Horrible Secrets Were Quickly Exposed- The Story of Madeline Soto
“Truly heartbreaking. We are learning that Madeline Soto’s body was found right near where I am standing on Hickory Tree Road.”
Welcome, or welcome back. I’m Cassie, and this is A Wicked World. The story I have for you today is one that’s been in the news a lot recently. It’s about a young girl who had just celebrated her 13th birthday party when she was suddenly killed, and by someone her mother trusted to be around her each and every day. But did her mother willingly put her in the hands of this predator? This is the story of Madeline Soto.
Madeline Soto was born on February 22nd, 2011, to her mother, Jennifer Soto, and her father, Tyler Wallace. She loved the movie Lilo & Stitch, playing the flute, going fishing, and she adored all animals. Madeline was said to be a sweet girl who was always kind to others and had no problems with anyone. She was loving, silly, and confident. Madeline, however, did deal with ongoing anxiety and ADHD, and she had difficulties managing it at times, but always tried her best to internalize these struggles. Jennifer, Maddie’s mother, also struggled with her own mental health as she had bipolar disorder and was heavily medicated for it, but still often had difficulties.
Now, Madeline’s biological father, Tyler, who lives in Texas, had actually been engaged to a woman named Tatiana. But when they briefly ended their engagement in early 2010, Tyler had essentially made Jen Soto his rebound. It was then that Jen had gotten pregnant with Madeline, and shortly after finding out that she was pregnant, Tyler would reconcile with Tatiana and they would get married just a few months after Madeline was born in April of 2011. Madeline would then go to visit her father for a few weeks each summer.
The teen, however, lived with her mother, Jen Soto, full-time in their condo located in Kissimmee, Florida, just a few minutes away from Disney World. They also lived there with two other roommates. Around the time that Madeline was 7 years old in 2018, her mother Jennifer began dating a man named Stephan Sterns. 37-year-old Stephan Sterns was, for a time, employed at nearby Disney World as a cast member, but in more recent years he hadn’t been working at all. He came from a rich family, and he had gone straight from living with his parents in their million-dollar home to living with Jennifer and Madeline in their Kissimmee condo.
On the evening of February 25th, 2024, Madeline’s grandmother threw her a 13th birthday party at her house. Following the party, Maddie’s aunt would drive her back home. Now, neither Jen nor Stephan had attended the birthday party that night because, apparently, Jen had been working from 2:00 to 10:00 p.m., and Stephan hadn’t been invited because he didn’t get along with Jen’s mother, Madeline’s grandmother. Madeline would get back home around 10:00 p.m., and her mother Jen would arrive back around 11:00. Apparently, by the time Jen got back home, Stephan was also already there. But something happened between that time and the following afternoon, because that’s when Maddie would be reported as missing after she hadn’t made it to school that day.
Jennifer wouldn’t find out about her daughter disappearing until around 4:30 in the afternoon when she went to school to pick her up, and was told by staff that Maddie had never arrived that morning. Apparently, it was in the school’s policy to contact parents after school was done to let them know about their child being absent, rather than earlier in the morning, which has since changed. Jen and Stephan would report Madeline as missing around 8:00 p.m. that night. When they did, the girl’s mother would tell police that her daughter had never run away from home before, and she had last seen Madeline the night prior shortly before she headed to bed around 11:00 p.m.
It was later discovered that Madeline had wanted to run away from home and live in the woods, though police did not know why.
“Hey there, hey there. What’s going on? So, my daughter was dropped off close to school this morning but never made it. I went to school… I’m sorry, one second, okay… alright, um, she was supposed to be dropped off at school. Didn’t make it to school. I went to pick her up from school today and she never came out. They announced it over the speaker and I’m just like, maybe she walked here, because sometimes she’ll walk here to this office. I came here, nothing. I went back to the school, they were closed. I got a notice, an email from the school saying she was absent, but I also messaged her teacher and he looked at her entire attendance today and saw that she was completely not at school today either.”
“Okay, um, so she never made it. Okay, what’s her name?”
“Madeline. M-A-D-E-L-I-N-E.”
“Last name?”
“Soto. S-O-T-O. Yeah.”
“Date of birth?”
“February 22nd, 2011. February 27… 201… 22nd. Oh, sorry, 22nd, 2011. 13th birthday.”
“13. What’s the name of the… “
“Madeline Soto, age 13.”
“I’m trying to get a full-on description now. What was she last seen wearing?”
“Green hoodie… um, green hoodie. White Crocs. Either blue or black pants. I think black shorts. Black shorts, yeah, black shorts.”
“Okay, black shorts. Alright, do you know if she has like, friends in the area?”
“She does, but she doesn’t know where they live.”
“She doesn’t know where they live? Okay. I asked all of them. Is this like, does she have any places that you guys know that she’ll usually be at? Any friend’s house, any places that she likes to hang out?”
“Not typically, no. No, not typically. Okay.”
The morning that Maddie had disappeared, Jen claimed that she had been awoken by her boyfriend Stephan coming into her room to get the dog to take it for a walk. Jen said that she hadn’t gotten out of bed at that time and she never saw Maddie off to school, but she believed that she heard her getting ready in the kitchen between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. However, Jen would later retract this statement and say that it was probably one of her roommates getting ready in the kitchen around that time and might not have been Maddie. This has left many people suspicious of Jen since, as you could hear in the body cam footage, she corrected Stephan and told the detective what Maddie had been wearing when she was last seen. But then she admitted to not seeing her at all, so how did she know?
Apparently, after bringing the dog for a walk, Stephan would then drive Maddie to Hunter’s Creek Middle School around 8:30 that morning. But he would tell police that he hadn’t actually dropped her off on school grounds. Instead, he had dropped her off a few blocks away near the Peace United Methodist Church on Town Center Boulevard in Kissimmee. According to Stephan, this was because Madeline was embarrassed about the car that he was driving, and she had requested that he drop her off there. He also suggested to authorities that maybe Madeline had just never made it to school.
“I dropped her off. Everything looked fine when I drove away.”
“So last time we saw her, what were the conversations that you had in the car when you dropped her off?”
“Well, she was asleep for most of the way. Told her ‘have a good day at school’ when she got out. ‘I love her.’ She said, ‘Thanks, love you too.’ That was it.”
“And so, where do you think she could possibly be?”
“I mean, this isn’t, as I was told, this isn’t normal behavior. She’s not the type that would just run off. We don’t know where she can be and we’re scared. We just want her home.”
“Are you in a sense blaming yourself?”
“It’s hard not to. It just keeps coming in waves. The reality keeps hitting, and we don’t know where she is, we don’t know if she’s safe. We’re just scared, we just want her home. Conflicting reports here and there, people say they see this or that, none of it’s conclusive and none of it’s helpful. We just want our baby girl back.”
Police began their search for Madeline, and more than 50 Orange County Police search and rescue team members began their search in the area where she had last been seen. But despite Stephan and Jen’s “worry” about Madeline being missing, Stephan would tell police that neither he nor Jen had gone out that night to look for her.
When detectives spoke with Madeline’s mother Jen, one of the things that they would ask her during her interrogation was where her daughter had slept the night before. To which she informed the detective that Madeline, her 13-year-old daughter, had slept upstairs alone with her boyfriend Stephan. The mother claimed that normally the three of them would sleep in bed together, but that particular night she had asked them to go to bed, just the two of them, because Jen had a new job and she needed to be well-rested for it. Though it’s said that Jen received disability check payments so she barely worked in order to not affect those payments.
So not only did she send her daughter to bed with a full-grown man—and her excuse was because of her job that she barely even went to anyways—but she also missed Maddie’s very important 13th birthday party because of this job. Madeline also had a small makeshift bedroom off of the living room of the condo, so there was no need for her to be sleeping in the same bed as Stephan. All three of them—Jen, Stephan, and Madeline—had their own separate beds, but according to Jen, it wasn’t uncommon for her daughter to sleep with Stephan when she was home, and sometimes when she wasn’t. Jennifer also added that she had a lot of anxiety, so it would make it difficult for her to sleep in bed with other people some nights, and she said that even though Madeline had her own bedroom, she really never slept there. She just hung out there during the days.
When police later spoke with Stephan, he told them that he only slept with Madeline because she needed “human contact” in order to fall asleep. He referred to it as snuggling her.
“What are the sleeping arrangements? Who sleeps in… okay. Um, did she sleep in her bed Sunday night?”
“Um, no. Uh, I was just back, I had been away for a couple months. Be in the same bed together, so um, to get some serious sleep, um, so she said no to that and suggested that the guest room upstairs had a big enough bed, so some snuggle cuddle time that supplies, and Jen gets to sleep in peace.”
“Okay, so you say snuggle time, what does that mean?”
“Like, to be alone, she’s extremely dependent. She does not like to be alone at all. She needs human presence around her. Gotcha. We’ve been trying to wean her off of that, but it’s difficult.”
Apparently, there was a woman who had once worked with and dated Stephan in late 2022, and said that around then he had broken up with Jen, and that’s when she had started dating him. But he would never spend any nights at her house. He would always return back to the Soto house, saying that Madeline and Jen couldn’t sleep without him there. Stephan also confessed to this woman that he would sleep in the same bed as Madeline, and one morning he had woken up with a boner, so he had to quickly turn around in bed. After finding out this information, the woman was very uncomfortable and stopped talking to Stephan.
Jennifer would also tell investigators that the morning Maddie disappeared, Stephan had left to bring her to school and Jen didn’t get out of bed until around 9:00 a.m. when she had to go to her doctor’s appointment. When she returned home around 11:00 a.m., Stephan was back home as well, but he told her that he had accidentally left his cell phone at home, and Maddie had left her cell phone at home too. Since Maddie had ADHD, this was likely that she could have forgotten it. However, it’s said that Stephan was constantly on his cell phone, so it’s highly unlikely that that was true.
Stephan told Jen, however, that things had gone good that morning regardless of them forgetting their phones. He also told Jen that he had offered Maddie McDonald’s multiple times, but she had declined despite that being their original plan. In fact, Stephan and Maddie had even woken up a little bit earlier that morning so they could go get McDonald’s for breakfast, so that really doesn’t make sense. And even though Stephan told Jen that he had asked Maddie multiple times on the way to school if she wanted McDonald’s, he also said that she slept the entire ride. So which was it?
After Stephan had returned back home and Jen had as well, they sat around the house and just hung out for a little while. During that time, Stephan decided to do an update to his iPhone, and he told Jen that he accidentally reset the entire thing. Convenient. A little while later, Stephan got up and told Jen he was leaving to go to a few video game stores and he’d be back later to pick up Madeline with her from school. But when Stephan didn’t return back by 2:30 p.m., Jen called him and received no answer.
Jen would end up deciding she couldn’t wait any longer for Stephan to get home, and she left on her own to go pick up Madeline. About 10 minutes after she left, Stephan would call and say, “Sorry, I accidentally left my phone at home again while I’d been gone.” He also told Jen that he had gotten a flat tire on Interstate 192. Despite Stephan earlier telling detectives that neither he nor Jennifer had gone out that night to search for Maddie, Jennifer said that Stephan had actually told her he was taking her car, a Nissan Sentra, and going out to look for Maddie. Stephan had claimed that he had driven up and down Route 192 looking for the girl but didn’t say exactly where. It would later be discovered that he had gone all the way up to North Port, Florida, where his parents live, for unknown reasons.
The following day, Jen woke up early to call as many resources as she could to help in the search for her daughter, while Stephan slept in most of the day. When police spoke with one of Jennifer’s roommates, she said that she had gotten home around 11:30 p.m. the night before Madeline had been reported as missing. When she got home, she didn’t see anyone downstairs, but she heard people upstairs. This roommate had then gone to bed at 2:30, and when she did, she said that she heard someone in the bedroom where Stephan normally slept, and it sounded like someone putting something on a table. The same roommate said that she had seen Stephan the following morning around 10:30 a.m., and when she did, he was acting odd and going up and down the stairs and in and out of the condo multiple times. He was also washing clothes, which the roommate said was weird because she had never seen him do that before.
On the night that Maddie had been reported as missing, police also took his phone into evidence to search through it since he had been the last known person to see Madeline, and on the ride home from the police station he seemed very nervous. Jen, however, also believed that police were targeting the wrong guy, so she decided to call up Stephan’s father and tell him that she thought he needed a lawyer at that point.
Then, two days after Maddie had disappeared, Stephan Sterns was arrested by the Kissimmee Police Department. However, it was not in connection with Madeline’s disappearance; it was on charges of SA and possession of CP. Police had searched through Stephan’s phone, and when they did, they found many images of him SAing little Madeline going back for at least two years.
“From what I understand, you gave the deputies consent to look through your phone?”
“You didn’t? Okay, um, and you voluntarily gave it to them so they could bring it here to do the extraction and stuff like that. Okay, what do you think was on the phone?”
“Um, text messages.”
“Text messages, mhm.”
“Um, emails. Cool stuff. Pictures.”
“Oh yeah, what kind of pictures were on there?”
“Ah, trading card pictures, lightsaber pictures, Disney pictures.”
“Do you have a Google account?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you save pictures to your Google account sometimes, or is it automatically? I know sometimes phones sync to a cloud and…”
“Yeah, I think it backs up to Google.”
“Here’s where I’m going to be brutally honest with you. There’s a phone, and I’m pretty sure you know what some of those pictures are about. You’re a very intelligent person and I don’t want you to discredit yourself by saying you don’t know about all the pictures that are on your phone. You understand what I’m saying? So, do you want to add to the list of pictures?”
“I don’t know. Should I… should I be talking with a lawyer right now?”
“I can’t answer that question. My sole purpose right now is to see if I can find her, and I’m really hoping you can help me.”
“Okay, well, I’d like to try to help, but I feel like I should probably have a lawyer present at this point.”
“So you want an attorney?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Okay, that can happen. Um, I want to let you know you’re not free to leave. You’re being detained.”
“Okay. Do you want to know what you’re being detained for?”
“Yeah.”
“Capital sexual battery and possession of child pornography. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“So we are going to step out. If you need anything, please tap on this door, okay? And there’s going to be detectives outside that will be able to assist you, okay?”
They had also found that Stephan had searched the term “sevoflurane and show up in a drug test” weeks prior to Maddie’s disappearance. This drug is an anesthetic that can cause hypnosis and amnesia, but it’s typically used in medical treatments. Investigators served a search warrant on Jennifer’s condo, and they noticed that the rooms in the photos matched the backgrounds found in some of the CP images in Stephan’s phone. Investigators also added that in Stephan’s phone, they found a photo of one of Madeline’s mother’s roommates nude in the bathroom, and she said she had not permitted Stephan to take that photo. So even though Stephan had accidentally reset his entire iPhone, luckily police had been able to recover a lot of information.
Detectives brought Jen Soto in for another interrogation, and during this time, she would tell them that she did not believe Stephan had anything to do with her daughter’s disappearance. However, after being shown photos of Stephan SAing her daughter, she now believed that he was guilty, she said. Jen went on to call Stephan a “master liar and manipulator.” She also said he would get angry and irritable about things and was very negative most of the time, however, he only ever got mad at Madeline when it came to parenting things.
Jen was then shown some pictures that police had recovered from traffic cameras the day that Madeline went missing, and they informed her that their investigation had now shifted from a missing person to a homicide as they believed that Madeline was deceased. Once she was informed of this, Jennifer sat silent for a few moments, then began to cry. The photos that authorities had showed Jen depicted her daughter Madeline sitting in the front seat of the car that Stephan was driving, and she did not look like she was alive. Her head was slumped over to her left shoulder and her mouth was wide open.
Now, Stephan had previously told investigators exactly where he had gone on the day Madeline disappeared, but what police found was not consistent with what he had told them. Stephan’s car had been seen on multiple traffic cameras, and his route did not match the one that was found in his Google Drive locations. Authorities knew that Stephan had never dropped off Madeline for school that day, and believed that she had actually been dead in the car the entire time. A camera at their condo complex had captured Stephan throwing Madeline’s backpack and school-issued laptop into the dumpster at 7:30 a.m. on February 26th. These were later recovered by detectives, and a trash bag with one of Madeline’s white Croc shoes was also recovered. The other white Croc was found right in Jen’s room. These were the shoes both Jen and Stephan had said that Maddie was last seen wearing.
Stephan was again seen returning to the condo complex at 8:19 a.m., and at that time Maddie was also seen in the car, but she did not look alive. Around 9:40 that morning, Stephan’s car was seen on camera entering the parking garage near Holiday Inn Club Vacations on South John Young Parkway. He was seen walking to the passenger side of the vehicle, opening the door, then he proceeded to carry what appeared to be a limp female body to the trunk of the car.
During Jen’s interrogation, she told police that when Stephan first moved into the condo with her and Maddie, there was a rule in place that Maddie was not to sleep in the same bed as Stephan. Why you would need a rule for that, I don’t quite understand. She said that soon Maddie began asking for sleepovers with Stephan though, which included eating popcorn, watching a movie, and then falling asleep together in bed, and she began to allow this because of how well Maddie and Stephan got along. But sometimes Stephan would be in just his boxers, and other times he would wake up cuddling Madeline. When Jen was asked by investigators during her interrogation if she thought that was weird, she said no.
Jen additionally denied knowing anything about the ongoing victimization of her daughter Madeline, and she said that while if Stephan had murdered her daughter that was evil, the sex stuff “wasn’t evil.” To the detective, it seemed like Jen had already accepted the victimization of her daughter, and her emotions during the interview just seemed fake.
“If anything, she was a little bit more open with Stephan, because she told him about a boy she had a crush on. Okay, and um, that his name was… and um, she described him. And Stephan’s like, ‘Are you aware that she has a crush on a boy?’ I said no. He’s like, ‘Yeah, she told me that he’s tall, and um, that she likes his fluffy hair.’ Um, when was this? Remember when this conversation happened? Within the last week sometime, but I’m not sure. Like within… so we saw, within a week of that Sunday. How did he take it? Was he like… and I want you to think back before you know things you know now… did he seem concerned about her? Did he seem excited for her? Like she started to, you know, be a kid and have crushes and everything else?”
“He seemed, he seemed happy for her. Okay. Um, he’s like, ‘Yeah, did you hear this? This is super cute.’ And I was like, oh, I hadn’t, she hadn’t told me. And I wondered, I’m like, why didn’t she tell me? Why’d she tell him and not me? Like, I want to know who she’s got a crush on. But maybe it’s because I told her she had a rule she wasn’t allowed to date for a few years, and I thought he was truly heartbroken. And not that he had done all this [ __ ] to her. Like, I look back at [ __ ] now, I’m just like, he was [ __ ] lying. He was [ __ ] faking. What else has he been lying to me about? I know he’s like a master liar manipulator, because he’s done it to his parents and he’s told me and shown me the lies he’s done to his parents. But I don’t know why I never thought not me. The lies are about money, they’re about where he’s at, what he’s doing, like what’s he… yeah, all that. Uh, to his… yeah, he’s stolen money from his parents. Um, they used to have a few thousand hidden in like a closet for an emergency fund kind of thing, and a few during COVID he stole. Like, he wanted RC cars. See, if he wants something, he’s going to get it, um, no matter what.”
“The police have showed you their hand. They said, ‘Stephan, we want your phone. Stephan, we want to talk to you. We’re going to lock down your residence, you can’t go back inside.’ Me, I don’t care if it’s the love of my life sitting next to me. I don’t care if it’s maternal grandma. If the police come and take my mom’s phone in my son’s disappearance, I’m not going to offer my mom a lawyer. That’s nuts to me. That to me shows you prioritizing Stephan, because at that point you became more worried about him being falsely accused. Does that make sense what I’m saying? Whether or not that’s what you felt, does that make sense? People having lawyers is their constitutional right, that is a thing that everybody is afforded. But for somebody who’s going through what you are going through to offer him a lawyer leads me to believe that there may have been a conversation, there may have been knowledge, or there may have been some inclination that you had, whether it be his involvement, her location, or something, to where in your mind there’s guilt. I promise you like, because you offering him a lawyer is very weird.”
“I know, I know. That was still me under the assumption that… I think at one point, no, 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 she… 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 his… I believed him. I believed his whole story. So I was just like, I kept repeating that part. I’m just like, what if… what if she did get dropped off? What if she got abducted? What if she’s missing? Um, but that was me assuming that you guys had the wrong guy. I wanted to think he was a good guy still, but clearly he’s not after everything you guys have told me and have shown me. I know he’s the worst person on this face of the Earth. We know that now, we know he’s a piece of [ __ ] now.”
“I know, but you didn’t know that then.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then you offered a guy who the police suspected of kidnapping, abducting, assisting the disappearance… offered him a lawyer, and then we don’t have to roundtable that you went back to what you just said, is the sex stuff is fine, it’s not fine.”
“If I knew anything, I promise you I would tell you. Like, I am willing to take a lie detector test, whatever the [ __ ] you want. But I don’t know anything. He’s never mentioned anything, I’ve never seen any signs. I tried watching her like a hawk, I thought I was doing a good job, but I wasn’t. I was oblivious to it.”
“Every four years minimum, that’s just how far back the cloud goes. And I find it hard to believe, for me, that you were so worried about how many pills she took at night but not where she slept or what relationship she was… his interest in her.”
“I thought we were all safe. I thought because in that, he hadn’t shown me anything so far, like everything seems fine. Like he seemed like he treated her like he treats you.”
The mother also said that she was afraid of a “Woody Allen type situation” occurring, referring to Woody Allen who fell in love with and ended up marrying his younger stepdaughter. But why you would ever have that on your mind as a mother unless you knew something was going on in the house, I’m not sure. Jennifer also told the investigators that she had broken up with Stephan in December of 2022 because he was so messy, but she continued to let him live in the house because he was her best friend. Well, messiness stays too, not sure if she realizes that. But after they broke up, Stephan had moved to the upstairs bedroom where he continued to live until December of 2023, and at that point he moved out and moved back in with his parents in North Port, Florida. So at the time Maddie went missing, he was apparently just there to bring her to school the next morning because Jen was too tired.
Detectives would then present Jen with the theory that maybe her daughter Madeline was pregnant at the time that she had died.
“She didn’t die naturally. She didn’t OD. She didn’t have a heart attack. We called murder on Monday. Something had to cause that. He’s been having unrestricted sexual activity for a long time. He’s getting what he wants from her, probably from you, and who knows whoever else, right? So it’s not like he woke up or went to bed Sunday and he was like, ‘You know what, I’m done with this, but I’m going to kill her.’ Something happened. People don’t just wake up and like, ‘You know what, they leave people and break up with people.’ But usually things cause people to snap. Now, what you know… what? And I’m in trouble, or I feel like I’m going to… or him being a coward. We can go even worse: she’s pregnant. That’s what… that’s what questions last night led me to believe. When we started talking about her period, I was told that her and her friend—and granted, I’m a male, never had a period—but that somebody found it weird that they were no longer on the same cycle. Could be different because she’s a teenage girl. Could be that she missed her period. Have you ever found a pregnancy test at home that wasn’t yours?”
“I have two underneath the kitchen, the bathroom sink, but I haven’t seen if they’re still there or not.”
On the same day as Jen’s interview, on March 1st, authorities were contacted by a man who had seen a news conference and wanted to report seeing Stephan’s car on the day Maddie had gone missing. The man said that he had seen this car around 1:30 p.m. on February 26th pulled off to the side of the road on Hickory Tree Road. He told law enforcement that the man was outside of the car with a tire iron in his hand, and he said this man looked scared, but he assumed that it was just because he was stranded by the side of the road with a flat tire. Law enforcement was also able to obtain video surveillance footage from the street over from Hickory Tree Road, and they saw a car that looked just like Stephan’s going down Hickory Tree Road around 2:00 p.m.
Police then went out to this rural area of Osceola County and looked for any signs of Maddie there. They spotted locked gates on the east and west sides of the road. After the property owner unlocked them, it was only a few minutes of walking around before they noticed a pair of blue jeans and, ultimately, Madeline’s body. She was found tucked behind a line of bamboo trees off of Hickory Tree Road. The teenager had been found wearing a green hoodie, blue jeans, and white socks, which were clean on the bottom, indicating that she did not walk anywhere on her own. There was also dried grass and hay on top of her body. Since the area where Maddie’s body had been found had been locked and the lock was not tampered with, Stephan would have had to have lifted her body up over some barbed wire and dropped it down before then getting over to the other side himself and moving her body to where it was found. Madeline Soto’s body was then transported to the medical examiner’s office, where it was determined that she had died of strangulation and her manner of death was homicide.
After police found Madeline’s body and they contacted Jennifer to tell her about the latest update, she began to cry. She then handed the phone over to Maddie’s biological father, Tyler, who had arrived from Texas. Apparently, after hearing that his daughter was missing, he had gotten into his truck and driven there, but he had arrived just hours before they found her body.
In April of 2024, Stephan was charged with first-degree murder in connection with Madeline’s death. This was in addition to the over 60 other charges that he was facing due to the ongoing SA of Maddie. The district attorney will be seeking the death penalty against Stephan Sterns. Prior to this, surprisingly, Stephan had only been in trouble with the law due to multiple speeding tickets. But he had definitely been hiding things, because on April 11th, when Stephan’s father was cleaning out a storage unit, he opened up a storage bin and found a hard drive that would normally be kept in a desktop computer. In the same bin was a watch that Stephan had told his father he had in his bedroom. He believed that his son had gained access to the storage unit when he had gone to North Port on February 28th. His father would then give this hard drive over to police, where it was found that there were close to 35,000 images of CP. Maddie was not on any of these, however, and they all appeared to have been from 2020 and prior.
Madeline’s teachers and peers had known that something was wrong with the teenager, they just didn’t know what. One girl knew that Madeline wanted to run away when she turned 13, but had no idea why. Another friend told detectives that Maddie had a meltdown just days prior to her death, and it wasn’t uncommon for Maddie to just break down into tears every few days. One of Maddie’s counselors would also say that the girl had sleepy days often, and she would just come in and lay her head down on the desk; they suspected that she was probably depressed. Another counselor noted that Madeline had said that Stephan made her feel weird and uncomfortable, and that her grades had improved ever since Stephan had officially moved out of the house in December of 2023. Jennifer Soto had actually been married in between her relat-
