The mother of nine-year-old Charlise Mutten has tearfully told a court that her smart and kind daughter had longed for a father, and she hates herself for putting her trust in the wrong person, as prosecutors push for a life sentence for the girl’s killer. Justin Stein, 33, was found guilty by a jury in June of murdering Charlise, whose body was found with gunshot wounds in a barrel next to the Colo River in January 2022. Charlise Mutten was murdered by her mother’s fiance, Justin Stein.
“It’s almost akin to an execution, isn’t it?” Justice Helen Wilson said at Stein’s sentence hearing on Friday. Charlise, who lived with her grandparents in Tweed Heads, had flown to Sydney in December 2021 to spend Christmas and the school holidays with her mother, Kallista Mutten, and her mother’s fiance, Stein. The Crown case was that Stein killed Charlise at his family’s mansion, Wildenstein, in the Blue Mountains on the night of January 11 or the morning of January 12, 2022, while her mother was staying 11⁄2 hours away at his caravan in Lower Portland.
Reading her victim impact statement via video link, a tearful Kallista Mutten said Charlise had “just longed for a dad. She trusted in my judgment and I just hate myself for being so wrong about it.” To Stein, she said: “You took away Charlise and, with that, my future as a mother.
” Kallista Mutten outside the NSW Supreme Court in Parramatta. Credit: Kate Geraghty Stein, wearing a dark suit, thin black tie and cr.