My wife does not want the WiFi turned on her Lumina 928. But when she check it a couple of days after turning it off, WiFi is back on. She has not updated her phone to 8.1.
Best way to keep it off is to delete the local connection in the list of available wifi in settings.
These phones always search for available Wi-Fi and connect if a router key is stored.
When you turn off wireless from the settings application, a dropdown box will appear saying that the wifi will turn back on after 1 hour. Just change that to "Manually". You can still leave the connect automatically checkbox marked, since it shouldn't connect to any network if the Wifi is off.