In his opening address earlier on Monday, Crown prosecutor Ken McKay, SC, said Stein and Kallista Mutten had first met while serving prison sentences, and Charlise had lived with her grandparents since she was aged five at Tweed Heads, near the Queensland border, where she also went to school.
The court heard Charlise flew to Sydney on December 21, 2021 to spend Christmas and the school holidays with her mother and Stein, and was due to fly back on January 18, 2022 – the day her body was found in a barrel filled with sand on an embankment by the Colo River.
McKay said Charlise had been shot twice, once in the face and once in the back.
Justin Stein is on trial in the NSW Supreme Court. Credit: Facebook
The prosecutor alleged Stein “was the last person with Charlise” and had the opportunity to kill the schoolgirl between 7.16pm on January 11 and 10.06am on January 12, while her mother was at the Riviera Ski Gardens caravan park in Lower Portland, about a one-and-a-half hour drive away.
“The Crown case will be that the accused was the person who shot Charlise Mutten,” McKay said. “He [Stein] then attempted to convince people that Charlise was missing, which were lies. He put on a pretense to search for her.”
The prosecutor said Stein’s alleged lies included initially pretending the girl had been unwell, and that he had left her in the care of a woman who had come to value the property before auction. He also claimed criminal associates with whom he had “bad blood” may have taken the child.
McKay said Kallista Mutten did not initially call police but phoned hospitals to see whether her daughter was there, and messaged friends “consistent with her belief that the child was missing”.
She reported her daughter missing at 8.15am on January 14.
McKay said CCTV and phone data captured Stein’s movements the previous day, January 13, including purchasing five 20-kilogram bags of sand at Bunnings in Marsden Park about 5.22pm.
He said police later weighed the sand recovered with the girl’s body, and it totalled 99 kilograms.
Crown prosecutors Ken McKay, SC, and Nicholas Marney outside the NSW Supreme Court at Parramatta.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
“In effect, nearly every grain of sand he [Stein] purchased, on the Crown case, was poured into that barrel,” the prosecutor said.
McKay said Stein, at 5.47pm, stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought a can of Coca-Cola, a slushie and Snickers bar, and around 6pm, went to a BP service station at Marsden Park.
The jury was shown a photograph of Stein’s red ute towing a boat, and a large object in the vehicle’s tray covered with a blue tarpaulin, which the Crown alleges was the barrel containing Charlise’s body. McKay said Stein filled the boat with $123.60 of fuel.
From there, Stein allegedly drove to Rose Bay wharf on Sydney Harbour in the eastern suburbs, then to Five Dock wharf in the inner west, and Windsor boat map north-west of the city, and also searched the Sackville ferry crossing and Colo River in the early hours of January 14.
The prosecutor said the jury would hear Stein and Kallista Mutten broke into a Mount Wilson house in August 2021 and stole property including two firearms, being a BSA .22 calibre bolt-action rifle and a Winchester lever-action rifle, and the first of the weapons was of “importance in the case”.
McKay said Stein “had an interest in firearms” and ordered a hunting rifle scope on eBay in late 2021, which was allegedly later recovered with the weapons buried on a Mount Wilson fire trail.
The prosecutor said Stein, after he was arrested on January 18 and charged with murder, was spoken to by a Corrective Services officer and asked “if he did it”.
“He said he didn’t, but he was in the vicinity when Kallista Mutten shot and killed the girl,” he said.
Source Agencies
