Content advisory: This article mentions sex abuse, CSAM, and homicide. Please take care while reading.
Not 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.
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 boyfriend, Stephan Sterns, 37 was arrested two days before Madeline’s body was found and appears to have done the unthinkable. One good look at his arrest affidavit is enough to make any sensible person feel sick.
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.
Overwhelming evidence against Sterns
Madeline disappeared on Feb. 26, less than a week after her 13th anniversary. It is believed that she was killed after her birthday party on Sunday evening, Feb. 25. That night, Stern was active on the app Telegram, notorious for its end-to-end encryption.
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.
It was reported that Maddie – as she was known – was last seen outside a Church wearing a green sweatshirt, black shorts, and white shoes. 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 her 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.
Shockingly, as her mother pleaded for help and her daughter’s safe return in one of the interviews she gave, 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.
During the interview wherein he surrendered his phone, 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. 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, 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 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 what happened.
A whopping 60 new charges, plus first-degree murder
The most damning evidence has to be the inexcusable sexual 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 nail this guy and 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:
- Eight counts of Sexual Battery on a Child Under 12
- Five counts of Sexual Battery with a Child 12-18
- Seven counts of Lewd and Lascivious Molestation
- 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 may point to the latter); two, if he had other videos of other children he abused; three, how much did Maddie’s mother know, and did she purposefully lie when she said she saw her daughter on the morning of Feb. 26, which we now know is an impossibility.
Even without a murder charge, these new counts mean Sterns is 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.
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.
