4 It must have been very difficult for Mr Mutten to give that evidence and yet he did so with a quiet dignity and calmness that made his obvious grief hard to see.
5 The second of the particularly revealing pieces of testimony from the trial came during the evidence in chief of the offender when he gave his wholly false account of the circumstances of Charlise's death. As the offender told the jury about supposedly witnessing Charlise's murder at the hands of her mother, his voice began to shake, and then to break. He reached for a tissue and dabbed at his eyes; he gave every appearance of crying from some deep place of sadness. An appearance was, however, all it was. From where I sat, only about a metre from the witness box, I could see very clearly that, despite the offender's presentation of distress, he was completely dry eyed and did not shed a single tear. The tissue with which he needlessly wiped his eyes was little more than a prop; at best, a means of hiding his dry eyes from the jury. The offender's evidence might have been called theatre if it wasn't so calculated and so utterly cynical, and if it had not concerned the horrific death of a 9-year-old child. Rather than demonstrating his anguish at the brutal slaying of a child he said he had been coming to regard as a daughter, it pointed to his complete lack of remorse for having murdered her.
6 What happened to Charlise after she embarked upon her visit to her mother and the offender was the subject of significant dispute when the offender stood trial for her murder; a murder that occurred on or about 12 January 2022 at Mount Wilson in this State. The trial commenced on 13 May 2024 and ended on 19 June 2024, when the jury returned a verdict of guilty to the charge, and the offender was convicted. As with the jury's rejection of the offender's evidence, the verdict was, in my opinion, entirely correct, and the only verdict reasonably open on the evidence. There was an overwhelming weight of evidence to establish the guilt of Justin Stein of the offence charged; a heavy weight that his transparently false account of the events of and around the shooting of Charlise Mutten could not call into doubt.
7 To sentence the offender for his crime, the Court must firstly determine the facts of it, with proof to the criminal standard required of conclusions adverse to
