What happened to 13-year-old Madeline Soto? Her disappearance, Stephan Sterns’ arrest and charges, explained

Content advisory: This article mentions sex abuse, CSAM, and homicide. Please take care while reading.

Not too long ago, the body of 11-year-old Texas girl Audrii Cunningham was discovered, suspected to have been murdered by a family friend and neighbor. More recently but not far apart, the body of 13-year-old Madeline Soto from Florida was also found nearly a week after going missing.

The prime suspect is also a man, but in this case, a man who had an even greater responsibility of protecting her. It feels like these kinds of cases happen way too often, especially as of late. But it doesn’t – and it shouldn’t – make it an easier pill to swallow.

Her mother’s long-term on-again off-again boyfriend, Stephan Sterns, 37, was arrested two days before Madeline’s body was found, and is accused of having done the unthinkable. One good look at his arrest affidavit is enough to make any sensible person feel nauseous.

The initial affidavit does not include the possibility that he was the one who also claimed Maddie’s life. It took nearly two months from the day Madeline disappeared to Sterns finally being charged with first-degree murder. He is currently awaiting his first trial, the CSAM (child sexual abuse material) trial which is almost sure to land in a conviction, as there is little disputing the mountain of photographic evidence recovered from his phone and Google Drive.

Overwhelming evidence against Sterns

Madeline disappeared on Feb. 26, less than a week after her 13th birthday. It is believed that she was killed after her birthday party on Sunday evening, or in the early hours of Monday morning. That night, Sterns was active on the app Telegram, notorious for its end-to-end encryption. Some suspect that Sterns was making money off the CSAM, a hypothesis which seems to be sustained by the fact that Sterns’ parents claimed in an interview with Hidden True Crime podcast he often had money they didn’t know the origin of since their son was unemployed.

Madeline was reported to have been missing since Sterns’ dropped her off near her school but an official missing child’s report wasn’t filed until that evening after her mother went to school to pick her up at around 4:30 pm and was told her daughter hadn’t been in attendance all day. More recently, in early June, a bodycam video of Jenn and Sterns at the police station on the night of the disappearance was released to the public.

It was reported that Maddie – as she was known – was last seen outside a church wearing a green sweatshirt, black shorts, and white Crocs. The recently released bodycam video shows Sterns saying exactly that. However, this, as stated by police, was likely not the case. If there was a girl of this description at church that morning, it wasn’t Madeline.

Her grandmother told Telemundo that it was very unusual for Sterns to be the one to take Maddie to school. It is also notable how Sterns seemingly drove her to school an hour earlier, which may have been to avoid having witnesses that wouldn’t corroborate his story. He also said Madeline refused to eat MacDonald’s breakfast, and was sleeping through the car journey. While she could be seen in the car in the morning footage, she was almost certainly already dead by that point, according to police.

Shockingly, as her mother pleaded for help and her daughter’s safe return in one of her media interviews, Sterns is visible in the back, loitering around while knowing exactly what he did. He can be seen nervously fidgeting, cracking his knuckles, and, it seems to me, making his constant presence known to his girlfriend. His demeanor is comparable to that of the bodycam footage at the police station that was later released.

During the interview, also later released, wherein he surrendered his phone at the end, Sterns made some odd, and ultimately self-incriminating statements. One was that he dropped Madeline down the street from her school, about half a mile away, instead of at the school gates as usual. His excuse was that Madeline was at that typical phase where kids feel self-conscious about being dropped off right in front of the school gates. Sterns also made further mistakes in the timeline of his events and in which direction he was driving.

That morning, Madeline had also coincidently “forgotten” her phone at home. When she was still missing, her mother, Jennifer, blamed her forgetfulness on her ADHD diagnosis, as did Sterns, but we now know that this time, her ADHD had nothing to do with it.

Even if with all the evidence, Sterns is found innocent in court of having taken Madeline’s life, there is little room to explain away why he had an extensive collection of explicit sexual abuse material featuring a child at their family home on his phone; or why his phone coincidentally reset to factory settings on the day she disappeared. It is also reported that he tried to get rid of other evidence, like Maddie’s school PC and backpack, by throwing them in the trash in the early morning of Feb. 26.

Sterns was first arrested on two counts: Count 1, Sexual Battery, and Count 2, Possession of Child Sexual Material – in other words, he had recorded (and deleted) instances of his abuse which the investigators were able to recover. It is usual for police to arrest suspects on lesser charges – although ‘lesser’ in this case sounds like a brutal understatement – before bringing out the ultimate capital charge once enough evidence has been gathered, which is precisely what happened.

A whopping 60 new charges, plus first-degree murder

The most damning evidence has to be the inexcusable sexual abuse material, assumingly of Maddie, contained in his phone. From the first arrest affidavit, although it is partly censored, what is readable is horrifying enough. So horrifying in fact, that you immediately understand why, allegedly, Maddie texted her friends shortly before her disappearance saying she intended to go live in the woods once she turned 13.

More recently, on March 12, Stephan Sterns was hit with another 60 new charges. At face value, this tells you investigators were getting ready to bring the hammer down on him with Karma’s full force, but, while the evidence for these new charges was not circumstantial but very much tangible, they were still meticulously building a homicide case against Sterns.

The 60 charges are:

1. Eight counts of Sexual Battery on a Child Under 12
2. Five counts of Sexual Battery with a Child 12-18
3. Seven counts of Lewd and Lascivious Molestation
4. 40 counts of Unlawful Possession of Materials Depicting Sexual Performance by a Child 10 or More Images

In other words, the number of images and videos he had of his assaults on Maddie is in the hundreds and they started before she was 12. We don’t know three important things that may complicate the already-complicated case: One, whether these videos were for his depraved private use or if he went even further and distributed them (his use of Telegram and his parents’ suspicions may point to the latter); two, if he had other videos of other children he abused; three, did Madeline’s mother purposefully turn a blind eye to the horrors that were taking place under her roof?

More disturbingly, we also now know, due to the released police interview transcript that Jenn not only was aware that Stephan would on occasion sleep in bed with Madeline when she was not around, but the mother acted as if it were a perfectly understandable arrangement. It is still unclear whether she was aware or suspected that Stephen was taking advantage of the arrangement in the worst way possible. She did, however, get to see an explicit photographic piece of evidence, but Jenn said she could not recognize anything in the photo as it was too dark.

Furthermore, during a subsequent recorded interview with investigators she defended her decision to offer Sterns a lawyer when it became clear to her that police were turning in his direction, despite having had already been made aware of the sexual abuse material contained in his phone. In her words during the interrogation:

“At one point, you guys interviewed me, and when you guys showed me the picture of her, I believed the sexual stuff, but I didn’t want to believe that he had done anything evil to her. I’m like, ‘no, what if he did this stuff, fine, but what if she’s still missing out there? What if somebody took her?’ I still wanted to believe in his… I believed him. I believed his whole story.”

Even without a murder charge, the 60 counts meant Sterns was facing life in prison in the State of Florida if convicted. But now, with the first-degree murder charge, he may very well receive the death penalty if found guilty of these heinous crimes. He is still jailed at the Osceola County Department of Corrections with no bail. His next court hearing is scheduled for Oct. 14, he has yet to make any appearance in the courtroom.

It is not a stretch to assume Madeline had wanted to flee to the woods due to the monster at home. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to. All we can hope now is that the one culpable for her long-time suffering and eventual tragic demise faces the most appropriate justice.