Explainer | Profile of a killer: Rurik Jutting’s descent into brutal depravity
Rurik Jutting once had the world at his feet, but now he faces life in jail for the murder of two women
As the door of his cell inside the maximum security Stanley Prison slammed shut on Tuesday night, sex-killer Rurik Jutting – who took the lives of two innocent young women during a three-day cocaine and booze-fuelled orgy of depraved sex and unspeakable violence – may well have begun to reflect on the fact that Hong Kong is quite literally in his DNA.
With an IQ of 137 – which puts him in the top 2 per cent of the most intelligent people on the planet – the former high-flying British banker, 31, has already calculated that the city which his grandparents, Mary Ching-man and the late ex-Royal Hong Kong Police Force superintendent, Briton Paul Eustace Smith, called home for more than 30 years, might not be the place for him.
Perhaps the former Cambridge University history and law student – who was named Rurik because of its connotations of “greatness” as the name of Russia’s first imperial family – doesn’t fancy waking up behind bars every morning for the rest of his life to a constant reminder of his horrific crimes.
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.
