The British banker charged with murdering two women whose bodies were found in his blood-splattered Hong Kong apartment was devastated after his former fiancée, a fellow trader, cheated on him, sources have claimed. 
 
 Rurik Jutting, 29, was remanded in custody on Monday after a brief court appearance following the discovery of one woman’s decapitated body in a suitcase on his balcony and another who was lying naked with her throat slashed in his living room. 
 
 The University of Cambridge graduate met Sarah Butt, 28, when they were both working at Barclays’ London headquarters in 2010 and the couple had planned to marry. 
 
 But the relationship came under strain when Miss Butt was seconded to New York and is said to have crumbled when she allegedly cheated on him. Sources close to Miss Butt claim she kissed another man. The “affair” left Mr Jutting feeling betrayed. 
 
 The couple tried to patch up their differences and became engaged. Mr Jutting even bought a ring, sources said. But the relationship had been irreparably damaged and soon ended. 
 
 “I think she had an affair with someone, told him about it, [and] ended up flying back the day that she told him because he kind of went ballistic about it,” one former acquaintance said. 
 
 “She wanted to marry him pretty fervently. [They] tried to reconcile and ultimately he proposed. But I think maybe a month or so into it he was not able to come to terms with the fact that she had been unfaithful. It was ultimately him who broke it off.” 
 
 A second source said: “It was a fairly dramatic break-up. They were engaged for a fairly short period. He broke the relationship up.” 
 
 The couple have had no contact since the break-up and Mr Jutting has had several girlfriends since, although none long term. 
 
 Miss Butt was born in Bury, Lancs, where her parents still live. One of three siblings, she attended the local grammar school and Imperial College London, working briefly at Pricewaterhouse-Coopers before joining Barclays Capital. 
 
 Tasheen Butt, Miss Butt’s mother, moved to Britain from Pakistan when she was 19 and lives in a modern semi-detached house on an estate close to Bury town centre. 
 
 She said she did not know about her daughter’s relationship with Mr Jutting and that her children had left home and did not discuss their lives with her. 
 
 Rurik Jutting arrives at court in Eastern Court in Hong Kong (AP) 
 
 She joined Goldman Sachs last year and spent about 12 months working in New York before returning to London, where she works as an associate on European special situations. 
 
 She was said to be shaken by the news of her former fiancé’s alleged killing spree. A source said: “She’s very upset. It’s a lot to take in.” 
 
 Goldman Sachs declined to comment. 
 
 Rurik Jutting has been charged in connection with the murders of Sumarti Ningshi and Jesse Lorena 
 
 Ms Butt was not Mr Jutting’s first serious girlfriend. The British banking executive lived with a previous girlfriend who worked as a lawyer, and who is described by sources as “very straight, corporate type”. 
 
 The pair lived together for around a year before Mr Jutting abruptly ended the relationship. 
 
 One former acquaintance described Mr Jutting as a highly competent individual who often seemed “preoccupied with power and money” and “was happy to go out and buy tables at clubs”. 
 
 The banker, from Surrey, once announced plans to spend “thousands of pounds” on an ornamental horse’s skull from a speciality shop in Brighton that he had visited with his former fiancée. 
 
 “The sense you got was that he enjoyed buying things that showed he was able to buy things,” the acquaintance said. 
 
 The source claimed that Mr Jutting and Miss Butt “spent everything they made”. 
 
 Police are seen at the apartment of Rurik Jutting (AFP/Getty Images) 
 
 Mr Jutting’s mother Helen did not want to comment when she was approached at the shop she runs in Woking, Surrey. 
 
 Neighbours in Cobham explained that she used to run a nursery. They described the suspect’s parents as “normal, hard-working people”. 
 
 Police were called to Mr Jutting’s 31st-floor apartment in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district at 3.42am on Saturday and found the privately educated Briton talking “delirious nonsense”, according to Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper. One of the victims was still alive despite knife wounds to her throat and buttocks but died a short time later. The second body was found eight hours later, bound and stuffed in a suitcase on the balcony. 
 
 Mr Jutting had been in Hong Kong since July 2013, having transferred from Merrill Lynch’s London office. Before that, he worked for the controversial Barclays division called Structured Capital Markets, which helped clients to avoid tax. It was closed last year. 
 
 Mr Jutting had quit his job just days before the alleged murders and apparently set up an out-of-office email referring to himself as an “insane psychopath” and hinting that he had intended to kill himself. 
 
 The message read: “I am out of the office. Indefinitely. For urgent inquiries, or indeed any inquiries, please contact someone who is not an insane psychopath. For escalation please contact God, though suspect the devil will have custody (Last line only really worked if I had followed through).” 
 
 During a brief appearance before magistrates on Monday, Mr Jutting, who was unshaven and dressed in black, appeared calm and drummed his fingers on his chest. When asked if he understood each of the two charges, he said “I do”. 
 
 He declined to enter a plea. 
 
 The judge granted his request to be remanded to prison detention rather than police custody, until his next appearance on Nov 10. The victims, both Indonesian, were named by local media as Jesse Lorena, 32, and Sumarti Ningshi, 25. Police believe one of the women had been dead for at least five days. ||||| Rurik Jutting, a 29-year-old British banker, appeared in a Hong Kong courtroom on Monday after police said they found two dead women in his apartment. The WSJ’s Ramy Inocencio reports. 
 
 The 29-year-old banker charged Monday with murdering two women in Hong Kong had been part of a Bank of America Corp. team that specialized in tax-minimization trades that are under scrutiny from prosecutors, regulators, tax collectors and the bank’s own compliance department, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. 
 
 Rurik Jutting was charged with two counts of murder after the bodies of two women were allegedly found in his Hong Kong apartment; one was hidden in a suitcase found on his balcony, police say. At a court hearing Monday, Mr. Jutting didn’t enter a plea and didn’t seek bail. 
 
 Mr. Jutting, a U.K. native and a competitive poker player, worked in Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Structured Equity Finance and Trading group, first in London and then in Hong Kong, according to these people and regulatory filings. Mr. Jutting resigned from the bank sometime before Oct. 27, which police say was the date of the first murder, according to a person familiar with the matter. 
 
 The trading group, known as SEFT, employs about three dozen people globally, one of these people said. It helps hedge funds and other clients manage their stock portfolios, often through the use of derivatives, according to the people and internal bank documents. 
 
 One of SEFT’s specialties in recent years has been “dividend arbitrage” trades that Bank of America used to help clients reduce taxes on stock dividends by exploiting differences in international tax rules, according to these people and the internal documents. 
 
 Internal bank communications from Mr. Jutting’s time in London show that he was involved in coordinating efforts between clients, internal and external tax lawyers, accountants and others to arrange dividend-arbitrage trades for clients. 
 
 His role involved reaching out to external brokers and consultants to vet the deals and then running any questions and changes past bank executives and trading partners, the communications show. 
 
 Bank of America’s dividend-arbitrage trades have drawn scrutiny from Federal Reserve examiners, which this year expressed concerns about potential reputational and financial risks involved with the trades, and are under review by the bank’s lawyers and executives, the Journal reported last month. German prosecutors and British tax authorities also are investigating one type of dividend-arbitrage trade across the banking industry. Bank of America and other banks curtailed their involvement in those specific trades in 2011. 
 
 ENLARGE Police officers investigate inside the apartment of British banker Rurik Jutting, in Hong Kong's Wan Chai nightlife and red light district. Mr Jutting has been charged with two murders. Apple Daily/Associated Press 
 
 Bank of America hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing in relation to tax-related trades. The Journal reported last week that the bank’s London-based lawyers and executives have been sorting through internal emails and trading records to gauge the bank’s involvement in light of the heightened interest from regulatory and tax authorities. 
 
 Mr. Jutting grew up in the U.K. and attended Winchester College, an elite boarding school where he was known by classmates as a bright pupil, according to a former student there. He was on the rowing team and in the school’s Combined Cadet Force, a Ministry of Defense-sponsored program that gives students a taste of military training. A Winchester College spokesman confirmed Mr. Jutting attended the school and said it was “saddened by the news coming from Hong Kong.” 
 
 Mr. Jutting then graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Cambridge University, where he studied law and history and continued to row. 
 
 Then he went to work at Barclays PLC until 2010, according to U.K. regulatory filings. 
 
 Mr. Jutting joined Bank of America in 2010 and worked three years in its London office, the bank’s hub for dividend-arbitrage trades, the people familiar with the matter say. He moved to Bank of America’s Hong Kong office in July 2013. 
 
 His resignation last month followed a period when he was missing from the office, according to the person familiar with the matter, adding that his employee record was otherwise strong. 
 
 Efforts to reach Mr. Jutting were unsuccessful, and contact details for his lawyers weren’t available. At Monday’s court hearing, he was represented by a temporary lawyer who complained that police denied Mr. Jutting access to a lawyer of his choice. 
 
 During his time in Asia, Mr. Jutting’s pastimes apparently included gambling. In a Sept. 14 Facebook post, he boasted of winning thousands of dollars playing poker at a tournament in the Philippines. He signed off the post: “God I love Manila.” The comment drew eight “likes.” 
 
 Six weeks later, early on the morning of Nov. 1, a resident in Mr. Jutting’s apartment complex says he spotted police leading a man through the lobby, wearing a black bag over his head. Mr. Jutting had been arrested in a case that would soon grip Hong Kong. 
 
 —Max Colchester in London also contributed to this article. 
 
 Write to Jenny Strasburg at jenny.strasburg@wsj.com and Enda Curran at enda.curran@wsj.com ||||| The woman, who did not wish to be named, dated Mr Jutting for around two months after meeting him last July in a bar she worked at. 
 
 In a phone interview with Channel 4 News, she said that she was shocked when she heard the news that two bodies had been found in his apartment. 
 
 "When I first heard the news, I didn't really believe it. I never thought he could do that. He was such a nice person," she said. 
 
 "We used to drink together, but he never smoked so I can't believe that he took cocaine. People who knew him thought he was a nice person, intelligent and smart. He's a happy person. I really don't have any idea why he'd do something like that." 
 
 For more on this story watch Channel 4 News tonight at 7pm 
 
 
 
 She said he was a "perfectionist" who could be strict, but she added: "He was a very nice person with me because I was his girlfriend."
– Was Rurik Jutting a white-collar criminal before he was accused of two grisly murders in Hong Kong? The British investment banker was part of a Bank of America Merrill Lynch unit involved in "tax-minimization" trades that were being investigated by prosecutors, regulators, and the bank itself, sources tell the Wall Street Journal. The banker—whose email auto-reply suggests contacting somebody who isn't an "insane psychopath"—resigned from the bank after a period missing from the office, but before he allegedly killed the first of two women on Oct. 27, a source at the bank says. At a court appearance yesterday, Jutting was charged with two counts of murder and shifted from police custody to prison until his next court appearance on Nov. 10. The American Psycho-style murders have put Jutting's background under intense scrutiny, and police are examining his travel history in case there are more victims. Acquaintances describe him to the Telegraph as a man "obsessed with power and money" who was "devastated" when a former fiancee cheated on him. A more recent ex-girlfriend in Hong Kong tells Channel 4 News that he's a "nice person, intelligent and smart," but he was stressed over work and financial issues and told her last year that he had tried to kill himself. "I think he tried to kill himself because he's under pressure with his job," she says. "He was depressed."