http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/a.../70510009/1001
There's more to the story. I caught it on the TV news last night (strangely there was more detail on the TV then in the papers... weird considering the papers had big stories on the amber alert when they thought it was real).
The woman explicitly wanted to scam "ransom" money from her church for the purpose of buying drugs. She kept the kid with a friend... and when she confessed and the police went to investigate, they'd found that the friend let the kid wander outside!
Oh, and hope you didn't miss this little tidbit:
What's with the child protective services?!
Obviously if they weren't to permanently take the kid away after that incident, the woman needed to get something straightened out. This incident was only a year ago! And apparently the drug problem has only gotten worse, leading her to use her child to scam a church!

Hopefully this time the kid will be put in foster care. Sure it's traumatic to remove a child from mother... but in this case the good would far outweigh the bad.

__________________
"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside