Rurik Jutting was a Cambridge-educated British banker working in Hong Kong when, at the end of October 2014, two Indonesian women died at his home in the Wan Chai district. Sumarti Ningsih, 23, died on October 27, according to the charge sheet. Seneng Mujiasih, 26, died in the early hours of November 1, a few days later. They were separate events, and Jutting was convicted of both as murders.
He telephoned the police himself on the morning of November 1, 2014, and he did not dispute at trial that he had caused both deaths. The contest in court was about the legal label. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and not guilty to murder, on the ground that his mental responsibility had been substantially impaired. The prosecution refused that plea, a nine-person jury unanimously rejected it on November 8, 2016, and the trial judge imposed the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment the same day. The Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in February 2018 and the Court of Final Appeal refused him leave to appeal in August 2018.
The case drew wide attention in Hong Kong and abroad. It involved a well-paid expatriate professional, two women from poor farming families in Indonesia, and a legal argument over how far a defendant's own state of mind could lessen what he had done.
Jutting grew up in Surrey, south of London, and attended Winchester College, the private school in Hampshire, before going on to Cambridge University to study history. At Cambridge he belonged to Peterhouse and served as president of the university's History Society, according to a Channel 4 News profile published when he was first charged. His date of birth was not reported; he was 29 at the time of his arrest and 31 when the jury returned its verdicts.
After university he went into banking in London. Channel 4 News reported that a professional networking profile listed a job at Barclays from June 2008 to June 2010, and ITV News also placed him at Barclays in London. He moved to Hong Kong in July 2013. By 2014 he was working at the Hong Kong office of Bank of America Merrill Lynch in structured equity finance and trading, as the Associated Press described his post. Bank of America Merrill Lynch told reporters in early November 2014 that a person of his name had worked there until recently. Channel 4 News reported that he had left about a week before his first court appearance.
Sumarti Ningsih came from Cilacap, a district in Central Java. Rappler, reporting in November 2014, gave her birth date as April 22, 1991, and described a poor farming family. She had finished only elementary school, married young and had a son, who was about five at the time of her death and lived with her parents in Cilacap. Her father was a farmer. Her mother had three children, Sumarti among them, and she had a brother.
Ningsih had gone to Hong Kong for the first time in 2011, at about 20, to find better-paid work than the village offered. She went back to Indonesia in 2013 and later returned to Hong Kong. She had been in Hong Kong since early October 2014 when she died. Her earnings paid for the daily needs of her family and for her son's schooling, Time reported. A religious leader in Cilacap remembered her to Rappler as a devout Muslim who sent money home so the family could take part in the Eid-ul-Adha sacrifice.
Her family learned of her death by telephone from an acquaintance and her father told Rappler he wanted the man responsible sentenced to death, although Hong Kong does not impose the death penalty. He asked the Indonesian and Hong Kong governments to bring her home to Indonesia.
Seneng Mujiasih was 26 when she died; most reports of the trial give 26, while Time gave 28 in two articles and Newstalk gave 29. Indonesia's foreign ministry said in November 2014 that she came from Muna, in Southeast Sulawesi, while the Jakarta Post reported that her family's home was in South Sulawesi. The two reports agree on the island, and her family was from Sulawesi.
Her earnings in Hong Kong helped pay for her mother's medical treatment and for a new family home, the Jakarta Post and Time reported. Her father was named in the Jakarta Post as Mujiharjo, aged 56. In the first days of the case only Ningsih was named; Al Jazeera reported on November 3, 2014 that the second woman's name was not known. By November 4, 2014, the Indonesian foreign ministry had named both women and said it would help return them to Indonesia, and that its consulate in Hong Kong would follow the legal proceedings.
John Reading SC, for the prosecution, gave the dates in his opening speech on October 24, 2016. The date charged for Ningsih's death was October 27, 2014, and the second death was charged as November 1.
The reports differ on small points. CNBC and SBS described the second death as coming five days after the first, and Asia Times said police believed the killings were six days apart. The record establishes two separate events within days of each other, and the jury returned a separate verdict of murder on each count.
In the early hours of Saturday, November 1, 2014, Jutting asked the police to come to his home. Officers went to the building in Wan Chai, on Hong Kong Island, and the investigation of two deaths began. Police arrested him.
He was charged on Monday, November 3, 2014, with two counts of murder, and appeared in a magistrate's court that day, where he told the court he understood the charges. He was remanded in custody until November 10. Al Jazeera, citing court documents, named him as Rurik George Caton Jutting, aged 29. Channel 4 News reported that the duty lawyer who met him, Martyn Richmond, said he had been denied contact with the British consulate and a solicitor of his own choice before he was interviewed, and that he had been interviewed by police up to seven times. Channel 4 News reported these points as the lawyer's account.
The case was at once compared with the one other well-known murder trial of an expatriate in the city, the 2003 case of the American Nancy Kissel. Al Jazeera and CBS News both drew the comparison.
At a hearing on Monday, November 24, 2014, Magistrate Bina Chainrai was told that psychiatrists at the Siu Lam psychiatric centre, a maximum-security facility, had examined him for about two weeks and had found him mentally fit to stand trial. The National, which printed the Agence France-Presse report, said the prosecution asked for the proceedings to be put back by about seven months so that forensic work on around 200 items of evidence could be completed. The prosecutor estimated 28 weeks for the testing. Jutting remained in custody. Ningsih's father, speaking from Indonesia, told reporters he was very disappointed by the delay and wanted the sentence to come quickly.
The trial itself began almost two years after the deaths, on October 24, 2016.
The trial was held in the High Court of Hong Kong, in the Court of First Instance, before a deputy High Court judge, Michael Stuart-Moore, and a jury of nine, five men and four women according to CNBC. John Reading SC prosecuted. Tim Owen led the defense team and appeared for Jutting. The trial was expected to last about three weeks and ran for about two.
On the first day Jutting entered his pleas. To the two murder charges he pleaded not guilty, on the ground of diminished responsibility, and he pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter. In a statement quoted by ITV News and Newstalk he said he was pleading "not guilty to murder by reason of diminished responsibility but guilty of manslaughter." The prosecution refused to accept manslaughter in place of murder, and the judge told the jury that they could still find him guilty of manslaughter or of murder. SBS reported that he also pleaded guilty to a third, lesser charge relating to the first death. The judge warned prospective jurors that they would see photographs they would find particularly distressing.
Under Hong Kong law an abnormality of mind that substantially impairs a person's mental responsibility can be a defense to murder, as the International Business Times summarized it. The jury therefore had one legal question: whether Jutting's mental responsibility was substantially impaired at the time of each death. The trial judge's directions on the meaning of "abnormality of mind", and on whether it required a disorder, were later the heart of his appeal.
The defense argued that his control had been substantially impaired. It called a British consulting forensic psychiatrist, Dr Richard Latham, who gave evidence in the second week that in his opinion Jutting's ability to control his behavior had been substantially impaired. The prosecution disputed it. Its psychiatrist, Dr Kavin Chow, agreed with the defense experts on some diagnoses but not on whether narcissism amounted to a disorder, the South China Morning Post reported, and the defense called her evidence absurd and contradictory. The prosecution's case, as the Taipei Times summarized it, was that Jutting could form judgments and exercise self-control before and after the deaths.
Psychiatrists from both sides gave evidence, and the jury had to decide between them.
On Tuesday, November 8, 2016, the jury returned unanimous verdicts of guilty of murder on both counts, rejecting the defense of diminished responsibility. After the verdicts Tim Owen read to the court a statement from Jutting, in which he apologized to the families, said he was haunted by what he had done and accepted the verdicts as just and appropriate punishment, and wrote that he was sorry beyond words, as the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and CBS News reported.
Stuart-Moore sentenced him to life imprisonment, the only sentence Hong Kong law allows for murder. In his remarks he described the case as among the worst murder cases ever to come before a Hong Kong court and the conduct as sickening in the extreme and beyond a normal person's imagination. He said Jutting could and should have been able to exercise self-control and had chosen not to. He said the apology in Jutting's statement was the first mention of any regret and that he did not accept it, saying Jutting had shown not one shred of remorse. He said Jutting was highly likely to kill again if he were released.
Owen told reporters that his client would apply to serve his sentence in the United Kingdom. The judge, for his part, said he would make sure the English authorities knew exactly what kind of person they would have to deal with if a transfer were ever sought, and said that British authorities would hold their own sentencing hearing if a transfer were granted.
Ningsih's mother, speaking from Cilacap after the verdict, told Agence France-Presse she was glad of the outcome but would never recover from her loss. Her seven-year-old grandson, Ningsih's son, lived with her, and she asked the Indonesian government to help her seek compensation from Jutting for the boy's upkeep, The National reported.
Tri Tharyat, Indonesia's consul general in Hong Kong, called the sentence just and appropriate and said the maximum punishment matched the hopes of the victims' families. He said the Indonesian government was ready to help. Time reported that activists in Hong Kong and Indonesia had contacted the families and were helping them look into a claim for financial compensation in the civil courts; no amount or outcome is on record. Members of Indonesian communities in Hong Kong had demonstrated outside the High Court during the trial, calling for justice for the two women. A union leader, Sringatin of the Indonesian Migrant Workers Union in Hong Kong, said his conduct was far more cruel than she had imagined.
The Jakarta Post wrote, two years after the deaths, that the families had heard of the trial from reporters and online reports and that no one from the government had contacted them in the interval. Ningsih's father and her brother were quoted in that report.
Jutting appealed against his convictions. His barrister, Gerard McCoy SC, argued that the trial judge had wrongly directed the jury on the defense of diminished responsibility. The application was heard by three judges of the Court of Appeal, Justices Michael Lunn, Andrew Macrae and Kevin Zervos, on December 12, 2017, and the hearing was adjourned to the next day, with John Reading SC again appearing for the prosecution. McCoy told them that Stuart-Moore had "wrongly conflated the psychiatric diagnosis of disorder with the definition of abnormality of mind", a point Time reported, and that the judge had repeatedly told the jury that abnormality of mind meant a disorder. In a second ground, reported by the Associated Press, he said the judge had been wrong to tell the jury to reach the same verdict on both counts when the two deaths had different circumstances. The prosecution maintained that the judge's directions were proper and relied on the expert testimony given at trial. Jutting's solicitor, Michael Vidler, said the court was expected to rule within about six weeks.
On Friday, February 9, 2018, the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal. The judges held that there was no merit whatsoever in the challenge to the directions and that the trial judge's directions had correctly applied the law to the evidence. They treated his guidance on abnormality of mind as advice and not as a binding instruction, according to the Taipei Times, and no retrial was ordered.
He then asked the Court of Appeal to certify a point of law for the Court of Final Appeal, Hong Kong's highest court. On Wednesday, April 11, 2018, the same panel refused, finding that the trial judge had made no error and that no point of law of great and general importance arose. The two questions he had put forward concerned whether the judge was right to tell the jury that only a mental disorder could support the defense, and whether the prosecution's psychiatrists should have been allowed to give opinions on whether his mind was "substantially" impaired.
The Court of Final Appeal then heard his application for leave to appeal directly, in August 2018, before Justices Roberto Ribeiro, Robert Tang Kwok-ching and Joseph Fok. McCoy argued that the judge had misdirected the jury on "disorder of mind" and "abnormality of mind", and stressed the distinction between traits and disorders. Ribeiro described that argument as artificial. After about eight minutes of deliberation the court dismissed the application, saying that for reasons to be given later it did not consider the questions reasonably arguable. Jutting was taken out of court and returned to Stanley Prison. That ended his appeals.
Jutting was held in Stanley Prison, a maximum-security prison on the south side of Hong Kong Island. Time reported in December 2017 that he was serving his sentence in a maximum-security prison on Hong Kong Island, and the International Business Times, the South China Morning Post and Asia Times named Stanley Prison in 2018.
His stated plan to serve the sentence in England rests on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons agreement that Hong Kong signed with the United Kingdom in 1998, CNBC reported in November 2016. Hong Kong has such agreements with 15 countries and Macau, and transfers have been rare; only Macau, the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom had completed any. CNBC called the application a big if and said that, if it succeeded, he would be the first convicted murderer transferred out of the Hong Kong prison system. The International Business Times reported on November 23, 2016 that he had said he intended to apply; no outcome is on record.
In August 2018 he was returned to Stanley Prison after the Court of Final Appeal's decision.
The dates of the two deaths are the main matter on which reports differ. The charge sheet, as reported by Al Jazeera and Channel 4 News, gave October 27, 2014 for Ningsih and November 1, 2014 for the second death. Reports give the interval between the deaths as five or six days, or simply "days later".
Mujiasih's age is reported as 26 in most accounts, 28 in Time and 29 in Newstalk. Her hometown appears as Muna in Southeast Sulawesi in Indonesian foreign ministry statements and as South Sulawesi in the Jakarta Post.
The sincerity of Jutting's apology was disputed in court. His lawyer read it as a statement of regret, and the judge rejected it. The jury was not asked to consider it.
2008 to 2010: works at Barclays in London, according to a professional networking profile reported in 2014.
July 2013: moves to Hong Kong.
October 27, 2014: Sumarti Ningsih dies (date on the charge sheet).
November 1, 2014: Seneng Mujiasih dies (date on the charge sheet).
November 1, 2014: Jutting telephones the police and is arrested.
November 3, 2014: charged with two counts of murder; remanded to November 10.
November 24, 2014: found mentally fit to stand trial; the proceedings are put back for forensic work.
October 24, 2016: trial begins in the High Court; pleas of not guilty to murder (diminished responsibility), guilty to manslaughter.
November 8, 2016: unanimous verdicts of murder on both counts; sentenced to life imprisonment.
December 12, 2017: Court of Appeal hears the application; adjourned to the next day.
February 9, 2018: Court of Appeal dismisses the appeal.
April 11, 2018: Court of Appeal refuses to certify a point of law for the Court of Final Appeal.
August 2018: Court of Final Appeal refuses leave to appeal; Jutting is returned to Stanley Prison.