It was a long-awaited holiday for schoolgirl Charlise Mutten, jetting off to stay with her mum Kallista and her new stepfather at his family’s luxury estate – but it would end in tragedy.
Over Christmas 2021 and into the New Year, the nine-year-old was set to spend up to three weeks at an address in Sydney and with Kallista’s fiancé Justin Stein at his wealthy parents’ property in the NSW Blue Mountains.
Charlise’s grandparents, Clinton and Sue Mutten, were her legal guardians and lived on the NSW-Queensland border, but the youngster was ‘happy and excited’ about the trip south.
‘She had packed her favourite toys,’ her grandfather told NSW Supreme Court.
But days later, Charlise was allegedly shot in the face and the hip by her new stepdad, who then stuffed her body in a barrel of sand and dumped it by a river.
Stein is on trial for murder after pleading not guilty to killing Charlise in January 2022, as tragic details emerged about the schoolgirl’s final days.
Her grandfather told the court of the ‘unconditional love’ between Charlise and her mother – a self-confessed ice addict – and said they would often Facetime each other, with Stein also on the call.
‘She said she really liked Justin and she asked me if he would be a good dad,’ Mr Mutten said.
The jury heard that Charlise had only ever met her biological father once, and like her mother, he had also been an ice addict.
Ms Mutton met Stein while they were both serving prison sentences, the court was told.
She had been jailed for dangerous driving occasioning death while having meth in her blood, and for two years, Ms Mutten’s only contact with her daughter was by phone from prison.
Meanwhile Stein had served time for drug offences.
The pair became engaged after meeting while in jail, and the court heard that on Stein’s release from prison in 2021, Kallista lived with him in NSW.
Asked if he had been concerned about sending Charlise ‘to an environment that at best was maybe questionable’, her grandfather said he was ‘under the impression that both had cleaned their act up’.
But he admitted his daughter was ‘not particularly honest’ about her drug use.
Charlise had been due to fly south for an earlier holiday over Easter in 2021, but the trip was postponed after her mother had two drug episodes.
They led to two hospital stays for drug use in quick succession, including one after a meth-fuelled psychotic episode which saw Kallista Mutten lying shoeless in a road babbling ‘did I hurt anyone, am I in a plane?’.
Flights had all been booked for the holiday, and Charlise’s grandfather said the schoolgirl had ‘cried herself to sleep’ when it was cancelled.
She was admitted to Katoomba Hospital, having been released from Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital four days earlier after, medical records read to the court said, she had been taking 17 points of methamphetamine daily.
Detective Sergeant Bradley Gardiner, the officer leading the investigation into Charlise’s alleged murder, agreed in court that was ‘very high’, with one point equal to .1 milligram of the drug.
At RPA, she admitted she had ‘hypersensitivity to interpersonal conflict’ which caused her to ‘cut myself’.
‘I cut myself to try and stop them leaving the relationship and it tends to work,’ she told RPA staff.
‘That’s not right. It’s a form of manipulation … that paranoia can last for days.’
When Charlise did eventually come down to NSW, she had finished a school year in which she had won a literacy, which she had been photographed holding and smiling at the camera.
Her grandfather told the court Charlise loved animals and dreamed of becoming a veterinarian surgeon.
Once in Sydney, Charlise stayed at Stein’s family’s sprawling Wildenstein property, a former celebrity wedding venue which was owned by his mother, Annemie Stein, at Mount Wilson in the NSW Blue Mountains.
Charlise also stayed in the Steins’ cabin at Riviera Ski Gardens caravan park in Lower Portland, on a bend of the Hawkesbury River where it joins up to the Colo River.
Charlise impressed friends of Ms Stein as ‘a charming child’ at a dinner at Wildenstein in early January, the court heard.
Ms Stein described Charlise to the court as a ‘very intelligent’ girl with a ‘very good nature … very polite, polite and a bit cheeky’.
And at the January 3 dinner party, neighbour Jane Hutt told the court she saw ‘chatting, maybe a hug’ between Kallista and Charlise who ‘seemed very loving and affectionate’.
It is just a week later, prosecutors told the trial, the Charlise was allegedly shot dead.
Stein is then alleged to have concealed the child’s body in a plastic barrel weighed down with sand and dumped it 50km away on the banks of the Colo River.
It allegedly followed the romance between Stein and Charlise’s mother breaking down, despite Ms Mutten being 12-16 weeks pregnant with his child, the jury heard.
‘I was so close to getting rid of her (Kallista), a couple more days and that girl would be on a flight,’ Stein said in a phone call from prison to his mother which was played in court.
On one call, the court heard Stein claim Kallista had been ‘three days deep into an ice bender’ at that time. On the stand, Ms Mutten testified that Justin had taken ice along with her.
The trial heard that Mr Stein and Ms Mutten had purchased methamphetamine in Sydney and then allegedly had sex in Centennial Park, and that this was allegedly after Charlise was already dead.
Damien Cossey briefly testified about how the couple bought $50 of cannabis and $100 of meth and were provided with syringes, which were referred to as ‘weapons’, the transaction caught on CCTV.
The court heard that discussions about Charlise’s return home to her grandparents home in Coolangatta had included the need for a Covid test.
As it turned out on January 15, 2022, all domestic travel restrictions were removed from Queensland borders.
But by then Charlise had been dead for days – exactly how many is disputed by the prosecution and the defence in the trial – and the girl’s remains were decaying in the barrel on the Colo river.
Crown prosecutor Ken McKay SC has said that Stein was the last person to see Charlise and had the opportunity to kill her between 7.16pm on Tuesday, January 11 and 10.06am on Wednesday, January 12.
Stein’s defence case is that Charlise was still alive on the Wednesday and was shot by her own mother near the chicken shed on Wildenstein.
When Stein’s counsel suggested to Ms Mutten while testifying that she had killed her daughter, the 40-year-old cried out ‘are you serious’ and ran crying from the court room.
The pitiful end to Charlise Mutten’s short life of less than a decade can be read in the details of the police and forensic officers who had to retrieve her remains and examine them.
The schoolgirl’s tomb, a reddish-brown plastic barrel had to be winched off the Colo riverbank, it was so heavy with sand.
Inside, Charlise was head down in a foetal position, her body wrapped in variety of bags, tarpaulin and tape.
The nine-year-old’s final journey was a 90km ride, still inside the barrel, and transported to the mortuary and forensic laboratory at Lidcombe, western Sydney.
Scientists examining the girl found she had been shot twice, once in back above her left hip, which would not have killed her, and again in the face, the fatal shot at close range, the court heard.
Post mortem testing of Charlise detected the anti-psychotic drug Quetiapine in her system. The court heard that Quetiapine was Justin Stein’s prescribed schizophrenia medication.
As the news of Charlise’s death and terrible end spread, weeping students, parents and teachers gathered at Tweed Heads Public School with candles, balloons and flowers.
Handwritten notes, toys and bouquets began to pile up around a makeshift shrine bearing a photograph of Charlise.
One of her teacher’s told the crowd gathered for the vigil on the evening of January 19, 2022 that Charlise’s ‘enthusiasm, positivity and warm, genuine and bubbly personality made our school a much better place’.
One girl said: ‘Charlise has touched many lives on her journey throughout this world’.
A swimming cap and a pair of flippers with ‘Shine on Charlise’ also hung from the school’s gate.
A card on one bunch of flowers read: ‘RIP Little Lady. May your Grandma’s family find strength to find peace’.
Justin Stein had been arrested in Surry Hills on January 18 and charged with Charlise’s murder.
His trial before Justice Helen Wilson continues.