The top court in Hong Kong has dismissed the appeal of a former British investment banker who killed and dismembered two Indonesian sex workers in 2014 and he is likely to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Rurik Jutting, 31, was sentenced to life imprisonment in an unanimous verdict by Hong Kong’s Court of First Instance in November 2016. In 2014 Jutting, who had been taking large amounts of cocaine as well as alcohol, slashed the throats of two Indonesian women, who were 23 and 26 at the time, and dismembered them inside his condo on the 31st floor of the upmarket J Residence complex in the city’s Wan Chai district.
The Cambridge-educated double murderer contacted police after the second killing and investigators and forensic pathologists at first did not realize there was a second body inside a suitcase on the balcony. The remains of the second woman were found hours after they were called to the site.
Police believe the two killings took place in six days between October and November that year.
Presiding judge Michael Stuart-Moore said the case was “sickening in the extreme.” The double murders sent shockwaves through the city that year, especially among maids and the expat community.
Justices Roberto Ribeiro, Robert Tang Kwok-ching and Joseph Fok at Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal, after eight minutes of deliberation, ruled on Thursday that there was no reasonable elements for argument in Jutting’s appeal. He was immediately escorted out of the court by correctional services officers and taken back to the maximum-security Stanley Prison.
In April the Court of Appeal also rejected his application for leave to appeal to the higher court.
Jutting’s defense lawyer Gerard McCoy SC cited questions regarding “misdirection” by the judge to the jury in the grueling 10-day trial on “disorder of mind” and “abnormality of mind” as well as on Jutting’s defense of diminished responsibility, stressing a difference between traits and disorders, to which Justice Ribeiro dismissed as “artificial.”
Jutting’s counsel during the initial trial, Tim Owen QC, had argued the killings were manslaughter because the abnormal state of his mind had substantially impaired his mental responsibility, Hong Kong media reported at the time.