Stephan Sterns pleaded no contest to murder and guilty to sex crimes on Monday in the repeated sexual abuse and death of 13-year-old Madeline Soto.
Sterns was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on the murder charges and life in prison for the sex crime charges. In exchange, he avoided the death penalty he might have received had he been convicted of first-degree murder at trial.
The plea comes a day before Sterns, who was dating Madeline’s mother and lived with them at their apartment in Kissimmee, was set to face a jury in a trial beginning this week for the sex crimes. That would have been the first of two trials, the second being for Madeline’s murder later this year.
As part of his guilty plea, Sterns admitted to 20 of the 60 charges against him, including accusations that he had sexually battered Madeline since she was 11.
Sterns sat in court on Monday in chains and wearing his orange jumpsuit, staring forward throughout most of the proceeding. Jennifer Soto, the mother who became an online pariah despite not being accused of criminal wrongdoing, was not in the courtroom. Instead, relatives and loved ones spoke on Madeline’s behalf.
Speaking before Judge Keith Carsten ahead of Sterns’ sentence, they described a little girl, known lovingly as “Maddie,” who had just turned 13 before she was killed. She enjoyed art, was a talented singer with a trademark laugh and a lover of sour gummy candies. She also was learning Spanish with a roommate who lived with her and her mother.
Losing Madeline, her loved ones said, left a void that, a year and a half later, cannot be filled.
“Sometimes it’s hard for me to close my eyes because I can still hear her laughter — it was a free, sweet and sincere laugh, one that I will never forget for as long as I live,” her maternal grandmother, Yolanda Zambrano, said in a letter read in court by prosecutor William Jay. “That laughter was silenced by a horrific act by the very man who betrayed her trust, her innocence, her body, and if that wasn’t enough damage he took her life. And with her, he killed a piece of our souls.”
She continued, “Every time I think about everything she could have been, everything that was stolen from her, it hurts even more. Because Maddie wasn’t just a victim, she was a little girl with a beautiful future, with a unique light, with so much love to give and receive.”
Sterns’ guilty plea to the sex crimes did not include admitting the possession of child sexual abuse material, comprised of scores of videos and images investigators said were found on his cellphone and Google accounts and formed the basis of the case against him.
Ahead of the trial, his public defender failed to have that material excluded from evidence after Judge Keith Carsten, who handed Sterns’ sentence, disagreed that investigators obtained it illegally.
Sterns’ murder trial had been set for September.
Sterns was arrested days after Madeline was reported missing on Feb. 26, 2024, once his initial story that he dropped the teen off at Hunters Creek Middle School that morning quickly fell apart after investigators searched his phone. Rather than driving her to school, according to investigators from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and Kissimmee Police Department, Sterns trashed her belongings in a dumpster and drove to and from St. Cloud.
Surveillance video also purportedly showed the teen’s body slumped lifeless in a passenger seat. She was found days later, abandoned on a property in St. Cloud and buried beneath a pile of brush.
Tyler Wallace, her father who flew from Texas to be at the hearing, said Madeline was considering living with him following her 13th birthday, which was four days before her disappearance.
“I was this close to having my little girl next to me,” he said. “Because of the actions of depraved man, I will never meet the woman she has become.”
Addressing Sterns personally, he added: “I can’t grasp the selfishness of you, the deplorability of your actions. You’re depraved. You’re weak. You’re a coward. You’re a sneak-thief. You crept into a family and took advantage and exploited them. It’s torn my family apart.”
Before the hearing ended, Sterns spoke before the court, saying he “prayed to God countless times to trade places with her, to take me instead, but unfortunately that’s not how he works.”
“I apologize for the pain,” he said.
He then stood up and went to a corner of the courtroom, where he signed some papers and gave courtroom deputies his fingerprints.
Deputies ushered him out of the courtroom to begin what will be the rest of his life behind bars.
