By Farah Master | HONG KONG
British banker Rurik Jutting calmly detailed to police his cocaine-fueled descent into a torture and killing binge that ended in the deaths of two Indonesian women in his luxury Hong Kong apartment, according to videos shown in court on Wednesday.
The 31-year-old Cambridge graduate told police that six weeks after he started buying cocaine directly from a dealer, he was vastly indulging in the drug, as well as alcohol and paid sex.
On the third day of his murder trial, the prosecution said Jutting was consuming 10 grams of 30-percent pure cocaine a day, an unbelievably high dosage. An expert toxicologist said in the courtroom around three grams could be fatal.
Jutting has admitted killing Sumarti Ningsih, a 23-year-old single mother, and another Indonesian woman, Seneng Mujiasih, 26, in his apartment two years ago.
But he has pleaded not guilty to murder on grounds of diminished responsibility, while pleading guilty to the lesser crime of manslaughter.
He explained in the video how cocaine made him feel sexually charged and led to him fantasizing for long periods of time. He had tried cocaine previously but only fleetingly, he said.
Later in the interviews, when describing the first killing, Jutting bent over to show how he slit the throat of first victim, Ningsih, whom he previously met through a classifieds website.
"Initially I didn't cut deeply enough, I cut the windpipe but only a vein ... she was bleeding on the floor. Then I pulled her into my shower and used the knife to cut as deeply as I could and then she died within a few minutes," he said in the video that was viewed by a packed court room.
Jutting filmed himself torturing and killing one of his victims, part of mobile phone footage taken from four hours of recordings in which he veered between boasting, remorse and describing the pleasure he derived from sexually brutalizing the women.
When describing the second killing in a video, Jutting explained how he met Mujiasih in a bar near his home and agreed to pay her HK$12,000 ($1,550) to go back to his apartment, just a few minutes walk from the city's red-light district.
He said he killed her within 20 minutes of her entering his apartment. Again motioning to the two officers present in one police video, he showed how he used his right hand to cut her throat and his left to hold her head.
"I don't recall how long it took her to die. I think at one point, while she was still alive, I went out onto the balcony ... I was naked and covered in her blood and lay on the balcony for some point of time," he said.
"SHE WAS PREY"
Jutting said he didn't sleep in between the two killings, which was a period of around five days. He instead took copious amounts of cocaine and read and watched extreme pornography which included violence and rape.
He detailed how he met his second victim in a bar called New Makati, a place where he said it was known that sex workers were available.
"She was prey – I was in a mode I can only describe as hunting," Jutting said.
In the police interviews conducted on November 2, 2014, a day after Jutting was arrested, he went into great detail over what had happened, politely relaying the course of events and appearing jovial at times.
Jutting, who also studied at Winchester, one of Britain's most famous and oldest private schools, worked at Bank of America Corp in Hong Kong prior to his arrest.
During the police interviews he said he resigned shortly after killing Ningsih, sending an email to notify the bank, before later attempting to "clean the bathroom" where his first victim died.
Bank of America declined to comment when contacted by Reuters on Wednesday.
Dressed in a navy blue shirt, Jutting appeared attentive during the court session on Wednesday as he listened to the videos.
In one video, he said he had "mutual sexual relations" with Ningsih at a hotel near his flat during a six-day period when he had a string of "sex workers" visit him.
The second time he met her he agreed to pay HK$8,000-HK$10,000 for her to spend the night with him, an encounter that ultimately turned into three days of torture.
Jutting, a former vice president and head of Structured Equity Finance & Trading (Asia) at Bank of America, had expressed "job depression" in his series of monologues that he termed the "narcissistic ramblings of Rurik Jutting."
Jutting was accused of murder in October 2014.
Police said they received a call from the then 29-year-old, requesting officers to come to his apartment, where they found the bodies of the two women.
Ningsih, who had a son in Indonesia, was visiting Hong Kong on a tourist visa. Her mutilated body was discovered inside a suitcase on Jutting's balcony, while Mujiasih, a domestic helper, was found lying inside with wounds to her neck and buttocks, forensic pathologist Dr Poon Wai-ming testified in court.
The defense and prosecution were largely in agreement over the physical evidence, Judge Michael Stuart-Moore had advised the jurors on the first day of the trial.
He told them the verdict could rest on psychiatric and psychological testimony.
Murder carries a mandatory life sentence, while manslaughter carries a maximum sentence of life.
The case continues.
(Reporting by Farah Master; additional reporting by Anne Marie Roantree; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree and Nick Macfie)
