Justin Stein blinked rapidly as he was declared a child killer Wednesday and then staggered to the side trying to represent the jury, as if the truth of being a convicted murderer was just setting in.
But on Thursday morning, waking up in his cell at the sprawling Metropolitan Detention and Reception Center in western Sydney, reality would have truly sunk in.
The 34-year-old’s trips from the MRRC in Silverwater to Parramatta Court for the trial and jury deliberation took six weeks.
Being led in handcuffs from the cells to Court 5 might have given Stein a sense of dread at the impending verdict, but it offered him some relief from the monotony in jail.
Now that this is over, Stein is in the protective wing of the prison and, as a child killer, will be among the most reviled inmates along with child sex offenders.
Charlise Mutten was murdered by Justin Stein in January 2022
Justin Stein buys sand at Bunnings to pour into the barrel where he had put Charlise Mutten’s body after shooting her in the face.
During the trial, Crown prosecutor Ken McKay SC asked Stein if he knew why Charlise was clothed but without underwear when she slept in her bed after she became ill and began vomiting on the eve of her murder on January 10, 2022. .
Charlise was staying alone with Stein at her family’s property in Mt Wilson.
Stein was also asked if he had given Charlise the antipsychotic drug Seroquel, which she took for her schizophrenia. The drug was found in her system after her death.
Stein denied any knowledge or guilt regarding these events.
He will be under protection in Silverwater for a further nine weeks until he is sentenced on August 23, when he will be taken back in a prison van to court, the location of which is yet to be determined.
Judge Helen Wilson will sentence Stein, taking into account that his victim was a child under 10 years old who was in his care as a de facto stepfather.
Charlise had been on vacation with her mother Kallista, Stein’s then-fiancee, over Christmas and New Year’s at the three Stein family residences when she was drugged and then shot in the face with a rifle.
Stein also faces a charge of tampering with a corpse, the maximum sentence of which is just two years.
But the unfortunate events of how Charlise was put in a barrel and dumped could influence the length of the sentence.
The schoolgirl’s body, weighing 33.5 kilos, was wrapped in a bag and a tarp, tied with duct tape and placed upside down in a barrel intended for chemicals or food products.
About 100kg of sand Stein bought at Bunnings was poured over the boy and the lid was screwed back on before he presumably backed into bush on the bank of the Colo River and rolled to a spot where he became wedged between logs of the trees.
The barrel was there for five days in January 2022 before police found it and arrested Stein.
The nature of Charlise’s death and the publicity that accompanied it should keep the child killer under protection for some time.
Justin Stein is currently in Silverwater Prison (above) in a protection wing, but will be moved to a prison such as Goulburn or Lithgow after being sentenced.
Charlise clutches toys and looks happy next to her mother, Kallista Mutten, on Christmas Day 2021, blissfully unaware of the horror to come.
Stein, who faces several decades in prison, will be assigned by a NSW Correctional Services committee to his “sentence jail”.
This will be one of the state’s maximum security prisons, Goulburn, Lithgow or the New South Wales North Coast Correctional Center in Kempsey.
This is the big moment. Stein, who is not a tall or muscular man and is still quite young and looking for someone in his 30s, will come face to face with career criminals, drug dealers, violent criminals and murderers who do not like career killers. children.
He is a soft-spoken, privately educated man whose parents are wealthy antique dealers, and although he has previously served time for cocaine trafficking, his shorter sentence meant a medium to minimal security environment.
Stein will have 17 hours to spend each night in his 3m x 5m cell at Silverwater (above) and then in whatever ‘sentence jail’ he is sent to for what could be decades.
Charlise’s horrible end inside this barrel thrown into the woods by Stein could influence the length of the sentence she receives
He is a diagnosed schizophrenic and takes buprenorphine for a long-standing heroin addiction.
Life for Stein will become a tedium of days that blend into each other, of wearing green prison clothes down to his underwear, of mornings in his cell with the standard breakfast package of cereal, bread, jam and a carton of milk.
He will then be allowed to enter a yard, return to his cell at lunchtime for sandwiches and a piece of fruit, go out to the yard again, and then return behind bars at 3 p.m. with a dinner consisting of meat. or fish and vegetables served in aluminum foil. tray.
The Correctional Services Industries, staffed by inmates, prepares “nutritionally balanced” meals labeled with catchy names like “Thai vegetable curry,” “chicken polenta” and “ginger beef salad.”
But inmates complain that they don’t have much taste and crave salty, greasy treats like McDonald’s, which they will never be able to have.
Justin Stein’s antipsychotic drug Seroquel, which was found post-mortem in Charlsie Mutten’s system (left) and her bedsheets into which the girl vomited, perhaps as a result of being given the medication.
Prison food includes dishes served on aluminum trays labeled with catchy names like “Thai vegetable curry,” “chicken polenta” and “beef and ginger salad,” but many inmates just want McDonald’s.
With dinner in hand, Stein will have 17 hours to spend each night in his 3 x 5 m cell. She will have access to a screwed-in television and books.
Because he faces a long sentence, Stein will have the opportunity to study, but it is believed that he has some learning difficulties that may hinder this.
If sentenced to Lithgow Correctional Centre, he will face a long series of freezing winters at Blue Mountains prison, where icy winds are known to whip through the yards.
If you go to Goulburn, you are unlikely to be sent to the High Risk Management Security Correctional Facility known as Supermax, which is for violent or disruptive inmates.
You may end up in the Main Prison Circle that has been home to many lifers, including Anita Cobby’s killers, now in their 50s and 60s, who have so far served 38 years of their “cemented” life sentence. “for beauty. The assassination of the queen in 1986.
A person convicted of murder in New South Wales can be sentenced to life imprisonment; however, the judge may impose a sentence for a specific period of time and with at least a non-parole period.
Aerial view of the yards of the old part of Goulburn main prison, where Justin Stein could spend decades for murdering Charlie Mutten.