GRAPHIC WARNING: CONTENT MAY DISTURB
A British banker accused of the murder of two prostitutes in Hong Kong was raised in a wealthy family and attended a $58,000-a-year boarding school.
Rurik Jutting, 31, grew up in leafy Surrey where his father, Graham, worked as an engineer and his mother, Helen, ran a nursery class.
He denies murdering Sumarti Ningsih, 23 and Seneng Mujiasih, 26, whose bodies were found in his apartment.
From the age of four to eight, he attended to the now-closed Wallop prep school, before attending Abberley Hall, a boarding school in Worcestershire.
His current situation is a far cry from his life in 1990, when he was pictured as an angelic six-year-old at Wallop Preparatory School in Weybridge, Surrey.
But a former classmate at the school said he was "a bit of a strange chap" and "wasn't very popular".
He told the Daily Telegraph: "I just woke up this morning to a phone call from one my classmates and he said 'you'll never guess what, Rurik is on the news'".
"He was in my class for a couple of years. He never really made a fuss about anything, he just seemed really quiet. He wasn't the most popular kid in the school."
He then moved to the prestigious Winchester College before winning a place at Peterhouse College in Cambridge.
His contemporaries at school have described Jutting as "arrogant".
Speaking to the Evening Standard, friends from Jutting's Winchester College days described him as "very sharp, very bright, and perceptive" and "more a leader than a follower" while a pupil at the exclusive school.
Speaking anonymously, one said they assumed Jutting was looking for a job reference when his name appeared in the subject line of an e-mail following his arrest in 2014.
"If they had been looking for a reference, I'd have said: I wouldn't want to spend more than an hour in a room with him, but he was incredibly bright."
Another Winchester contemporary added: "I'd say he was - it may seem surprising - rather attractive.
"He had a sort of controlled poise and a certain understated smugness, a sort of superior air, but lightly worn. He seemed quite detached. I'd never have described him as affable."
Former schoolmates also spoke of their shock at seeing Jutting looking bloated in recent photographs - adding that they remember him as being "slim, tanned and attractive".
During his time at Cambridge, Jutting joined the rowing club and was the secretary of Clio, the undergraduate history society.
He studied law and history at Peterhouse College in the mid-2000s.
A senior member of the university told the Daily Mail: "He was a bit of an action man, always on the move.
"I never heard about him getting into any serious trouble, so this comes as a real surprise."
During his career in banking, Jutting is said to have quickly acquired a taste for the high life.
After graduating, he embarked on a high-flying career in banking, working first for Barclays and then Merrill Lynch in London.
He then moved with the latter to Hong Kong where he was reportedly earning $600,000 a year by the time he quit his job.
It was while working in Hong Kong that Jutting is said to have developed an obsession with having sex with 'two or three women' and hosting drug-fuelled sex parties that lasted for days at a time.
By the time of his arrest on suspicion of murdering the two young women found dead in his apartment, Jutting cut an entirely different figure to the brawny public schoolboy he once was, with photographs showing him looking bleary-eyed, bloated and surrounded by Asian sex workers.
Jutting had been in Hong Kong since July 2013, having transferred from Merrill Lynch's London office where he had worked since July 2010, according to his profile on LinkedIn.
Prior to that, he worked as a trader in capital markets at Barclays in London.
He also enjoyed skiing holidays in Courchevel, the Alpine playground for the elite, and when in London he relaxed at a private members' club in Shoreditch.
He mysteriously quit his job in the days around the first murder.
A colleague who claims to have worked with Jutting at the Merrill Lynch offices in Hong Kong said the alleged killer had been under 'extreme pressure' while working 16-hour days before he quit the firm.
The woman, who declined to be named, told MailOnline: 'He was working until midnight and the early hours of the morning most days - he did extremely unsocial hours.
"You could see he that someone who worked those hours would feel significant pressure.
"You could see he was under more extreme pressure than most people."
Following his arrest claims emerged that he was obsessed with having sex with "two or three women" and held drug-fuelled sex parties lasting for days at his flat.
According to one former Hong Kong law enforcement officer, he went on regular "drug and drink binges".
The pupils of the 29-year-old banker were dilated from suspected cocaine abuse and he appeared to have used amphetamines to act as a 'livener', he told MailOnline.
Fellow drinkers in the Queen Victoria and Old China Hands pubs in seedy Wan Chai included the British former law enforcement officer, who worked on drugs investigations during his career in the UK and the Far East.
The ex officer told MailOnline: "Jutting would come into the pubs on Saturday and Sunday mornings in a very bad state.
"He didn't know who he was, where he was and what he was doing.
"Cocaine tends to slow your body down and it appeared he had used amphetamines, probably speed, to perk himself up."
Then on - on Halloween - at his $3,400-a-month Hong Kong apartment, a scene from a horror movie unfolded.
A prostitute's throat had been slit, and police later found another woman rotting in a suitcase, trussed up and all but decapitated, who had been there for several days.
After he was arrested and brought to court, he looked a shadow of his younger self in the back of the police van, sporting a pot belly, bloated face and unkempt beard.
And any attempt to contact him at his Bank of America Merrill Lynch e-mail account triggered a disturbing reply that goes some way to shedding light on his downward spiral.
"I am out of the office. Indefinitely," it read.
Posts
