Accused killer of girl found dead

Sandra Chereb

Monday, Jan. 29, 2001 | 10:48 a.m.

MINDEN -- An autopsy was expected to provide some clues into the death of an accused pedophile on trial for the rape and killing of a 9-year-old Lake Tahoe girl.

Thomas Soria Sr., who just turned 40, was not breathing when he was found by sheriff's deputies around 5 a.m. Sunday during a routine check of his jail cell, Douglas County District Attorney Scott Doyle said. Efforts to revive him were unsuccessful.

Doyle said there were no visible signs of trauma.

Soria was being held in a medical isolation unit because of the charges pending against him, Doyle said. He added Soria was on medication but he did not have details on the type of drugs he was taking.

Soria, a former computer technician who moved to Lake Tahoe from Sacramento in January 1999, was on trial for the killing of Krystal Steadman.

The South Lake Tahoe, Calif., fourth grader disappeared March 19 from a Stateline apartment complex where Soria lived and where her mother, Elizabeth Steadman, was visiting her boyfriend.

The little girl's nude, battered body was found the next day down an embankment along U.S. 50, about 20 miles from where she vanished. She was sexually assaulted and her throat was slashed numerous times with a serrated blade.

Testimony in Soria trial began Friday after a week of jury selection. He faced a possible death sentence if convicted.

Prosecutors described him as a man obsessed with sex who kept a lurid computer file detailing fantasies of brutalizing his victims.

According to court records, Soria wrote of how he wanted to terrorize young blonde women and girls because that was the "only way a woman like that would ever have sex with me."

The state's key witness was Soria's son, Thomas Soria Jr., who admitted to luring the little girl into the Soria apartment and said he did so at his father's beckoning.