By GRAHAM BRINK and SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 10, 2001

Bugging a home is rare, so rare that the lead detectives in the Sabrina Aisenberg case had no experience doing it.

Three weeks after Sabrina vanished, the Sheriff's Office decided bugging was the way to go. They had no physical evidence, and Steve and Marlene Aisenberg had hired a top lawyer and were no longer talking.

With a bug, they hoped to catch the couple on tape talking about what had happened to Sabrina.

First, though, they needed a judge's permission. A bug is considerably more intrusive than a wiretap, which lets police overhear telephone conversations; a bug lets them eavesdrop on everything, even a husband and wife in their bedroom.

Strict standards must be met before courts will allow electronic eavesdropping: The crime under investigation must be from a select list of serious offenses; police must demonstrate that other, less intrusive methods have failed or are likely to fail; and they must show that they have good reason to suspect the people they want to bug.

Sheriff's Cpl. Bill Knowles, a deputy for 27 years, drew up the application for a bug. He neatly summarized the evidence pointing to the couple's guilt:

The Aisenbergs didn't ask questions about the investigation, and their aloof behavior seemed at odds with their infant getting snatched in the middle of the night. Marlene seemed too calm in the background of the 911 tape as she talked to an "unknown party" on another phone line.

During the first few days of the investigation, the Aisenbergs retreated to their bedroom several times to "avoid" law enforcement, Knowles wrote. Brownie the dog barked at everyone who came in the house (in other words, had there been an intruder, the dog would have made a racket). Detectives noticed little baby food, few diapers and a "lack of photographs" of Sabrina, signs that the Aisenbergs did not love or care for her properly.

Knowles backed it all up with FBI statistics showing that caregivers are to blame in 92 percent of similar cases.

Knowles' application went up the line, reviewed by the detectives, their supervisors and FBI agent Kerry Myers, a lawyer who was the lead federal investigator on the Sabrina case.

The 26-page document painted a convincing picture. But several oversights, inaccuracies and assumptions undermined its authority and later became fodder for defense attorney Barry Cohen.

In contrast to Knowles' version, the 911 tape reveals Marlene crying hysterically; the "unknown party" is clearly her mother. The sheriff's crime scene photos and videotape show diapers scattered throughout the home, including in Sabrina's bedroom. According to a Publix receipt the Aisenbergs produced, Marlene bought four jars of Beech-Nut baby food and a box of Beech-Nut oatmeal cereal the day before Sabrina disappeared.

That the Aisenbergs "retreated" to their bedroom could mean they were guilty people plotting strategy, but it could just as easily have an innocent explanation: With FBI agents and sheriff's detectives in their home around the clock, the couple "retreated" to the bedroom for some private time.

Knowles stated that detectives had "tried or considered" other police methods.

But they had not thoroughly interviewed the couple's friends and relatives. They had not checked the Aisenbergs' bank accounts for evidence that the couple sold the baby. They had not finished examining physical evidence seized from the home.

Friday, Dec. 12, 1997, 18 days after Sabrina vanished, detectives Linda Burton and William Blake took an oath at the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office and said the information in the bugging application was accurate.

In many jurisdictions, prosecutors help police draft probable cause affidavits for electronic surveillance. But in Hillsborough, then-State Attorney Harry Lee Coe III gave police carte blanche.

As supervisor of electronic surveillance for Coe, Assistant State Attorney Eric Myers was responsible for making sure police probable cause affidavits were accurate.

He read the Aisenberg application but asked few questions of the detectives. He didn't ask to see the crime-scene photos. He didn't ask to listen to the 911 tape. He didn't correct several grammatical errors in the affidavit (one sentence, about how long the surveillance would last, concludes: "... it shall continue until communications are intercepted reveal the details of the disappearance of Sabrina Paige Aisenberg, the location of any physical evidence.")

Myers signed off on the paperwork and passed it to Coe, who gave it his blessing.

Myers and the two detectives took the application to Circuit Judge F. Dennis Alvarez. No stranger to politics, the silver-haired Alvarez had served as chief judge in Hillsborough since 1988.

Alvarez knew Myers and the detectives from previous cases. He knew Blake from two judicial campaigns in the early 1980s when the detective served as Alvarez's campaign treasurer. Five years later, when Blake applied for a job at the Sheriff's Office, he listed Alvarez as a personal reference. (Alvarez says the relationship did not influence any of his decisions.)

Blake and Burton again said under oath that the application was true. Alvarez initialed each page of the application and, about 30 minutes after the meeting began, signed it.

The Sabrina task force had its bugs.

* * *

Saturday, Dec. 13, 1997.

With dozens of law enforcement officers still in and out of the Aisenbergs' home, it was no problem for one of them to plant a bug in the bedroom. Another was hidden in the kitchen.

The devices, less than an inch long, retail for about $5,000. They include a transmitter and a hearing-aid type microphone. The "parasitic" bugs suck power from a home's phone or electrical lines and can pick up conversations from 20 or more feet away.

The task force set up a listening post at a bureau of the Sheriff's Office. The monitors rolled three tape recorders during each conversation. Blue stickers marked tapes that picked up bedroom conversations, red stickers for the kitchen. Mounted to a power pole outside the home, a video camera fed the post simultaneous footage of anyone coming or going.

The monitors worked from 7 a.m. to midnight. They were instructed to listen for evidence of homicide or child abuse. They rolled the tapes for two minutes at a time. If they heard a pertinent conversation, they kept rolling. If not, they were to shut them off for "60 seconds or so" before making another spot check.

They wrote a brief synopsis of each recording in a log, then handwrote transcripts of pertinent conversations. They quickly found the sound quality poor. Some of the tapes had been recorded on before, making them more difficult to hear.

To fill in the gaps, monitors would listen to the tapes again and again. The detectives would fix misquotes, and after dozens of reruns, they would jot down new, pertinent conversations.

An example: At 10:41 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 28, 1997, Steve and Marlene were picked up on the bedroom bugging device.

Monitor Miguel Diaz could not make out specific words or phrases, but Marlene sounded like she was crying. He marked the conversation as pertinent.

Headphones on, monitor Jussara Olmeda transcribed the tape during the next shift. She used a foot pedal to rewind and replay the tape, again and again. When she was done, Olmeda had pieced together a damning quote from Marlene:

"I hate, I hate, I hate you for what you did to our tiny daughter."

* * *

Because of the invasive nature of bugging a home, warrants come with a 30-day time limit. To keep the tapes rolling, Maj. Gary Terry's detectives needed to convince the judge that they were making headway.

Cpl. Knowles wrote the application for a 30-day extension, which focused on the "pertinent conversations" recorded the first month.

One paragraph suggested they had caught the Aisenbergs talking about money they got for selling the baby. Another insinuated the couple had been caught on tape plotting to cover up abusing their kids.

According to the application, Steve told Marlene to keep quiet and not to leak information, even to their friends and family. He was also quoted saying, "They belong without you, you, oh my God, we pulled her clothes off, we, I," and, "Our tiny baby didn't suffer because of your ..."

The application said Marlene had been captured lamenting that she didn't like lying to her father; scheming to provide a false suspect to the investigators; and asking Steve, "What if they check the shed?"

The coup de grace was Marlene's comment, slightly reworded: "I hate you, I hate you for what you did to our tiny daughter."

Friday, Jan. 9, 1998, Burton and Blake presented the incriminating tableau to Assistant State Attorney Myers.

One of the rules governing the bugging was that detectives were required to supply Myers with daily copies of the monitors' logs. The detectives did not do that, nor did Myers ask to see them.

He knew some of the tapes were so difficult to hear that Terry had sent them to the FBI lab to erase background noise. Even so, Myers thought the application to extend the bugging was solid. It said detectives had captured the Aisenbergs virtually confessing; they just needed more of the same to bolster the case.

A judge must approve every bugging extension, as a check to protect the public against arbitrary invasions by the government. The detectives didn't offer to let Judge Alvarez hear the tapes himself, and he didn't feel it necessary. The quotes were the quotes, he thought. Hearing them wouldn't make them any more or less damning.

Alvarez signed off on the application. The detectives had another 30 days.

* * *

As the mystery built, the tabloids, morning TV chat shows and talk radio set the spin for the Sabrina story. They portrayed the Aisenbergs as a privileged Jewish couple from the suburbs (never missing a chance to mention their silver Cadillac) stonewalling the police, hiding behind their $350-an-hour lawyer.

Adding to the negative spin, TV cameras had caught the Aisenbergs smiling as they climbed into a police cruiser the evening after Sabrina vanished. Hardly anyone bought Barry Cohen's explanation that Detective Burton had made them smile by joking about running over one of the TV photographers. It all seemed familiar -- Tampa Bay's own John and Patsy Ramsey, minus some of the glitz.

Radio host Bubba the Love Sponge weighed in with a rap song:

Aisenberg story seems a little funky.

Smells a little too fishy, smells a little skunky.

That's because it's all lies.

Don't believe a word of this, her mother's phony cries.

The PR beating put Cohen into spin control. To restore the couple's image, he paid $4,583 to the former FBI polygraph examiner who cleared Richard Jewell of the Olympic bombing in Atlanta. Cohen called a news conference to announce that the examiner had cleared the Aisenbergs of wrongdoing.

Armed with the results (but not the polygraph charts, which Cohen refused to make public), the lawyer took his clients on a full-tilt media blitz. After shunning reporters for weeks, they made pleas for Sabrina's return on Good Morning America, Today, the Oprah Winfrey Show and Larry King Live.

Cohen's investigator, Kevin Kalwary, helped prep the Aisenbergs for their appearances and told producers which questions the Aisenbergs would answer and which should be asked of Cohen.

On Oprah, retired Boston police detective Peter O'Malley was presented as the lead investigator on the Charles Stuart case. In 1989, Stuart said a black man shot him and murdered his pregnant wife, but Stuart had done it himself.

O'Malley said it troubled him that Steve and Marlene had hired a lawyer. "If it was me, I would be on the policeman's step every morning, asking him a thousand questions, ask him who they talked to, what did they find out."

Steve answered that they hired a lawyer only because detectives had been so accusatory. "First we're looking at the biggest nightmare of our lives, and then we're asked to believe the next hardest thing that we could believe, that our spouse, or one of us, would be implicated in it. And so we felt the need to talk to somebody."

Another guest on Oprah was Marc Klaas, whose 12-year-old daughter Polly was abducted from her bedroom and murdered in 1993. Like Steve and Marlene, he had been treated like a suspect, interrogated, polygraphed. He hated it, but he said he answered every last question the police asked, hoping something he said would help bring Polly home. "It's not fair, but you have to be strong," he said.

The camera zoomed in on Marlene, as Klaas finished his lecture. "If a parent's not going to be out there fighting for their child, why should anybody else?"

Winfrey's closing comments played it right down the middle. "I believe there is a higher judgment than any of us could ever render or any court could ever render," she said. "And I pray to God that you are telling us all the truth."

Cohen hoped the national appearances would help the public see the Aisenbergs as the loving parents he knew, raised in tight-knit, working class families, who met at the University of Maryland and had their first date at a mall.

Cohen took advantage of the national exposure to ratchet up his critique of the cops. Complaining they had ignored the intruder side of the story, he called them amateurish and told them how to follow leads, collect evidence and do interviews.

He told Terry the case reminded him of the movie My Cousin Vinny, where a small-town Alabama sheriff twists an innocent comment by a college kid and charges him with murder. The case unravels.

"The purpose of your detectives should be not to take shortcuts, not to try to undermine the Aisenbergs' counsel, not to try to find facts that support the conclusion that they have prematurely reached," Cohen wrote in one of many stinging letters to Terry.

Terry and other sheriff's spokesmen suggested that Cohen had misrepresented the investigation. On national TV, they said the Aisenbergs were not cooperating, that they refused to meet for an interview without Cohen's preconditions and, contrary to Cohen's assertion, Marlene's polygraph tests were not both inconclusive. Terry made it clear the couple remained under a cloud of suspicion.

Spin aside, the Sabrina case had become a morass. The FBI crime lab hadn't turned up trace evidence tying the Aisenbergs to a crime. No snitches had come forward. Rumors that they were having affairs or that Sabrina had an Asian or Hispanic father led nowhere.

The inquiry into the possibility they sold the baby out of financial desperation fizzled, too, after the FBI found nothing unusual about the couple's tax returns, bank records and credit reports. They earned about $65,000 a year, depending on Steve's real estate commissions, and had a monthly mortgage of $949 on their $117,600 home.

In police circles, stretching the truth to get a search warrant or omitting facts to fit a theory is not uncommon. Defense lawyers even have a name for the practice: "Testilying." People inside the system often forgive it as just something cops do to get the bad guys.

In the Aisenberg case, the detectives already had fudged; now they went farther. The detectives set out to discredit Cohen's image of the Aisenbergs as caring and devoted parents -- and to expose them as child abusers who killed their baby.

No matter how hard they tried, though, they couldn't get over the first hurdle: finding an eyewitness to say Sabrina was abused.

* * *

Sabrina Paige was born 11 days early, on June 27, 1997. She weighed 7 pounds 4 ounces and had a slight case of jaundice and dark hair like a fluffy duckling. Some people thought she had a "lazy eye," where the muscles of one eye didn't move in conjunction with the other.

Sabrina's brother and sister sent out the announcements and handed out bubble-gum cigars to their relatives. The Aisenbergs took her to Disney World when she was 3 months old.

Like her father, Sabrina had a minor heart murmur. Her initial neonatal screening revealed a low T4 count, an indicator of hypothyroidism, which if left untreated can lead to mental retardation. In late October and early November 1997, she battled a skin rash and ear infections that drained a yellow-green fluid.

Two weeks before Sabrina disappeared, the Aisenbergs said the pediatrician found her alert and healthy. The earaches had improved with antibiotics. A follow-up test revealed no sign of developmental disabilities. She was gaining weight and had started to eat oatmeal and fruit. She was just beginning to crawl.

Marlene told an FBI agent she could understand why someone would take her baby: She wasn't fussy and rarely cried.

From the start, Detective Burton didn't buy the idyllic story. She had noted the messy home, scattered toys and lack of baby photos as possible signs of neglect. The medical records suggested that despite Sabrina's ear infection, her parents skipped two doctor appointments in the two weeks before she disappeared. Contrary to what Marlene said about the baby never being fussy, Burton thought, an "extremely serious ear infection" would have left Sabrina irritable and uncomfortable.

Then there was the 4 1/2-minute video of Sabrina crawling on the floor in her pink outfit. Marlene took it two days before she vanished.

Burton thought the video was odd. She had noticed from Day 1 a patch of thin hair on Sabrina's head. When the detective asked about it, Marlene said the baby's hair got stuck in "the crusty stuff behind her ears."

Also from the video, Burton thought dark spots on Sabrina's face might be bruises. In some of the frames, she had half-moons under her eyes. But when she turned toward the light, the moons went away, suggesting they were only shadows. Her brother William and a playmate displayed the same half-mooning when they appeared next to Sabrina in the video.

The Sheriff's Office wasn't convinced.

A lab at Disney World had blown up still photos from the video. Burton and Detective Blake showed the photos to a pediatrician, Dr. Laleh Bahar-Posey, who said it was possible the dark spots were bruises, but she couldn't be sure.

In their application to extend the bugging of the Aisenberg home, the Sheriff's Office turned Posey's tentative assessment into a strong accusation: "Doctor Posey in her expert opinion concluded that hair had been pulled out of the left side of the baby's head and the area around the left eye was bruised."

The detectives drove Posey and two other doctors to the Disney lab to view the video. Posey and another doctor concluded the baby might be bruised, but they weren't sure. The third said she was certain the baby was bruised.

The investigators did not tell the doctors that 15 witnesses who saw Sabrina within a day or two of her disappearance all said she looked fine; none mentioned abuse.

Detectives had three theories that might explain "the crusty stuff" behind Sabrina's ear.

No. 1: Marlene neglected the baby. She didn't bathe her well, among other things. Theory No. 2: Sabrina's ear infection hadn't been treated properly. And No. 3: The baby had been hit so hard upside the head that her eardrum perforated, spilling fluid that turned "crusty" behind her ear.

Witnesses said that to prove one of these scenarios, detectives fed them information or tried to bully them into changing their stories.

"I was becoming somewhat intimidated," said Carla Kussner, an accountant who knew Marlene only casually. "It was just so noticeable to me that they were directing me to respond in a way that would -- would satisfy them."

The pressure didn't stop at the witnesses. On Wednesday, Jan. 21, 1998, Burton and Blake showed up with the suspicious photos, unannounced, at the Aisenbergs' home, despite Cohen's instruction not to talk to his clients without him present.

Burton described the Aisenbergs as "flustered" and noted that the color seemed to drain out of Steve's face. She noted that Marlene abruptly left the room in the middle of their conversation, making something sinister out of something innocent: Marlene had left to check on Monica and William, who cried out from another room.

Detective Blake said they went to the house as a courtesy; they wanted to keep the Aisenbergs informed about the investigation. Another explanation: They wanted to spur the Aisenbergs into saying something incriminating as the tapes rolled at the listening post. Instead, they got an innocent-sounding remark from Steve.

"Where are the bruises?" he asked.

The detectives suspected that the Aisenbergs' family and friends, who wouldn't confirm any abuse, were protecting the couple. The investigation widened.

Federal prosecutors in U.S. Attorney Charles Wilson's office began to play a more active role. Wilson could mobilize a fuller barrage of law-enforcement tools than could the state of Florida. The federal system, unlike the state's, is cloaked in secrecy.

The federal prosecutors stayed behind the scenes as sheriff's detectives launched a new strategy. They targeted the couple's two remaining children, William and Monica.

On Jan. 26, 1998, a member of the Sabrina task force, Sgt. Robert Bullara, contacted the Florida Department of Children and Families, the agency with the power to take custody of abused children. Bullara told operations program manager Margaret Fender that the task force had photos suggesting the Aisenbergs abused their children.

Under Florida law, officers are supposed to report suspected abuse right away. Detective Burton saw possible signs of abuse almost from Day 1. So why did it take them so long to notify child-protection workers? Detectives say they wanted to get confirmation from doctors before making any accusations.

Bullara's report came with a catch. He asked Fender to delay an abuse probe until he gave the go-ahead. "(He) was requesting that the Department not contact the parents at this time as the criminal investigation was ongoing and they did not want the parents alerted to this evidence yet," Fender wrote in her report.

It was a curious reason, given that five days before, the detectives had gone to the Aisenbergs' home to show them the very same photos.

Fender was concerned; what if Monica and William were in jeopardy? Told that a deputy was stationed outside the home 24 hours a day, Fender agreed to hold off.

Within a week of putting the abuse probe on hold, the feds turned up the heat from a different source.

Two FBI agents served the Aisenbergs with subpoenas, ordering them to appear before a federal grand jury. Reporters were treated to leaks about the secret grand jury probe.

Barry Cohen saw it as a trap. He told Terry that the grand jury subpoenas were a "sham," that Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Kunz just wanted to harass his clients, turn public opinion against them and indict them.

At that point, Cohen didn't know about the bugging. He didn't know that detectives would be listening if the Aisenbergs talked about getting their stories straight for their upcoming grand jury appearance.

Cohen proposed this offer: If the feds would back off calling Steve and Marlene to the grand jury, he would drop one of his interview preconditions. Detectives could talk to the couple without first having to give Cohen their police reports.

Terry considered it an empty offer meant to leave the phony impression that Steve and Marlene wanted to cooperate. He said the Aisenbergs would have to tell their story to the grand jury.

Cohen beefed up his offense. He had Kalwary help put together a file of negative information about Kunz -- the prosecutor leading the grand jury -- and a file of positive information about the Aisenbergs' parenting skills.

On Feb. 9, 1998, Sgt. Bullara called back Fender, the child-abuse supervisor. Go ahead with the investigation, he said.

The next evening, just 17 hours before the Aisenbergs' scheduled grand jury appearance, two child-abuse investigators showed up, unannounced, on Marlene and Steve's doorstep.

The timing infuriated Cohen. Underhanded psychological warfare, he called it.

The prosecutors say Cohen has only himself to blame for the bad timing; one, because he delayed the Aisenberg's initial grand jury date of Feb. 4, and two, because he asked Terry to remove the deputies posted around the clock outside the Aisenberg home. That meant nobody was there to keep a protective eye on William and Monica.

With custody of their two remaining children on the line, the Aisenbergs opened up their home. For an hour, the investigators looked around and talked about the photographs and the Sabrina video. They asked who did the cooking and vacuuming.

Away from Steve and Marlene, the investigators questioned the kids about their parents' work schedules. They also wanted to know about household rules and discipline.

William, a good student who loved computers and video games, told the investigator he wasn't allowed drinks in his bedroom. He had to eat all his hamburger and fries at McDonald's before opening his toy. No dessert before dinner, either. When he got in trouble, he was sent to his room.

Monica, who as an infant had looked just like Sabrina, collected Beanie Babies and made up her own songs, sometimes about her sister. She did a lot of "baby talking" and acted younger than her age. She let her older brother answer most of the questions. She and William played leap frog during part of the interview.

Investigator Teresa Hanks wrote that the parents appeared "guarded but cooperative." Steve seemed "depressed" and Marlene had a "glazed" look that led Hanks to think she might be on medication.

The children appeared healthy and unafraid of their parents, Hanks observed, and the family interacted appropriately. The children did not need to be removed from the home.

Marlene and Steve had survived the visit. The timing, on the eve of their grand jury appearance, sent an unmistakable, if unintended, message: Cooperate, or risk losing your children.

Coming Tuesday

The government charges the Aisenbergs, only to have the case come undone.

About this story

Reporters Graham Brink and Sydney P. Freedberg reviewed thousands of pages of sheriff's and court records, including many previously unreleased police reports and state child abuse records.

They interviewed the Aisenbergs for more than six hours, and sought comment from virtually everybody else involved in the case. Many of those working on the case for the law enforcement agencies spoke only in generalities, saying ongoing investigations and the continuing court battle over legal fees forbid them from talking about the case.

Researchers Kitty Bennett, John Martin and Barbara Oliver contributed.

The series was designed by Amy Hollyfield. It was edited by Richard Bockman.