Parents Accused Of Kidnapping

For months Steven and Marlene Aisenberg went on talk shows, including "Oprah." Their baby, five month old Sabrina, was missing, they said, kidnapped from their suburban Tampa home. They wanted help. They begged for help. CBS Correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports on the incredible turn this case has taken.

There was an international land and water search for Sabrina, but secretly investigators didn't buy the story. Some thought the parents lacked a certain anguish.

And, there was a video of Sabrina, which showed a bald spot police thought was an injury to the child's head. After waiting almost two years hoping for better evidence, a federal grand jury decided to indict the couple not for murder, but for lying.

The couple were not charged with murder or kidnapping.

The Aisenbergs were in court Thursday when a prosecutor told a judge: "The baby is in fact dead. They knew that and had some hand in it."

Assistant U.S. Attorney Rachelle Des Vaux Bedke made the statement in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Md., as the couple appeared before a magistrate-judge on a seven-count indictment returned earlier in the day in Florida.

"If they have evidence to support a murder charge they should charge them with murder," said Barry Cohen, the Aisenbergs' Tampa attorney. "It's not supported by any evidence."

The Aisenbergs also were accused of substituting a picture of their older daughter Monica, now 6, for Sabrina for use on billboards to draw attention to the search for the missing child.

The same picture was used by the Missing Child Help Center in mailings nationwide urging Americans to be on the lookout for the kidnapped baby.

Bedke also said Aisenberg was heard telling his wife: "I wish I hadn't harmed her. It was the cocaine." Cohen said Aisenberg is not a drug user.

It turns out that the FBI was making tapes. According to the indictment, a month after reporting Sabrina missing, Marlene said to Steven "the baby is dead and buried. It was found dead because you did it." Steven answers. "Honey, there was nothing I could do about it. We need to discuss the way that we can beat the charge."

The actual offenses in this indictment seem minor: for example, Marlene changing her story to investigators about what she was wearing that day. Because police never found Sabrina's body, a horrendous case of possible abuse and murder is now just a case of misleading the FBI.