The man accused of murdering a schoolgirl has been in confronted in court and told: ‘You shot Charlise Mutten twice.’
Justin Stein, 34, was under cross-examination by the prosecution for a second day while on trial for the nine-year-old’s alleged murder in the NSW Blue Mountains in January, 2022.
But Stein dismissed the accusation from the witness stand and calmly replied: ‘I understand that, but no, I never touched her.’ Asked a second time, Mr Stein said ‘I didn’t shoot her.’
He also denied the accusation he ‘removed whatever evidence’ from the crime scene.
Crown prosecutor Ken McKay SC said Mr Stein had been confident in phone calls with his mother Annemie Stein that police ‘had no crime scene’.
But Mr Stein denied that claim too.
Now in its fourth week in the NSW Supreme Court at Parramatta, the trial has heard the accused give evidence from the witness box.
Mr Stein denies murdering Charlise, but admits disposing of her body.
Prosecutors allege Mr Stein placed the child’s body in a plastic barrel and dumped it 50km away on the banks of the Colo River.
Mr McKay asked Mr Stein about the fact that post mortem forensic examiners had found Charlise was clothed, but wearing no underpants.
‘Do you know if anything happened to her underpants?’ Mr McKay asked Mr Stein replied, ‘No, I have knowledge.’
On Tuesday, the court heard that Charlise’s mother, Kallista Mutten, made phone calls to three hospitals at Lithgow and in the Blue Mountains, including children’s hospitals.
Detective Sergeant Bradley Gardiner had earlier testified that calls from Ms Mutten’s mobile and a landline at Mr Stein family’s Mt Wilson home in the Blue Mountains had been made just before 9.30pm on Wednesday, January 12, 2022.
Mr Stein claims Ms Mutten killed her own daughter just after 9pm that night and then vanished with the girl’s body.
He said he was in a shed fixing a car and came out when he heard gunshots before he was ordered to find a tarpaulin by Ms Mutten, who was standing with a rifle over Charlise’s body on the ground.
But he said that when he came out again, both the Charlise and her mother were gone, and there was a patch cut out of the ground.
‘So after you come out of shed, a 33.5kg child and Kallista are gone, the firearm is gone, the dirt is gone?’ asked Mr McKay, to which Mr Stein replied: ‘Yes’.
At the end of his cross-examination, Mr Stein was asked seven times by Mr McKay whether certain actions, lies or stories he had told were because he had shot and killed Charlise Mutten and needed to cover up.
He replied, ‘No’ to six questions and ‘No, I never killed Charlise’ to a seventh.
Mr McKay then added a question: ‘I’m suggesting it is the crown case that in shooting Charlise
Mutten you intended to kill her when you shot her in the head, or you intended to do really serious bodily injury to her.’
Mr Mr Stein denied both propositions.
Mr Stein earlier testified that after the alleged shooting by Ms Mutten, he returned to his bedroom at Wildenstein, wept, smoked a joint, then fell asleep.
Mr Stein said he didn’t know about Google searches of local hospitals and Ms Mutten’s phone calls to them.
GPS data from that time had placed Ms Mutten on the northern end of Wildenstein’s patio at the rear of the house.
‘So Kallista Mutten is on the patio of the house at 9.24pm, do you accept that?’ Mr McKay asked Mr Stein.
‘Not only did she do the searches, she then made the phone calls. 107 seconds call to Blue Mountains Hospital. A 74 second call to Lithgow Children’s Hospital from the landline.
‘You would have been in your bedroom on your evidence? You didn’t know where she was? The landline is a cordless phone? Mount Wilson is very quiet?
‘You’re in your bedroom just having … some cannabis?’
Mr Stein insisted: ‘No I didn’t hear it.’ When McKay said ‘I suggest that story is not true,’ the accused responded, ‘No, that’s what happened.’
He said the first time he had known about the phone calls was in custody reading the police brief following his arrest.
Asked about the following morning when he took off his red Holden Colorado ute, towing a boat and with a barrel in the back, Mr Stein said it had been ‘completely empty’ when he loaded it and he was unaware Charlise’s body was inside.
He said he hadn’t seen Ms Mutten load her daughter’s body into the barrel before he drove off.
Mr McKay: ‘You just assumed at some time that (Kallista Mutten) has picked up a 33.5kg child, climbed up on the ute, removed tarpaulin, removed the straps you had securing barrel?’
Mr Stein agreed.
On Monday the court heard a menacing phone call in which Mr Stein threatened to kill the girl’s mother, raging: ‘Guess what? I’ve got my f***ing gun and I’m going to kill you.’
In a second call later that morning, played in court, an incensed Mr Stein warned: ‘I’m going to hurt you and everyone else.
‘I’ll tell the police that you’re the one that took your daughter.’
Mr McKay questioned Mr Stein’s earlier testimony and also mocked the alleged killer’s courtroom tears, suggesting he had previously wept while lying to police.
Charlise was visiting her mother and Mr Stein, who was her fiance at the time, during the 2021/22 school holidays, and spent time in NSW between Wildenstein and Riviera Ski Gardens caravan park in Lower Portland where Mr Stein owned a van.
Under questioning by his defence counsel on Monday Mr Stein wept in the witness box as he claimed the schoolgirl was shot by her own mother, and gave his account of Charlise’s final moments.
Mr Stein told the jury that Ms Mutten shot her daughter in the face and back before screaming at him: ‘You made me do this.’
Mr Stein said he had been on his family property when he heard a shot ring out and Charlise scream his name then cry out ‘Mummy, no’ before a second shot.
‘I walked up to the fence. That’s when I saw Charlise on the ground. (Ms Mutten) had a rifle in her hand,’ he told the court from the witness stand on Monday.
‘I said, ‘What the f*** have you done?’ and she started screaming ‘You did this’. She kept screaming ‘You did this’ she then screamed ‘You made me do this’.
‘She screamed at me to get a tarp. I said, ‘No’. She then lifted up the rifle as if to shoot. I put up both hands.’
Mr Stein admitted in court to taking heroin since the age of 12 and said he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 21.
He said he first met Ms Mutten in jail at Kempsey on the NSW Mid North Coast and the pair had started seeing each other when they got out of jail.
The prosecution has alleged Mr Stein was the ‘last person’ to see Charlise and had the chance to kill her between 7.16pm on January 11 and 10.06am on January 12, 2022.
But in his testimony on Monday, Mr Stein said the child was shot dead on the evening of January 12, by her mother.
He also claimed Charlise had been ill and vomiting after her mother had given the child his schizophrenia medication.
Mr Stein said that during their ‘very up and down’ relationship, Ms Mutten had constantly taken methamphetamine and ‘get very paranoid’.
‘She’d … think people are trying to kill her, poison her, she’d worry about drones’ and ‘she was always paranoid that the house was bugged’.
He said that Charlise arrived for her holiday, things had become ‘more volatile’ between himself and Ms Mutten who ‘almost became jealous at times’ of the ‘good relationship’ he had with the girl.
He said that he planned to end their romance after Charlise had returned from her holiday back to Queensland, but had also planned on getting married to Ms Mutten.
He said he ‘paid for everything’ in the relationship from money saved and his disability pension for his schizophrenia.
During the Charlise’s holiday he and Ms Mutten ‘had a big fight she then starting cutting herself, then threatening to end her own life’.
But he admitted he had also Googled about marriage and adoption certificates and ‘there was still part of me that loved her and thought she could change’.
On January 12, 2022, when the prosecution alleges Charlise was already dead, Mr Stein said the girl was sleeping in his ute along with his hunting dog, Dozer.
He admitted driving to Sydney to buy ice and cannabis with Ms Mutten, but denied having sex with her at Centennial Park.
Instead, told the court he had been ‘walking the dog while she was shooting up ice in the toilets’.
He said the following day – two days after he’s alleged to have killed Charlise and one day after he claims Ms Mutten shot her own daughter – he left Wildenstein believing he had an empty barrel in his ute.
‘It was completely empty,’ he told the court. ‘I loaded everything up. I used two ratchet straps.’
Mr Stein told the court it was at night, after he had smoked cannabis and bought ice for Ms Mutten at Drummoyne boat ramp, when he finally learnt Charlise’s body was in the barrel on his ute.
He said the tarpaulin over the barrel had come loose and after pulling over to fix it, ‘I noticed the ratchet straps … were upside down,’ he told the court.
‘I undid the straps … pulling it, I tipped the barrel. That’s when I saw Charlise wrapped in a blue tarp in the barrel. I threw up.’
Mr Stein admitted lying to police when he was interviewed after Charlise was first reported missing.
Asked why, he said ‘I lied about what happened. I had concerns about going back to jail for dumping that barrel’.
Mr McKay suggested that Mr Stein had driven his ute and the barrel with the boat to dispose of Charlise’s body, and that he had weighed down the barrel with sand ‘to submerge it in water … until the remains of Charlise had decayed to the point it would hinder the (forensic) examination.’
Mr Stein denied this.
He said that on January 14 Ms Mutten had returned to Mount Wilson and was sitting in the living room, watching TV.
‘I started abusing her telling her [she was] a piece of s***, a putrid dog for what she did. I’ll never forget this, she smiled,’ he said.
The trial before Justice Helen Wilson continues.