The British banker who slashed the throats of two women in his luxury Hong Kong apartment was “as far from normal as possible” at the time of the killings, his defence said Friday at the close of his trial.
Once a “brilliant superman investment banker” earning several million Hong Kong dollars a year, 31-year-old Rurik Jutting spiralled out of control under the influence of personality disorders, defence counsel Tim Owen told the court.
He became “a bloated, unshaven, permanently intoxicated, isolated and depraved drug and alcohol addict whose mind was permanently obsessed about sadistic sexual fantasies,” he said.
Cambridge graduate Jutting is accused of murdering the two women, Sumarti Ningsih, 23, and Seneng Mujiasih, 26, two years ago, after saying he would pay them for sex.
The trial, which has captivated the Chinese city, heard that he tortured Ningsih inside his apartment for three days before killing her and stuffing her body in a suitcase found on his balcony.
The Briton has pleaded not guilty to two murder charges, instead pleading guilty to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility — an argument the prosecution has rejected.
The past week has seen witnesses from both sides arguing the extent to which Jutting was impaired by multiple disorders.
Defence psychiatrists said Jutting was consumed by addictions to alcohol and huge amounts of cocaine, and suffered from narcissistic personality disorder and sexual sadism disorder.
Prosecution counsel John Reading told the jury in his concluding speech that Jutting “wasn’t substantially impaired”, took cocaine in order to gain “dutch courage”, and looked and sounded calm in the videos he made between the killings.
“He took the cocaine in order to be able to torture and ultimately kill,” Reading said.
But Owen argued that the picture painted by the prosecution that Jutting was cool, calm and collected at the time of the killings was untrue.
“Rurik Jutting was as far from normal as possible to be,” he said. “He was off the scale… by any standard of normality”.
The judge will sum up the case on Monday, with the jury expected to begin deliberating on the verdict Tuesday.
