New documents shed light on the Madeline Soto investigation

Documents and a recorded interview with the accused killer of Kissimmee teen Madeline Soto released in the last week by the State Attorney’s Office shed light on what may have happened the day she went missing—and in years of potential abuse leading up to that.

Stephan Sterns, 37, is charged with first-degree murder in Soto’s death. The state also levied 60 other child sex-charges, including sexual assault on a person under 12 and between 12-18, lewd and lascivious assault and possession of sexual performance materials by a child.

He has trials scheduled to begin for the murder charge on July 16 and another Aug 19 on the other charges. He is scheduled for a pre-trail hearing on all of it on July 10, but he has yet to appear at any of his hearings or scheduled court appearances.

In the recorded interview from Feb. 27—the day after Soto was reported missing from her Hunter’s Creek school, and the day before he was arrested on the first of his charges, Sterns gave a fragmented timeline of the morning she disappeared. He noted they talked about going to McDonald’s on the way to school, but didn’t and that he dropped her off at a church down the road from the school, then tried to visit a vape shop that wasn’t open, so he reportedly returned home at 10 a.m., then left again and returned at 11 a.m.

He spoke of making a grocery store list and going with “her”— logically Madeline’s mother Jennifer Soto, as Madeline would have been at school according to his story. This would speak for the late morning; hours not yet accounted for as law enforcement showed his Lincoln car on Old Hickory Tree Road between 1 and 2 p.m. That is a few miles north and west of where Madeline’s body was discovered on Hickory Tree Road on March 1. During that interview, he talked about cutting around of errands short because he got a flat tire in the area of Oak Street and 192— footage from that day shows he got the flat tire in the Hickory Tree Road area.

Also in that interview, Sterns characterized Madeline as someone “Very dependent on us … I don’t think she’d know what to do if she did run away.” This is contrary to remarks made that said Soto wanted to “Go live in the woods when she turned 13”, which occurred the day before she went missing.

Sterns admits having taken Ativan, a sedative used to treat anxiety, the evening of Feb. 26, to explain his fragmented memory.

The inconsistencies are highlighted in a police report that detailed the investigation, which also showed contents of his phone: contents of a folder on his Google drive that contained, among other things, 1,700 files, a majority of them photos and videos of a minor, believed to be Soto, in different sexual positions. The descriptions in the report became more graphic, and the time stamp on one goes back to when Madeline would have been eight years old.

The report also detailed an interview with Jennifer Soto, who admitted that the three would often sleep in the same bed, and when asked if it was “normal that Stephan and <redacted> to sleep together without her being there, she said yes … Jennifer stated if she needed a good night sleep due to her anxiety, she would ask them to sleep in a different bedroom.”

While Jennifer “did not want to believe” Madeline and Stephan were engaged in sexual activity, she was shown a picture from the Google Drive.

“She said she didn’t recognize anything in the picture, as if she was in denial,” the investigator wrote. “However, she became visibly upset.”