The luxury family estate where nine-year-old Charlise Mutten was allegedly murdered overnight on January 11 has a past marred by a long running neighbourhood feud, a $7.6 million embezzlement case and a bitter divorce.
The five-hectare property – one of the many with stately mansions and sweeping gardens in the wealthy Mount Wilson enclave – has had an unhappy history leading up to the tragic death of the schoolgirl on its elegant grounds 12 days ago.
That history included the property unwittingly playing host to a woman who siphoned millions from the National Australia Bank to fund her addiction to diamonds, designer clothes and handbags, expensive antiques and vintage champagne.
The bad luck associated with the Stein family and the property has taken place over two decades before the grisly discovery of Charlise’s remains in a barrel, which police allege was dumped by Justin Stein after he killed his girlfriend’s daughter.
The multimillion-dollar country home enjoyed a brief respite from its jinxed history as the go to wedding destination for the nuptials of everyone from AFL star Buddy Franklin and his model wife, former Miss Universe Jesinta Campbell, to Sky Racing reporter Julie Snook and actor Hugo Johnstone-Burt.
Jesinta and Buddy Franklin after their marriage in the grounds of Wildenstein which had become a successful wedding venue until Charlise Mutten’s alleged murder there halted the business
The view from the verandah of Wildenstein, with its tables set for a wedding, the location from which tragic schoolgirl Charlise Mutten was reported to have vanished before her remains were found in a barrel
The mansion built by the Stein family on Wildenstein, the sprawling estate with an unlucky history of links to $7.6m fraud case, a neighbourhood feud, and now the alleged murder of Charlise Mutten
The lavish venue, which boasts sprawling park-like gardens decorated with urns, bronze and stone sculptures by antiques dealer James Stein Sr, was run by his interior designer and event planner son James Stein Jr.
The younger Stein turned Wildenstein into a successful wedding venue after his own marriage there to husband, radio announcer Keegan Buzza there in 2015.
Celebrities and others who saw the couple’s wedding pictures started asking if they hired the property out for events and Wildenstein’s grand and intimate spaces, hedged garden rooms, incredible views and majestic trees became the backdrop of a thriving business.
The couple described their business as ‘a company built on the love of two men’, but since the alleged murder of Charlise Mutten there its website has been taken down, as James Stein’s official event planner Instagram page.
James Stein Jr and Keegan Buzza’s own marriage at Wildenstein in 2015 was the impetus for their celebrity-driven wedding business which was interrupted by nine-year-old Charlise’s alleged murder on the property
James Stein Jr adjusts a table setting inside the wedding tent of Wildenstein in 2018 (above, left) where Sky Racing reporter Julie Snook and actor Hugo Johnstone-Burt were married last year
If James’ younger brother Justin goes to trial for murder and it is found that Charlise died die on the property, it is hard to imagine how the wedding venue would recover.
The Stein family’s association with the ill-fated began in 1989 when James Stein Sr took his wife Annemie and then young son James up to Mount Wilson just weeks after arriving in Sydney from Perth.
Justin Stein would not be born until the following year.
James Stein Sr, a keen amateur gardener who ran an antiques business with Annemie, later told Australian Country Magazine ‘every green finger started twitching’ when he saw the property.
Mr Stein found that Mount Wilson, where pastoralists and moneyed city folk spent weekends and holidays, had ‘the most wonderful volcanic soil … and the most incredibly pure water’.
Charlise Mutten (above) is believed to have left her fulltime carer grandparents on December 21 to holiday with her mother and Kallista Mutten’s new fiance Justin Stein, who police alleged murdered the schoolgirl
Detectives and uniformed officers walk down the driveway to Wildenstein last week on the day before Charlise Mutten’s body inside a barrel was located 65km away near the Colo River
Kallista Mutten (above, left) took her daughter up to Wildenstein on a holiday that ended in tragedy when Charlise died and Kallista’s fiance Justin Stein was charged with the nine-year-old
The sleepy hamlet was dotted with grand houses with fancy names, including the childhood home of author Patrick White who lived at Withycombe in the 1920s and 1930s.
Wealthy families considered it a ‘hill station’ escape from Sydney’s summer over which they held garden and tennis parties and the children rode ponies and went lyrebird and wombat spotting.
When the Steins bought the property, it had only a small shack on it, possibly the same shack where accused killer Justin Stein is known to have occupied in recent years.
James Stein Sr designed and built the garden and Annemie Stein designed the now palatial home from whose verandah Charlise Mutten was reportedly last seen when police were first alerted that the little girl was missing.
Hedged gardens and stunning landscapes are a feature of Wildenstein (above) favoured by couples planning their weddings, but the picturesque venue is now at the centre of a murder investigation
Kallista Mutten (above) seen at Wildenstein after having a ‘medical episode’ which resulted in her being taken to Katoomba Hopsital where she remains as police wait to formally interview her about her daughter Charlise’s death
As a ‘bewitched’ James Stein Sr spent weekends planting and working the ‘giant canvas on which to build his dreams’, he and Annemie Stein operated a successful business, Martin & Stein Antiques in the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney.
The couple bought a house in Woollahra, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and their sons attended the exclusive boys’ school, Cranbrook.
In 2001, when Justin Stein was ten years old, his parents antiques business was mentioned during a high profile court case involving Heather Kathleen Power.
Power was Martin & Stein Antiques’ best customer, in a business specialising in antique jewellery and decorative arts, with pieces sourced internationally from the UK, USA and Europe.
Power drove a BMW, leased a harbour apartment, drank vintage champagne, hired stretch limousines, accumulated Australia’s largest collection of diamond jewellery, had a collection of Cartier handbags, wore Thierry Mugler perfume and dined at expensive restaurants.
She was feted by Sydney’s finest stores and boutiques, and received invitations to their special events, but it would emerge that she was living a fantasy double life.
James Stein Sr, above with casings he claimed were from his neighbour John Haitzler’s firearm, after the pair had a dispute over alleged shooting on Wildenstein’s shared fenceline
Martin & Stein Antiques (above) in the QVB was bank clerk Heather Power’s favourite shop where she bought 200 items including jewellery during her three year fantasy high life
On one spree, she bought an 18-carat diamond-encrusted leopard brooch straight out of the Cartier boutique’s window.
In late 1996, the then 45-year-old Power met Justin Stein Sr and his employee Chriss Smith at Martin & Stein Antiques.
Within three years, she would have bought 200 items from the shop, was taken out to smart restaurants by Mr Smith and Mr Stein, and stayed at the Stein family home at Mount Wilson.
Daily Mail Australia is not suggesting the Steins nor their antique business had anything to do with Power’s dishonest actions as she spent the money she secretly embezzled from the NAB to pursue her fantasy life.
Power’s personal photographs featured herself pictured with James Stein and Mr Smith looking happy and affectionate and often with a raised champagne flute.
She was in fact a bank clerk at the National Australia Bank, where her husband Mark also worked.
Bored with her dull reality, she would tell Mark she was off to calligraphy classes when she was out spending the NAB’s embezzled money.
Heather Power (above) bought diamonds, a BMW, vintage champagne, Cartier handbags and dined at smart restaurants over three years of siphoning $7.6m from NAB
Keegan Buzza and James Stein Jr’s (above, left) 2015 wedding at Wildenstein after which the two husbands began ‘a company built on the love of two men’, but is now currently halted as police investigate Charlise’s murder there
In the late 1990s, unbeknownst to NAB or anyone else, Power set up an intricate web of computer-generated loans which would amount to $7.6m.
Her first purchase was a gold chain, her largest purchase was worth $200,000 and her visits to Martin & Stein came with laughter, compliments, champagne and eventually an exclusive social circle.
‘They built me up,’ Power would tell Nine newspapers, ‘I’d walk in on Thursday evening and they would always compliment me on my hair or my make-up or what I was wearing.
‘They always complimented me. It was made to be real fun … and I got swept along with it.’
She later claimed Mr Smith, about whom she had romantic aspirations but who only ever saw her as a client, ‘would sometimes say that he had turned me from a boring suburban housewife into someone who was dynamic and fun and glamorous’.
The fraud came to light only when the bank realised that correspondence about several loans was all going to the same address.
Police raided her rented harbourside apartment, and found the walls hung with painting, a bedroom turned into a private gallery for 1930s Art Deco glass vases and marble and bronze statuettes, and 76 bottles of vintage champagne in satin cases inside a wardrobe.
Annemie Stein (pictured) and James Stein Sr are now divorced and last week she described her son’s relationship with Kallista Mutten as a ‘headache’
James Stein Sr runs antique business The Gallery with New York artist Bernardo Diaz in Mount Victoria, about half an hour’s drive from the Wildenstein property he helped develop
The Blue Mountains antique shop (above) run by Justin Stein Sr who said he had never met his son’s stepdaughter Charlise because of the fractured Stein family, but described her death as ‘a tragedy’
Power pleaded guilty to 39 charges of fraud and was sentenced to jail.
A Christie’s valuer took eight hours just to count Power’s diamonds among what was estimated to be the largest private jewellery collection ever auctioned in Australia.
When trying to recover some of its money, the NAB tried to pursue James Stein, but he was never aware of any of Power’s deceitfulness.
Up in Mount Wilson, the Steins were having problems of their own.
Wildenstein would become the subject of a property case after James Stein Sr and Annemie Stein divorced, Mrs Stein taking possession of the estate, and Mr Stein opening an antiques business in Victoria with New York artist, Bernardo Diaz.
The next door neighbour to Wildenstein is orchardist John Haitzler and his wife, Carole, who live at Jamine, which shares a fence with Wildenstein.
Wildenstein neighbour John Haetzler has had a two decades long feud with the Steins who accused him of shooting birds, which he vehemently denies, and had an AVO out against Justin Stein after they had a confrontation
Police guard the gates at the entrance of Wildenstein last week after investigations were continuing following the discovery of schoolgirl Charlsie Mutten’s remains in a barrel on the Colo River
Mr Haitzler, who told Daily Mail Australia how his wife Carole had seen a car leave Wildenstein with its headlights off at 4.30am on the day Charlise Mutten was reported missing, had his own bitter dispute with the Steins.
A confrontation between him and Justin Stein, the man now charged with murder, led to Mr Haitzler taking out an AVO in Katoomba Local Court about seven years ago.
This followed a disagreement resulting in claims, counter claims and legal action between Mr Haitzler and James Stein Sr over firearms and the death of wildlife.
Mr Haitzler, who has more than 200 fruit trees on his property, has a firearms licence which allows him to shoot feral animals such as rabbits and foxes.
In 2014, the Blue Mountains Gazette reported he told a NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal hearing that he also fires weapons into the air to frighten away birds eating his cheery, peach and plum trees.
A tribute to Charlise Mutten at a candlelight vigil held by the Tweed Heads Public School following the nine-year-old’s tragic death in Blue Mountains on January 11
Police vehicles at the Colo River Park near where officers made the gruesome discovery of Charlise Mutten’s remains inside a barrel dumped on the river’s banks in mid-January
James Stein Jr (left) and his husband Keegan Buzza (right) were married at Wildenstein and thereafter established a successful wedding business there until Charlise’s disappearance
The Steins complained they frequently found dead birds such as black cockatoos, satin bower birds and crimson rosellas which they claimed had been shot.
They also allegedly feared for their safety and that of bushwalkers who regularly stroll nearby, and said the noise of the firearms being discharged was frightening.
Magistrate Nancy Hennessy heard that on New Year’s Day 2013, James Stein had reported Mr Haitzler walking along his fence and staring at Mr Stein in a ‘menacing manner’.
Police seized Mr Haitzler’s firearms and suspended his licence, but he appealed the suspension which was overturned and vehemently denied shooting dead any birds.
Mr Haitzler said it was a goshawk that was killing the native birds, hiding in the trees and attacking parrots as they fed on the ground.
Ms Hennessy found Mr Haitzler had stood in ‘a defiant manner staring at Mr Stein’ but she couldn’t be satisfied that he had been carrying a weapon when he did so.
She understood neighbours felt disturbed and annoyed by the sound of gunfire, but Mr Haitzler said he never used guns near his boundary line and she was satisfied ‘there is virtually no risk of injury or death to a person … outside Mr Haitzler’s property’.
Police vehicles make their way down to Wildenstein last week as detectives were still piecing together what happened before Charlise vanished from the sprawling Mount Wilson property
Justin Stein reportedly lived in a shack on the grounds of Wildenstein which his parents had bought in 1989 and on which they built the luxury mansion where Charlsie was staying before she died
One of the classic views from the house on Wildenstein which was operating as a wedding and events venue before police shut it down as a crime scene following Charlise’s disappearance
She noted ‘the extent of neighbourhood disputes … other than firearms’ he was involved in, restored his licence, giving Mr Haitzler a victory over the Steins.
Mr Haitzler said he was ‘delighted … in the end, truth prevailed’.
Three days after the judgement, he informed James Stein he would once again be shooting on his property.
James Stein Sr said it had been ‘a 15-year saga of shooting’ which was ‘terrifying’ and that he would be ‘quietly gardening’ at Wildenstein ‘and then you hear gunshot’.
He also contemplated once again losing the birds that had returned to his garden.
‘Until 2013 I hardly saw a bird here — I just kept picking up dead ones,’ Mr Stein said. ‘Since January 2013, the return of the birdlife has been overwhelming.’
Last week, Annemie Stein told the Daily Telegraph that her accused son Justin has ‘had a pretty tortured life’.
‘You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink, or choose their partners, and sometimes it ends up in a headache like this one.’
James Stein Sr said the death of Charlise, who he had never met was a ‘tragedy’ and he was ‘heartbroken’ after he heard the news.
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