The former partner of nine-year-old Charlise Mutten’s mother has been found guilty of her shooting murder in the NSW Blue Mountains in January 2022.
Justin Laurens Stein, 33, has been on trial in the NSW Supreme Court after denying accusations he had shot the schoolgirl twice with a rifle at his family’s Mount Wilson estate.
Stein admitted to dumping a plastic barrel, which the girl’s body was found in, but claimed that Charlise’s mother killed her own daughter.
Charlise’s disappearance sparked an extensive four-day search before her body was eventually located on the banks of the Colo River, after police obtained GPS data from Stein’s phone.
It took the jury around a week and a half to find Stein guilty of murder.
He will face a sentence hearing in August.
The maximum penalty for murder in NSW is life imprisonment.
As she discharged the jurors, Justice Helen Wilson thanked them for their service.
She said “quite a lot of people” had told her at the beginning of the proceedings that they did not feel they could listen to evidence about the death of a child.
“It’s not an easy thing to hear evidence about something as distressing as the violent death of, particularly, a child,” she said.
“That’s upsetting, I think, for most people.
“It’s also difficult to sit in judgement on a fellow member of the community.
“In being willing to do both those things, you’ve played a very important role in our criminal justice system.”
The case against Stein
During the trial, the court heard Charlise was under the custody of her grandparents in Tweed Heads when she travelled down to Sydney to stay with her mother, Kallista Mutten, and her mother’s fiancé Stein, over the Christmas break.
The jury found Stein shot Charlise in the face and lower back with a stolen hunting rifle on the evening of January 11 or the following morning, while the two were alone at the Mount Wilson property.
The court head Charlise’s body was found in a plastic barrel, wrapped in plastic bags and a tarp, with 99 kilograms of sand on January 18, 2022.
Stein was charged with her murder the same day.
A forensic toxicologist told jurors, a “toxic” dosage of Stein’s prescribed schizophrenia medication was found in Charlise’s system, which they said would cause a child to experience “profound” sedation.
The Crown said it did not need to prove beyond reasonable doubt Stein’s motive for the murder but told the court during closing submissions said that Stein was concerned that he “would be found out that he had given her anti-psychotic drugs”.
Stein takes the stand
During his testimony, Stein claimed Charlise’s mother had shot the nine-year-old.
But the prosecution questioned his story that the girl’s mother had managed to disappear with a 33.5kg child, a rifle, pick up two firearm cartridges and dig a up section of dirt containing the girl’s blood in complete darkness within a 10-minute period.
Stein also claimed that Ms Mutten managed to put Charlise’s body in the barrel, while he “rolled a joint” and “cried himself to sleep” even though he supposedly thought a “psychotic woman” was running around the house armed with a gun.
Phone records showed Ms Mutten was on the patio of the house using the landline to make calls to local hospitals, asking if her child was there, just before 9:30pm.
Carolyn Davenport SC, representing Stein, put to Ms Mutten that she shot her daughter, provoking a shocked reaction from the witness box.
“Are you serious?” Ms Mutten replied.
“No.”
When Ms Davenport suggested Ms Mutten shot Charlise once in the back and once in the head, she replied: “I didn’t even know she was shot with a gun, and I don’t even know where she was shot, so now I know.”
The court heard Ms Mutten was at least eight weeks pregnant with Stein’s child at the time.
One of the key pieces of evidence against Stein was a .22 BSA rifle found by detectives buried off a fire trail in the Blue Mountains, containing his fingerprints and a scope he had purchased online.
In a recorded phone call between Stein and his mother while he was in custody, Stein told her “I need you to retrieve some stuff in the mountains”, which his mother replied “I think they found them”.
While giving evidence, Stein said he was not referring to the “murder weapon” and was instead talking about “electronic equipment” he had borrowed to take care of some drones.
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