toys, a pair of pliers and his fists.

“I became rough. Went from being consensual to non-consensual, from playing to forcing her to stay,” he recounted. “She was obviously very scared, she was smaller than me. I was physically restraining her, choking her, rougher and rougher. She obviously wanted to leave.”

But Jutting kept torturing and threatening her.

“How much do you love me? Do you love me? If you say yes, I hit you once. If you say no, I hit you twice,” the Briton told the woman. “If you scream, I will punch you,” he continued.

He also took a kitchen knife and asked Sumarti to take it, but the terrified woman did not dare do so.

After tormenting her for three days, he took her into the bathroom, had her kneel in front of the toilet bowl with her hands tied behind her back and made her lick the toilet bowl.

He held her hair from behind and whispered to her “I love you” before cutting her throat with a serrated-edge knife.

Sumarti did not die immediately so he dragged her into the shower and continued to saw through her neck until she was dead.

“She made no noise. She didn’t cry. She was bleeding on the floor,” Jutting told police.

Over the next few hours, he filmed himself on his iPhone – talking about himself, the torturing of Sumarti and the first killing.

“My name is Rurik Jutting. About five minutes ago, I just killed, murdered, this woman here,” he said into the camera.

Moments later, he held up his shaking hand.

“It’s Monday night. I’ve held her captive since early Saturday, I’ve raped her repeatedly, I tortured her, tortured her badly.”

“I’ve never seen anyone that scared,” Jutting said of Sumarti.

“She would voluntarily eat faeces out of the toilet ... she would just do anything.”

He added that he had killed his first victim in some “very perverted sense”.

“I still don’t feel guilty, I feel sickness.

“The narcissistic ramblings of Rurik Jutting, Rurik George Caton Jutting. Former vice-president of structured equity, finance and trading at Merrill Lynch, newly unemployed and part-time rapist/murderer,” he continued.

A naked Jutting also talked about his fantasies, which involved going back to the United Kingdom and kidnapping three teenage girls whom he would turn into “sex slaves”.

The Briton said he had considered giving himself up, killing himself and hiding the body.

But he later wrapped the body in plastic bags and a bed sheet before stuffing it in a suitcase. He then placed the suitcase out on the balcony.

Jutting recorded further sequences of him talking about how he enjoyed dominating the victim and killing her.

He said in relation to his having killed Sumarti: “I definitely could not have done that without cocaine.”

The use of cocaine and alcohol, combined with the Briton’s “narcissistic personality” and sexual sadism disorders, left him unable to control his actions, his defence later argued in court.

Jutting said that when he became sober, he had thought of letting Sumarti go in a way that would not be traceable to him.

But he did not allow her to live. He even ventured out four days later to hunt for another victim.

On October 31, 2014, Jutting left home and visited a sex shop in Central, where he made a number of purchases including coloured rope and some sex toys.

When he returned to Wan Chai, visiting a hardware shop near his flat, he bought several items including pliers, a hammer, some plastic ties and some sheets of sandpaper.

“Once I got back to apartment, slept briefly. Desire had gone. I just felt quite sick ... more cocaine ... desire came back,” he recounted.

He filmed some video clips in which he discussed what he was going to do with the items he had bought.

Before he left his flat at around 11pm, he placed two knives under cushions on his sofa. He also prepared a gag made from a length of rope and a condom, which he left beside the sofa.

He went to a bar in Wan Chai and approached Seneng Mujiasih, 26, a domestic helper who was also working at the place.

“I spoke to a number of girls. This girl, I don’t know why I chose her. I’ve never met her before.

“She was, at that point in time, she was simply prey. I was hunting for prey. She was the unfortunate person to be hunted,” he told police.

Jutting took the Indonesian woman back home before midnight.

When they entered the flat, they both undressed and began to kiss and cuddle on the sofa.

Then Seneng apparently saw the gag beside the sofa and stood up and started to shout at the Briton in a foreign language, presumably Bahasa Indonesia.

Jutting grabbed her and pulled her to the floor.

He took one of the knives he had placed under a cushion and held it to her throat and told her that if she continued to call out and struggle, he would cut her throat.

“She was very brave ... She was struggling, she was resisting, she was shouting.

“In the course of that I cut her. I used all my force to cut her neck,” Jutting told police.

“I don’t recall how long it took her to die,” he said.

Still naked and covered in her blood, he went to the balcony to lie down.

“I knew that some people saw me. A group of people saw me. That I was naked, covered in blood, holding a knife,” Jutting said.

After he killed his second victim, he used up the remainder of the cocaine he had and seemed to be hallucinating. He saw the door handle move and thought that “Ninja Police” were outside and on the balcony.

He told police that he had actually climbed from his balcony to his neighbour’s balcony, a distance of several feet.

Believing police were coming to get him, Jutting called 999.

The last call he made before his arrest was to his boss at the investment bank, telling him: “I’m in a lot of trouble.”

He became so emotional that ambulance officer To Shing-fai testified that he found Jutting crying, talking aloud and acting edgy outside his flat, standing and sometimes sitting when he and his colleagues arrived at the scene.

The ambulance man added: “I also asked [a] police officer at the scene whether this expatriate male was the injured one.”

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.