Was Justice Served for Madeline Soto?
By Robert A. Waters
"I'm pretty sure this was all an accident. I'm not sure that any one person [is to blame]. Maybe no one's to blame or everyone's to blame a little bit." Stephan Sterns speaking about how Madeline Soto (pictured) died. NOTE: It wasn't no one's fault or everyone's fault, it was Sterns and Sterns alone who murdered her.
It's hard to say who was running the asylum in Kissimmee, Florida.
There was Jennifer Soto. She rarely worked and when she did, she had to make sure she didn't earn enough so that her disability payments would be revoked. The asylum was a pill dump--everyone in the "family" of three seemed to be overly-medicated much of the time. Jenn, as she liked to be called, took sleeping pills for comfort. If she didn't want to face a problem, why not gulp down a benzodiazepine or two? She also had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. That required additional meds. Drugs were everywhere in the home.
The "family" lived in a 2200 square foot townhouse. It had four bedrooms. Jenn's father owned the place and even his daughter was forced to pay rent to live there. There were two female renters in the rooms upstairs. There was one kitchen that everyone used and a bathroom on each floor.
The whole situation invited chaos.
Madeline Soto, Jennifer's daughter, had a make-shift bedroom she rarely used. A teenager, she still slept with Jenn, and sometimes Jenn and Stephan. On the night she was murdered, Jenn sent Maddie upstairs to sleep with her boyfriend while she (Jenn) slept. So what could go wrong?
Maddie's father lived a thousand miles away in Texas. So she had gown up in the chaos. She had fought her way through 13 years, being force-fed pills just to exist. Like mother, like daughter. Jennifer claimed that Madeline had ADHD--attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Due to the drugs Jennifer gave her, Madeline sometimes could not stay awake in class.
On Sunday, February 22, Madeline went to her grandmother's house to celebrate her 13th birthday. (Her mother had to work that day and couldn't attend.) Maddie came home in the late afternoon to find her mother's boyfriend waiting.
Stephan Sterns, 37, was a sneaky little hustler. He lived upstairs in Room 4. Like Jenn, he almost never worked. He bragged to her that at any time he could manipulate his parents into giving him money. And if they wouldn't hand over the cash, he would steal it, he said. He had actually stolen his father's Rolex watch. Sterns' parents lived two hours away. Sterns loved vaping, and playing Warhammer games and wearing his cap backward like a 1980s teenaged nerd. He seemed to think he looked cool. He collected trading cards and figurines, Tamagotchis and Battletech. He was so creepy that almost everyone of Jenn's friends who met him warned her to get him out of her life.
But for some reason, she ignored the advice.
Like Jenn and Maddie, Sterns took medication to sleep and for anxiety.
He had a secret. A dark deadly secret that had festered for years inside Room 4. The room was equipped with several inside door locks so no one would find out the secret. For at least five years, Sterns had been raping Maddie. Sometimes he doubled her sleeping pills so he could molest her while she was unconscious. Other times, he blackmailed her into succumbing to his dark desires. Or he would tell her he loved her, playing on her naivete to form an emotional pathway for sexual exploitation.
Shortly after Maddie returned from her party, Sterns strangled her to death. Panicking, he drove her body around for hours looking for a place to dump it. Eventually, he found a row of out-of-the-way bamboo trees on private property off Hickory Tree Road in Osceola County. Five days after Maddie went missing, cops found her remains there.
In this era of amateur YouTube detectives, millions of viewers across the world learned details about Maddie's case. (I'm not putting the YouTubers down, just stating a fact.)
After recovering Maddie's body, Kissimmee PD took the lead in the investigation. Detectives had already arrested Sterns on 60 counts of sexual battery, molestation and child pornography. In addition to 1,700 images of Maddie being violated in every way possible, cops found a hard drive owned by Sterns that contained 35,000 images of random sexual acts with children. While the original charges consisted of Sterns raping Maddie, the 35,000 images on the hard drive were likely picked up off the internet. Cops think those images may have been bought and sold. Since Sterns rarely worked but always seemed to have cash to buy expensive figurines, many have conjectured that he sold those vile images via the internet.
A few weeks after Maddie's body was found, Sterns was charged with first degree murder. Prosecutors said they planned to seek the death penalty.
But the court cases never got that far. The prospect of 12 jurors watching 1,700 images of Maddie being raped was too much even for Sterns. Had he allowed those images to be seen, he wouldn't have a chance in prison. His lawyers persuaded him to plead guilty. In that way, he could avoid the death penalty and no one else would view the horrific things he did to Maddie.
On July 21, 2025, Sterns pleaded no contest to the murder charge and guilty to many of the sex abuse charges. He was sentenced to something like 20 life sentences with no chance for parole.
One major question remains. What caused Sterns to murder Maddie? Even after pleading "no contest" for her murder, he never told the reason.
Many theories have emerged. Some analysts say he "outgrew" her. According to this theory, molesters have a certain age preference. Maddie no longer looked like a child. She was a teenager fast becoming an adult. Did that turn Stephan off? Possibly. Would it have made him kill her? I doubt it.
It's more likely that Maddie threatened to expose her abuser. She had told friends that when she turned 13 she planned to go "live in the woods." That may have been a coded way of saying she wanted to end the abuse. I can imagine a scenario of Maddie confronting Sterns. Social scientists who study domestic violence have determined that ending a relationship can be a very dangerous time. What if Maddie informed Sterns that she planned to tell her mom about the hell she had suffered over the years. He knew the end of Maddie's silence would mean he would be imprisoned for life. In his mind, that could never happen. So the only viable alternative for him to continue his life as he knew it would be to murder his long-time victim.
One other scenario strikes me as plausible. What if Maddie was pregnant? Or maybe she thought she was pregnant? It is possible that Maddie had been brainwashed into thinking she was in a romantic relationship with Sterns. While this is despicable to think about, it's happened before.
According to one of Maddie's girlfriends at school, they kept track of their periods together. They had started menstruating about the same time so they talked about it occasionally. Approximately two months before she was murdered, her friend told detectives that Maddie's periods had stopped. She may have told Sterns she was pregnant with his child. While she might have been ecstatic about having his baby, he would have been crushed. He knew the end had come. Murder, as Sterns saw it, was the only option.
One other fact supports this theory.
Cops found emails on the phones of Maddie and Sterns in which she pressured him to buy "mom," "dad," and "baby" tokens.
If Maddie was indeed pregnant, the information isn't likely to be released any time soon. But those tokens are certainly intriguing.
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