Rurik Jutting’s last girlfriend describes a kind, generous side to the convicted killer
The former banker was a frequent visitor to the Philippines, where he struck up seemingly meaningful relationships with bar girls who viewed him as a good catch
Joanna Mendoza has every reason to consider herself lucky. She was the last girlfriend of a killer who on Tuesday was convicted of murdering two prostitutes in his Hong Kong apartment in the most horrific circumstances imaginable.
The petite Filipino bar girl was Rurik Jutting’s close companion until just a fortnight before he embarked on his killing spree. In an intense two-month relationship, he set her up in a flat in Manila and spent almost every weekend with her as he escaped the pressures of his high-powered job with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
In a doting relationship that seems incongruous in the context of the horrors the Cambridge University-educated banker would soon graduate to, the couple discussed marriage and Jutting invited her to visit him in Hong Kong before their relationship came to an abrupt end.
Speaking for the first time about her relationship with Jutting, Mendoza’s testimony reveals the double life the murderer was living between Hong Kong, where his cocaine abuse spiralled out of control, and the Philippines, where he spent laid-back weekends with bar girls.
Poring anxiously over news reports of his trial in a hotel bar in Angeles City, where she has returned to work as an escort in the same bar in which she met Jutting more than two years ago, 27-year-old Mendoza (not her real family name) says, with a sad smile, “Everyone tells me I’m lucky. They say I’m lucky because I could be dead.
