THE LUCKIEST WOMAN ALIVE
The last girlfriend of psychopath banker reveals how he begged her to visit him — just before he butchered two women
LAST month Ariane guarin received a message from her rich British ex- boyfriend, asking if she would fly out to visit him in Hong Kong.
The message sent to the 22-year-old nightclub hostess from the Philippines by Rurik Jutting was abrupt and to the point. There was no sign off. no kisses. ‘Did you get your passport? if so, do you want to come to Hong Kong this weekend? And stay the week?’
At the time Ariane could have had no idea that Jutting, a 29-year- old banker with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, was descending into a mental abyss of unimaginable depths and that his glamorous life in the former British colony was swiftly and tragically unravelling.
Less than two weeks after he made contact with Ariane on October 11, Jutting’s financial licence to trade in Hong Kong was revoked and he apparently killed for the first time.
Then, a week ago, the Cambridge graduate summoned Hong Kong police to his luxury apartment in Wan Chai, where officers discovered a young indonesian prostitute dying from savage wounds to her throat and buttocks.
The decomposing and partially decapitated body of another young woman, whom Jutting is believed to have killed five days earlier, was discovered in a suitcase on the balcony.
A week on, the unanswered question on everyone’s lips is still ‘why?’.
For Ariane, the shocking discovery that the man she loved has apparently murdered two young women is tempered only by the feeling that she has had an extraordinarily lucky escape.
‘i had a problem applying for my passport,’ she says, ‘because i don’t have a valid identity card. He wanted me to stay for a week with him but i couldn’t go without a passport. i feel lucky. i am really thankful that it wasn’t me.’
Speaking exclusively to the Mail about her sixmonth relationship with Jutting, Ariane paints an intriguing picture of the gifted British banker as a kind-hearted, paternalistic boyfriend and ‘normal’ lover who never once hurt her and even spoke of marriage. Far from being the ‘insane psychopath’ Jutting claimed to be in his final outof-office email reply, she insists he did not have mental problems and was never violent.
indeed, if they argued, she says, ‘ he would surrender first and act sweet’.
She adds: ‘He was like a boy who just stared at me as if he wanted to cry. That’s all.’
Ariane insists that Jutting, who is said to have earned £350,000 a year, was ‘a lovely boyfriend’ and that ‘we had already broken up when he became that person’ — the kind of person capable of killing. ‘i loved him,’ she says. But while she paints a picture of a boyfriend who lavished gifts not only on her but also on her family, as well as taking them out to dinner and joining them on a beach holiday, it’s hard to find anything romantic about Jutting’s visit to the Philippines.
Ariane, one of eight children born to a Filipino pillow salesman from Angono, met the engineer’s son in February in Angeles City, the Philippines’ so-called ‘sin city’.
There, she earned around £70 a week at the Del Rio bar, one of the go-go and hostess bars in the red-light district which sprang up decades ago with the arrival of a major U.S. air base nearby.
At the bar, where the overweight banker had been a regular since January, several scantily clad women, many drawn from the poorest Filipino families, still remember him fondly. They recall how they would rush to the door when Jutting arrived and lead him to his favourite place, a mouldy fake-leather couch which they covered with a pink blanket so he wouldn’t get rashes on his legs.
SiTTing there for most of the night, Jutting would swig bottles of a local lowcalorie beer while handing out cash, buying everyone rounds of drinks. He’d already chosen a couple of women as ‘companions’ that night when he spotted Ariane.
‘He started asking people about me,’ she says. ‘He thought i was sexy, that i looked like a model. He’d already chosen his companions that night but he included me. So the four of us ended up hanging out.’
When Jutting returned to Hong Kong, she says, they started talking. ‘He told me that when he came back, i would be the one to accompany him and i could invite a friend as well.’
He returned for the weekend for his 29th birthday in March and, according to Ariane, began calling four or five times a day.
‘He didn’t want me to work when our relationship started,’ she says. Jutting treated her like a spoilt child, buying her bracelets and rings. He even offered to pay for her to take a college course or set up a business.
‘He took care of me,’ she says. ‘He made sure i wasn’t bored. He’d say: “if you’re starting to get bored maybe you and your friends can go out.” He was very nice to me. He was kind. He really looked after me. i considered him a lovely boyfriend.’
But her rose-tinted vision of herself as Jutting’s girlfriend will not sit well with many. While Ariane insists that she is a ‘guest relations officer’ not a prostitute, her relationship with Jutting was certainly not one which placed them on an equal footing.
Despite the dinner dates, ‘romantic nights’ as Ariane calls them, it was hardly love’s young dream.
By her own admission, Ariane says: ‘Sometimes i’d feel like i wasn’t there with him. Sometimes, when he was caught in certain moments, it was as though i wasn’t there. He would be on his phone too much.’
Another hostess at the bar, Joy Reyes, 26, remembers him as ‘a big spender’ who blew up to £300 a night on drinks — a sum equivalent to the annual income of many Filipinos.
‘Everyone would welcome him,’ says Reyes. Linda Laida, a 43-year- old bartender, recalls how Jutting would pull a wad of cash from his pocket and peel off notes to give to the girls.
Jutting made fortnightly weekend visits to Ariane and her family in the Philippines. Whatever the truth about his feelings for her, there is little doubt that he was desperately lonely.
He and Ariane were never engaged, but she says he sometimes spoke of taking her to Hong Kong or getting married in London.
‘He said he’d introduce me to his family and that we would have kids. He just talked about those things, he never really proposed,’ she says.
Perhaps Jutting did toy with the idea that his relationship with Ariane could find a happy ending. if so, such thoughts must have been momentary. Eyewitness accounts in Hong Kong suggest that Jutting’s behaviour there was just as lascivious.
According to a waiter in one of Jutting’s favourite watering holes, the legendary Wan Chai bar Joe Bananas: ‘He would come in here waving fistfuls of dollars and slam then down on the table. He’d order bottles of champagne and vodka and run up £2,000 tabs. He was a good tipper and would always pay us well. Every time he came in he would have at least five or six girls hanging off him, giggling.’
Then there’s the final, tantalising post Jutting left on Facebook last Friday, just hours before apparently killing for the second time and turning himself in to police.
‘Money DOES buy happiness,’ says the headline in the article he posted. it continues: ‘growing wealth of Asian nations is making their people happier — but women are more content than men.’
PERHAPS he was referring to women like Ariane, not to mention Sumarti ningsih and Seneng Mujiasih, who died in his flat and who, for the camera at least, always always seemed to be smiling and laughing, whether draped around Jutting or lying on a bed with piles of cash.
Tellingly, in the handful of recent pictures which have emerged of Jutting, he doesn’t appear to be smiling in any of them. His hard face and soulless eyes are a stark contrast to the giggling Asian girls around him.
Contemporaries in the UK struggle to equate the bloated man in those photos with the Jutting they knew.
‘He looks completely different,’ says an old schoolfriend who last saw him two years ago. ‘He used to be a lot thinner. He was a good-looking chap with the world at his feet. now he’s a dead- eyed shell. Something’s happened to him.’ Certainly, this
cannot be the narrative that wealthy engineer Graham Jutting and his wife expected for their son’s life.
While the Juttings are undoubtedly well off, they are also reassuringly down-to-earth. They are keen beekeepers. His father, who as a millwright worked in the installation of industrial machinery and equipment, has an interest in vintage motorcycles and his entrepreneurial mother, a former nurse and playgroup leader, runs an American- style milkshake bar franchise in Woking, Surrey.
Jutting is also the grandson of a decorated former member of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, who after completing his National Service in the Royal Navy settled in the former British colony, married a Chinese woman and had two children, including Jutting’s mother Helen.
Superintendent Paul Eustace Smith, who investigated murders in Hong Kong as part of his work for the CID, was awarded the Colonial Police Medal for meritorious service before retiring in the early 1990s.
Former colleagues expressed shock this week that Mr Smith, a quiet teetotaller and an enthusiastic squash player who died in 2004, could be the grandfather of Jutting, who, aside from allegations that he is a murderer, has blown hundreds of thousands of pounds in the last year on drugs, alcohol and prostitutes. The contrast in their lives, they say, could not have been more dramatic.
Jutting was privately educated, first at a prep school near the family home in Cobham, Surrey, then at Abberley Hall, a preparatory boarding school in Worcestershire. From there he won a coveted scholarship to Winchester College and from thence to Cambridge, where he read history.
His contemporaries at Winchester and Cambridge speak of Jutting as well-adjusted and modest with a passion for cross-country running, rowing and football. After a brief flirtation with a U.S. law firm, he was snapped up by Barclays in 2008, telling friends that money had tempted him into banking. Two years later he moved to BAML.
When was sent to Hong Kong by his employers in July 2013, Jutting was handsome, tanned and slim, a brilliant young man with the world at his feet. In the space of barely a year, he Flashy lifestyle: Jutting with his then girlfriend Ariane Guarin turned into an overweight, suicidal, self-confessed ‘insane psychopath’.
Ariane doesn’t believe her exboyfriend is mad, adding that she saw no sign anything was wrong while they were together.
‘He told me he was happy with his job. He never complained about work. He’d send me pictures late at night to show he was still working.’
In March this year, Jutting’s 27-year-old brother, Auryn, went out to the Philippines with his girlfriend to join him for a brief holiday on the idyllic island of Boracay.
‘He and his brother had a good relationship,’ Ariane says, ‘and even his brother’s girlfriend. They’re close. He looked after them.’
With hindsight, however, there were small signs. She says he told her he hadn’t been home for a long time and missed his mother’s birthday. ‘He said he hadn’t visited them and that his mother was probably disappointed.’
THEN there was the fact that despite their so- called relationship, Jutting was cheating on Ariane. Having told her to stay out of Angeles City with her family, he was sneaking back there to visit the Del Rio from Hong Kong.
She caught him out after he called her on his Filipino mobile while claiming to be in Hong Kong. Friends at the bar confirmed he’d been there and had left with three women.
The last time she saw him was at the Del Rio bar two months ago, where Ariane has now returned to work. She sends money to her parents in Angono, a tiny town ten miles east of Manila, to fund a second floor at their home in case of flooding.
‘I only saw his back,’ she says. ‘My friend said he looked scruffier. His beard and hair were longer. When we were together, he always shaved his beard and always had a haircut. He’s also gained a lot of weight.’
The final texts she sent Jutting still sit on her mobile phone. On October 15, a ‘Hello, how are you?’ message to Jutting went unanswered although a tick beside it shows it was read.
On October 31, the day Jutting allegedly killed for the second time, she sent him the same text at around 7pm, just before he left his 31st-floor apartment and went to meet Seneng. That message was also read.
By the time she sent the final message, wishing him a ‘Happy Halloween’, Jutting was in police custody. His phone, said to contain thousands of sexual images of him with the victims as well as with their bodies, had been confiscated. Ariane’s words went unread by Jutting at least.
She finds it hard to say how she feels about him now.
‘I can’t believe I messaged him on that day, on Halloween,’ she says. ‘I still have feelings for him but it’s not the same. They are just feelings. I feel sorry for him, disappointed. I can’t believe he would do this. I want the truth to come out.’
Above all, she is baffled that a man she saw as so ‘fine’ and ‘civilised’ could apparently have turned into such a monster.
The truth about Rurik Jutting, it seems, is only just beginning to emerge.