Hong Kong's Grisly Red-Light District Murders

Illegal Indonesian immigrants are among the city’s most vulnerable

The scene outside a nightclub in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai districtPhotograph by Vincent Yu/Associated Press

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By Frederik Balfour, Fitri Wulandari, Cathy Chan, and Sheridan Prasso

November 13, 2014 at 10:42 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the November 17, 2014 issue of businessweek.

On the last night of her life, Seneng Mujiasih stopped by the Queen Victoria bar in the heart of Hong Kong’s red-light district, Wan Chai. Dressed in a leopard-skin jumpsuit, she was on her way to a Halloween party when she dropped in to see a friend. “She gave me two kisses on the cheek as always,” says Robert van den Bosch, a 47-year-old Dutchman who works as a disc jockey and says he’d known Mujiasih for three years. “She said, ‘I am going to enjoy myself tonight.’ ”

Six hours later, police found her body in an upscale apartment two blocks away, her neck slashed open. In the same apartment, stuffed into a suitcase on the balcony, police found the body of a second Indonesian woman, 23-year-old Sumarti Ningsih, who had been visiting Hong Kong on a one-month tourist visa. The apartment was the residence of Rurik Jutting, a British former employee of Bank of America who was charged with the murder of both women. Jutting, 29, hasn’t entered a plea and will next appear in court on Nov. 24 after undergoing court-ordered psychiatric tests.