Sabrina Aisenberg

What happened

On the morning of November 24, 1997, Marlene Aisenberg found her five-month-old daughter Sabrina’s crib empty in their Valrico home. The baby’s handmade blue-and-yellow blanket was gone, and the laundry-room door to the garage stood open. There was no sign of forced entry, but investigators found a boot print in Sabrina’s room and an unidentified blond hair in her crib.

Suspicion turned to her parents, Steve and Marlene Aisenberg, and the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office secretly recorded the couple’s conversations for seventy-nine days. In September 1999 a federal grand jury indicted them on conspiracy and false-statement charges — they were never charged with harming Sabrina. In February 2001, after a federal magistrate found the tapes largely unintelligible and the warrant application false in material part, every charge was dismissed, and the government was later ordered to pay more than a million dollars of their legal fees.

Sabrina has never been found, and no one has ever been charged in her disappearance.