“She Was Ice Cold” – The Chilling Phone Call That Changed the Maddie Soto Case
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3 • 791 Ratings
🗓️ 24 March 2025
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this gripping deep dive, we explore the disturbing details surrounding the murder of 13-year-old Madeline “Maddie” Soto and the man accused of killing her—Stephan Sterns. Through newly released 2025 jailhouse phone calls between Sterns and his parents, we hear the chilling moment he admits to finding Maddie’s lifeless body and discusses her death in hauntingly casual terms. With the public now hearing his voice for the first time, Sterns' words paint a disturbing picture of regret, denial, and a fatal awareness of the death penalty he may soon face. This episode examines how those calls flipped the case upside down.
We’ll also break down the latest forensic evidence revealed by investigators, including the cadaver dog alert in Sterns’ car and surveillance footage that prosecutors say disproves his original alibi. Combined with the digital evidence pulled from Sterns’ phone and Google accounts—allegedly containing years of sexually abusive material involving Maddie—the case against him has only grown stronger. Hear how the prosecution is building a timeline they believe proves premeditated murder and how Sterns’ own shifting story may be his downfall.
Finally, we look ahead to the courtroom battles already in motion—from defense motions to suppress key evidence to the fight over whether this capital case should play out in public or behind closed doors. With the murder trial scheduled for later this year and the state pushing hard for the death penalty, the Maddie Soto case continues to unravel in ways no one saw coming. Subscribe now as we bring you inside one of Florida’s most harrowing and high-profile murder investigations.
#StephanSterns, #MaddieSoto, #MaddieSotoCase, #JusticeForMaddie, #TrueCrime2025, #FloridaCrime
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The latest on The Downfall of Diddy, The Trial of Karen Read, The Murder Of Maddie Soto, Catching the Long Island Serial Killer, Awaiting Admission: BTK’s Unconfessed Crimes, Delphi Murders: Inside the Crime, Chad & Lori Daybell, The Murder of Ana Walshe, Alex Murdaugh, Bryan Kohberger, Lucy Letby, Kouri Richins, Malevolent Mormon Mommys, The Menendez Brothers: Quest For Justice, The Murder of Stephen Smith, The Murder of Madeline Kingsbury, The Murder Of Sandra Birchmore, and much more! Listen at https://www.truecrimetodaypod.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a true crime in real time update from True Crime Today and the Hidden Killers podcast. |
| 0:06.9 | She was ice cold, he said. Those were his words. |
| 0:10.9 | Spoken casually into a jailhouse phone like he was describing leftovers gone bad in the fridge. |
| 0:15.7 | But he wasn't. He was talking about a 13-year-old girl, Madeline Soto. |
| 0:22.7 | The child who had gone missing, |
| 0:27.8 | whose face lit up digital billboards and news alerts, whose body was found days later dumped in a remote area of central Florida. And the man saying those words, Stefan Stearns, wasn't just anyone. |
| 0:35.2 | He was her mother's boyfriend. He was the last person confirmed to see |
| 0:39.2 | Maddie alive. And now, according to prosecutors, he's the man who killed her. That phone call, |
| 0:45.3 | one of dozens recorded by the jail and released publicly in 2025, flipped this case on its head. |
| 0:51.3 | What had started as a missing person's investigation spiraled into something so much |
| 0:55.9 | worse. The tapes didn't just contradict his prior statements. They offered a chilling glimpse into a |
| 1:02.2 | man who seemed to be processing the horror he'd caused, not with urgency or remorse, but with a kind of |
| 1:08.2 | eerie, matter-of-fact, resignation. Let's back up just slightly. The jailhouse |
| 1:14.2 | calls were made roughly three months after Stearns was arrested. At that point, he was already |
| 1:19.0 | sitting in the Osceola County Jail, facing dozens of child sex abuse charges. But it wasn't |
| 1:25.5 | until April 24 that he was formally indicted for first-degree murder |
| 1:30.9 | in Maddie's death. Then the state dropped another bomb. They would seek the death penalty. |
| 1:37.8 | Fast forward to early 2025, and prosecutors made the strategic decision to release around four |
| 1:44.1 | hours of recorded phone calls between Stearns and his parents. |
| 1:47.7 | These weren't accidentally leaked. This was intentional. They knew what they were doing, letting the public hear his voice, |
| 1:55.4 | letting the contradictions speak for themselves, because Stearns had already given one version of events to police, that he dropped |
| 2:02.2 | Maddie off at school the morning she disappeared, that he went on with his day as normal, |
... |
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