messages were played to the jury at trial,[1] and the savagery with which some of those messages were delivered was alarming, even at a distance in time and space.
30 Ms Mutten told the jury that, when she returned, the offender smashed her telephone and assaulted her.[2] Afterwards, she escaped into the bush and waited until such time as he had calmed down.
31 With his first lie about the kindly auctioneer having been necessarily abandoned by the offender, he invented a new explanation for Charlise's absence, telling Ms Mutten that some of his former associates from the world of illicit drug supply may have kidnapped Charlise. He used that possibility to both dissuade Ms Mutten from calling the police to report Charlise as missing,[3] and to portray himself as a warrior "going to war" with dangerous criminals to recover Charlise from them.[4] In reality, this new story gave the offender the opportunity he required to move and conceal Charlise's body. The offender told Ms Mutten that he would drive to Sydney and look for Charlise among his criminal associates. It was necessary for him to take his boat, he said, so that, if anything happened and "people g[o]t hurt" he could use the boat to "get rid of [the] evidence".[5] Because it is the only reasonable inference on all the evidence, I am satisfied to the criminal standard that the use the offender intended for the boat was the disposal of Charlise's body, by taking her remains out to sea or to some other large body of water and dumping them.
32 The casualness with which the offender went about this gruesome task is demonstrated by Ex. D, evidence which tracked his mobile phone and his car as he left Mount Wilson in the Colorado ute, towing his boat, with a large barrel in the tray of the utility, at 4:13pm on 13 January 2022. The 220-litre plastic barrel was a makeshift coffin for Charlise.[6] The offender had wrapped Charlise's body in a white coloured woven plastic material or bag, a black garbage bag, and two blue tarpaulins, the whole being roughly secured with packing tape. These wrappings were bloodstained, suggesting that the
