A Monstrous Crime: The Case Of Maddy Middleton
July 26, 2015. 6:08 p.m. A panicked 9-1-1 call comes in from an apartment complex in Santa Cruz, California. A young girl is missing, and her mother is beside herself. She had last been seen riding on her scooter around the complex and she had not been seen since just after 5 p.m. Her mother gave the officers the all-important description: “Eight years old, four foot tall, about 48 pounds, brown hair, wearing a black helmet and a purple dress. Last seen riding a little white scooter. Name: Madison Middleton.” It was now all hands on deck to find the eight-year-old who had seemingly disappeared in the space of a few minutes.
Eight-year-old Madison Middleton, known as Maddie, lived with her mother, Laura. She was an only child, and she, her mother, and father, Michael, were a tight trio. The family lived in the Tannery Arts Center apartment complex, a really unique campus that provides affordable living for families and artists—a place they can live and create art together. In their little community, everyone in the complex was close. They would all create things and spend time together. All the children would hang out in the courtyard and play games. For a young girl that loved all things creative, it was the perfect place for her to grow up. She would often paint little toy animals and create plays and stories with them. She loved to sing, dance, and draw. Her mother, Laura, said, “Maddie was such a generous child, always the first to try and help someone or stand up for someone that was on their own or needed support. She was bright, intuitive, and curious, never without a smile on her face.” Everyone in the apartment complex knew her as “Chatty Maddie,” and she would talk to anyone and everyone, always making friends and entertaining people.
July 26th was a Sunday. Maddie was enjoying the last part of her weekend. Her friend took him over and was now playing a board game with her mom, Laura. Maddie was waiting for them to finish and decided she was going to play with her new present while they wrapped up the game. She had just got a scooter a few days before and couldn’t wait to take it around the courtyard before it got dark. At 4 p.m., she was seen by several neighbors. She was also spotted a few times after this, just riding around and having fun. Occasionally, she stopped to talk to a few of the other children but was happy to be by herself. At 5:07 p.m., she was seen going past some mailboxes. This was the last time anyone saw Maddie. After this, she vanished. Her mother, Laura, thought she might have met another friend and started going door-to-door. There were around 100 apartments in the eight-acre complex, but with each person that answered saying they hadn’t seen her, the panic was mounting. She was nowhere. Officers rapidly descended on the apartments and got to work without hesitation. Her family said that although Maddie was confident, she knew not to wander off by herself, go too far, or talk to people that she didn’t know. So, detectives knew her disappearance was out of character. Despite this, an amber alert was not issued because they said the case did not meet certain criteria. An amber alert is an emergency alert system that sends out information about an endangered missing or abducted child.
“My name is Kirby. I know Kerrville, just look there, okay?” “What can you tell us about what she was doing out here?” “She was writing her brand new scooter; it’s a white razor. She had a black helmet on, she was wearing a purple dress, and she was just happy as could be riding around, you know.” “Did you check with friends to see if she was with them?” “Absolutely. We’ve searched the entire Tannery door-to-door. Officers have gone door-to-door, every loft we’ve looked at cameras; um, we’ve had search parties all night long.” “Is there anyone else? Is there another friend, an adult friend she might have befriended or anything like that?” “Not that I can think of at all.” “Has she—has she ever done anything?” “Nothing, never, never. She’s never left Tannery property. She knows where she’s supposed to can and cannot be here; uh, she was, you know, in the courtyard where she was supposed to be. She came over here and that was the last we saw of her on, uh, surveillance.” “So, where do you go? I mean, I just got to ask, what—you know, how difficult is it knowing that you can’t really do anything? You’re doing what you can, but…” “I already fell apart. Now I’m just in survival mode. I—I can’t explain how difficult this is. Nobody should have to go through this.”
An extensive search was now underway, which included the involvement of the Santa Cruz Police Department, a Santa Cruz Sheriff’s Office search and rescue team, and a canine unit, but it was soon dark and they hadn’t found anything. By 11 a.m. the next day, 50 FBI officers were on the case, going door-to-door in the area and requesting everyone look in their garages and check their bins, gardens, and sheds. By this point, the complex had already been searched top-to-bottom, and the hunt for Maddie was now spreading into the outer areas. “Again, with the latest on the search for a missing eight-year-old Santa Cruz girl. At a news conference earlier this morning, Santa Cruz Police say they’ve expanded their four-and-a-half square mile search area for the missing eight-year-old girl and have called in the FBI, who have additional resources to help. Search crews in orange jackets are fanning out through a large area of Santa Cruz, hoping to find any sign of Madison Middleton. The eight-year-old girl went missing Sunday afternoon. She was last seen by neighbors about five o’clock yesterday afternoon at the Tannery Arts Center. Neighbors have joined in on the search.”
“Just wonderful kid. We would have heard her. She’s—it, I don’t—I don’t get this. Nobody gets this. We would have heard. She was just right here, right here.” Parents heard about the missing trial when they brought their children to a dance class at the Tannery Arts Center. “I mean, it’s tragic. I feel terrible; um, like I was telling my son, I’m hoping that they’re gonna find her. We’re sending positive, happy thoughts that she’s going to come back happy and healthy.” Neighbors immediately began to help look for her and spent all night scouring the area with no luck. “We’re all feeling a little helpless at this point. We’ve been checked all the tents and homeless camps. A lot of us have been up all night. We’ve gone as far as Paradise Park.” Police say there’s no evidence Maddie was forcibly abducted, so they are treating this as a missing person’s case. “We’re not calling this a kidnapping. We’re still early on in our investigation, where we’re calling it—this is—we’re looking for a lost child.”
Late this afternoon, police stopped vehicles entering the Tannery parking lot and looked for any information or signs of missing Madison “Maddie” Middleton. Hundreds of volunteers arrived to search. Police had now received over 1,000 tips, and it was clear to see how much this case had resonated with the public and how much they were trying to help bring her home. As the police approached the 24-hour mark, they decided to refocus their search back inwards. With such a small window of time in which she suddenly vanished, they felt confident that the answers lay in the apartment complex somewhere. They started a more thorough and intense search of the buildings.
Just over a day after the search for Maddie had started, it came to a painful and abrupt end. At 8 p.m. on July 27th, her body was found in a bag inside a recycling bin in the first-floor garage of the apartment complex. “A body believed to be that of eight-year-old Madison Middleton was found in a dumpster almost 24 hours after she disappeared near her home. At 8 p.m. last night, police suddenly herded residents out and pushed everyone onto the street after Maddie’s remains were found below the complex.” “Forensic uh analysis—the autopsy—will determine those results. At this point, we don’t—we don’t know, we just don’t know.”
One of the investigators said everyone’s hearts sank when they found her, but they quickly regrouped as the missing person’s case was now a major homicide investigation. No sooner had this happened, police announced that they had made an arrest. “In Santa Cruz, California, have a 15-year-old boy under arrest in connection with the disappearance and apparent death of an eight-year-old girl.” More shocking still, the suspect lived in the apartment complex, and he was just 15 years old. “Last night, our cameras were there when police took a neighbor into custody. We’ve blurred his image. Yesterday evening, we saw a distraught woman stomping and screaming in the parking lot of the apartment complex where that arrest took place. Neighbors tell us she is the mother of that teen.”
“Approximately 7:55 p.m., a Santa Cruz police detective conducted a secondary and more thorough canvas of the complex, which included the search of a recycle bin located in an enclosure on the first-floor parking structure at the Tannery Arts Center complex. Maddie’s body was located within that recycle bin. I will merely say that Maddie’s body was concealed in a recycle bin in a way that was not obvious or readily apparent. Male juvenile who resides in an apartment on the property upstairs from the location where Maddie’s body was found, and he was nearby when Maddie was located. He was subsequently taken into custody, where he was brought back to the Santa Cruz Police Department and interviewed. Investigators from the Santa Cruz Police Department interviewed this individual into the early, early morning hours this morning; um, and he was subsequently arrested for the murder of Madison Middleton. Additionally, investigators have located evidence that links the suspect to this horrific crime. Appears that she was lured to the suspect’s apartment willingly. Additionally, we’ve determined that Maddie was murdered inside of the suspect’s apartment. We determined that the suspect acted alone and not in concert with anyone else. I would like to thank the members of my staff who worked relentlessly throughout this investigation. Many of them worked 36 hours straight, driven by our desire and hope that we would find Maddie safe. I’m sure all of you can relate to this as a parent myself, or many of you I’m sure are parents; this—this has just been absolutely devastating for me personally and for my staff. You know, my staff is so hopeful that we were going to find her alive. When the news came last night that she was not alive, it was—it was hard.”
At 9:00 p.m. on July 28th, the broken community came together for a vigil. “A lot of people in town and all over have been walking around numb, you know. It’s like that’s how I feel. I feel like I’ve been walking around numb because I couldn’t even imagine if it was somebody that I loved, somebody that I was supposed to.” Because of his age, the teenager’s identity was protected, but all this changed when Santa Cruz County District Attorney Jeff Roselle issued a statement. He announced that they had sufficient evidence against him and he would be charging the teen as an adult, not only for murder but also for kidnapping and sexual assaults. “The law allows under certain circumstances with certain types of offenses a determination as to whether or not you want to charge someone as an adult or whether or not they’re charged as a juvenile. Based on the information that we know at this point, there do appear to be charges that can be filed as an adult and we are absolutely considering that, and these are the type of charges and the type of offenses that are and can be charged also.”
And with this, his name was released. The suspect in custody turned out to be Adrian Jerry Gonzalez, known as AJ, and he had lived in the apartment for the last six years with his mother. It was a bombshell for the neighbors, and the fact that he could have been involved left them shocked. Not knowing any details, everybody at first thought that this must have been an accident and AJ had panicked and tried to cover it up. Everybody described him as likable and polite, often spending time outside with the other children, teaching them how to do yo-yo tricks and play the piano. He even worked as a counselor for the younger children. Everyone loved and trusted him, and this was an unfathomable thing to process. “We love this guy, all of us. If you ask us what you think of him, would tell you he’s an outstanding kid, I pose the child,” one neighbor said. But others argued his social media posts pointed to someone who was far more troubled than anyone had realized, with many of his posts having disturbing captions. It was also said that he had abused his dog years before, and one of his friends had urged him to seek help when he started threatening to jump off of buildings.
What had initially drawn police to AJ that day was that he was watching them intently as they were searching the bins, and the second the officers realized that Maddie was in there, he started to run, despite the fact he wouldn’t have been able to even see what they had found. He had been helping in the searches and involving himself in the investigation from the beginning, asking everyone questions about what they knew and if anyone had heard anything—something that seemed innocuous. But when police questioned him after he ran away, they realized something was very wrong and he did have something to hide. They wouldn’t go into detail about what he had said or what evidence they had uncovered in his apartment, which was likely due to his age and how much they were allowed to reveal.
An examination of Maddie’s body came in the following day, and it was determined that her mouth had been bound with tape. She had been beaten and raped before being strangled and stabbed. It was such a monstrous crime, and what poor Maddie had gone through was horrendous. After being formally interviewed, AJ admitted to what he had done. He said that he had lured Maddie into his apartment by offering her some ice cream. Maddie knew AJ well and trusted him. As she was helping herself to the ice cream, he attacked her from behind. After he bound her and assaulted her, he strangled her before forcing her into the bag she was later found in. As he was doing this, he realized that she was still alive; he subsequently stabbed her in the neck. Medical examiners concluded that she had ultimately died of positional asphyxiation from her position in the recycling bin.
District Attorney Jeff Roselle said, “We are going to bring him to justice. He is looking at life in prison.” He also said that he thought being charged and tried as an adult was the only appropriate course of action and that AJ was a sexual deviant with no place in society. Judge Salazar agreed with Jeff Roselle and determined that AJ’s trial should go through the adult court system instead of the juvenile one. He cited Prop 57, which was passed by voters and allowed judges to decide whether or not a teen should be tried as an adult. AJ entered a plea of not guilty despite his admissions, but his defense team were fighting hard to transfer his case back to juvenile court using the controversial Senate Bill 1391, which had just come into effect. SB 1391 prohibits anyone 14 or 15 years old from being tried as an adult. They also said that the reasons behind why he did what he did stemmed from a tough home and school life and being socially awkward. But people that knew the Gonzalez family said that this was simply not true. His mother, Reggie, had left his father when the relationship had turned violent and her children were her biggest priority. They said that AJ was showered with love and affection and he came from a caring family that had done their best given their situations. They said that although Reggie had battled drug and alcohol issues, she was now clean and doing her best to repair any damage that had been done. The police and prosecution said that numerous people have tougher upbringings than most and this is not the outcome; they said that using his mother and his upbringing as some kind of justification for what he had done was heartbreaking.
Thousands of people signed a petition to stop SB 1391 applying to AJ’s case, but it was in vain when, after much deliberation and appeals by AJ’s defense team, the Supreme Court ruled that his case should be transferred to a juvenile court. “Now, to our top story tonight. The man accused in the brutal assault and killing of eight-year-old Maddie Middleton is back to being tried as a juvenile. California’s Supreme Court rules to uphold a 2018 law preventing juveniles from being tried as adults if the crime happened when they were 14 or 15 years old. Adrian ‘AJ’ Gonzalez was 15 when he allegedly sexually assaulted and killed Middleton at his mother’s Santa Cruz apartment in 2015. For the last several years, Gonzalez has been in the adult system in custody at the Santa Cruz County Jail.”
“Absolutely disappointing,” were the words from the family of Maddie Middleton. Thursday morning, California’s Supreme Court voted to uphold Senate Bill 1391 in the case of OG versus the Superior Court of Ventura County, which states 14 and 15-year-olds cannot be transferred to adult court. “We are extremely disappointed; um, and I’ve spoke to some of the family members and they are absolutely devastated.” “Not a person based on all the evidence we heard in nine weeks from experts throughout the state—that is not somebody who’s going to be safe to be released in juvenile hall. He responded very well to the programming, the services, the support, um, in the structure of the hall. Kids can get treatment and aren’t just thrown away into an adult prison where they’re going to learn very bad habits.” This was met with huge backlash, and the community were horrified that something so awful could happen to someone so vulnerable and be met with potentially just a few years in prison. Judge Salazar also expressed his feelings, saying that his hands were tied by the change in the law and that he had no choice. He said, “Allowing all 14 and 15-year-olds accused of first-degree murder and other violent offenses to remain in the juvenile court is not promoting public safety because not all of them can be safely rehabilitated.”
Following this decision, in April 2021, Adrian Jerry Gonzalez changed his plea. “Todd’s story tonight, a major development in the murder case of eight-year-old Madison ‘Maddie’ Middleton. Today in court, the suspect, Adrian ‘AJ’ Gonzalez, pleaded guilty to all charges. He finally pleaded guilty to six felony counts, including the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Maddie.” More than five years prior before his sentencing, AJ said he hoped that the family would forgive him one day. “I understand there is very little I can say after all the pain and suffering I have caused. My goal is to work on my issues so no one else has to experience what you have endured. I’m aware that does not change the fact that I have brought you tragedy, loss, and devastation. I am hopeful that when I take the time to apologize that you may accept my apologies for the actions that I have done and what they have brought you.”
He said Maddie’s father, Michael, said he has accepted his daughter’s loss and that he has forgiven AJ. “That doesn’t make anything easier. It just allows me peace. The alternative could be to hold to the darkness, but this would only consume my soul. I refuse to poison my soul in existence. Forgiveness is the only path, and I believe that Madison would agree,” he gracefully said. Laura said her daughter’s death left her suffering with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, resulting in her being unable to work. Even AJ’s attorney expressed his relief that this was all coming to an end so that Maddie’s family did not have to go through any more than what they already had. In the adult court system, AJ was facing 126 years to life in prison, but the juvenile court system gave a very different sentence.
“Good evening, our top story tonight, people gathering outside the Santa Cruz County Courthouse earlier today, protesting the sentencing. Under California law, Gonzalez must be sentenced here as a juvenile. Gonzalez was 15, almost 16 years old when he killed Maddie Middleton. Because of that, because he was a child at the time of the murder, he will be released in just four years when he turns 25.” Judge Salazar imposed the maximum sentence he possibly could given the circumstances. The law as it stands now determined that AJ’s maximum term of confinement ends when he turns 25. This will be in October 2024. There is no guarantee he’ll be released in 2024, however, as the court can be petitioned to extend his time. Although District Attorney Jeff Roselle said he sadly believes it might be, “I think it’s likely he will be out at 25, and I think it’s an absolute travesty of justice, and I think it’s unsafe for the community,” he said.
“The bottom line is certain changes need to be made in juvenile justice, juvenile reform, of course, but one-size-fits-all legislation that takes no account at all for people like Adrian. We had experts who said they had never, ever seen anybody present like him, ever, in a 30-year career as a child psychologist. Never. Anybody who thinks that this person is going to be healthy and fixed and able to come out into society at the age of 25 is mistaken.” AJ must also register for life as a sex offender and pay $22,000 in restitution fees. Maddie’s grandfather, Dan, said that the sentencing ignores all the evidence pointing towards him being a danger to society. He also predicts that SB 1391 will have dire consequences for future cases. “It’s terrifying that most likely will be released in 25. This law affects not only my family and our community here but anyone else who suffered a crime in the hands of a juvenile. And I believe in reform in the system for juveniles and adults. This wasn’t a crime of robbery or drugs. This—this was a sociopathic murder. All the experts have testified that AJ is unlike any they’ve seen before, and he’s the next Edmund Kemper. So all of us should be terrified.”
“How do you want the public to remember your daughter?” “Well, Madison was the love of my life. She brought joy to everyone she met. She was charming, she was brilliant, she was creative, artistic, loving. She loved animals, especially dogs and wolves, very playful. She could hold her own with adults; she wasn’t afraid of anything. It was beautiful, um, loving, um, and she’s gone, but at least I’ll know she’ll always be a perfect little eight-year-old, and, uh, I miss her.”
An unlikely bond was formed between Laura and AJ’s mum, Reggie, during the ordeal. Reggie was devastated that her son would do this, and neighbors would frequently see her crying at Maddie’s memorial. Laura would often sit with her, hugging her, telling her she wasn’t to blame. She said, “I just love her, and we both lost our children that day. That’s the tragic truth. I don’t fault her.” More pain would soon come for the grieving family. Maddie’s father carried her ashes around with him inside his car so that she could stay close to him, but the family were left devastated when someone broke into the car and stole them. They have sadly never been recovered.
Maddie was from such a tight community who continued to honor her name and her memory through arts and creative works. She loved animals, but wolves especially, and a wolf sound sculpture was made for her on a beach near her home. The Rio Theater put her name up outside, and paintings done by the artists that lived in the apartment were also put up everywhere. A celebration of life was also held where hundreds turned up, and the Mayor, Don Lane, commemorated her life by declaring October 5th, 2015, as “Madison Middleton Day,” her birthday.
The family also founded “MCASC,” Maddie Child Angel of Santa Cruz. Their motto is: “Before you go, let someone know.” The aim is to educate children and parents about safety and protection. Tannery Arts Center apartment complex has never been the same since, and probably never will be. The little community everyone had worked so hard to form, once so close and safe, has been changed forever. Laura said that Maddie was the light and love of her life and brought so much joy to so many people. She was growing up beautifully, bright, perky, fun, and generous of heart. “She was the best thing I ever made.”
