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E243: Korrina Malinoski and Annette Sagers
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When a second disappearance occurred on October 4th, 1988, in the exact location of an abduction less than a year earlier, on November 21st, 1987, law enforcement knew something unusual had happened. Were the disappearances explainable? Or had the two met with foul play, whether at the hands of strangers or at the hands of someone they knew very well? In this week’s case, Allison explores the disappearances of Korrina Malinoski and Annette Sagers.
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Transcript
The Appeal and Danger of Isolation
00:00:00
Speaker
With the hustle and bustle of life that we face on a daily basis, we often look for the opposite of it. The peace, tranquility, and most often, lack of people we can find in isolation. Some of us go to non-touristy beaches to find it. Others go to cabins in the mountains or camping to quote-unquote get away from it all.
00:00:24
Speaker
But that peace and tranquility becomes scary, at least to me, when it's our everyday. Don't get me wrong, living away from other people has its perks when it's where you live because there isn't traffic. There's not pollution, even light pollution, so you can see the stars. However, if you need help,
00:00:48
Speaker
There's also no one around. You are alone to escape the terror and there's no one left to provide answers.
Introduction to Karina and Annette's Case
00:00:57
Speaker
And that brings us to our episode this week. This is the case of Karina Malinowski and Annette Sakers.
00:01:39
Speaker
Welcome to Coffee and Cases where we like our coffee hot and our cases cold. My name is Allison Williams. And my name is Maggie Dameron. We will be telling stories each week in the hopes that someone out there with any information concerning the cases will take those tips to law enforcement. So justice and closure can be brought to these families with each case. We encourage you to continue in the conversation on our Facebook page, coffee and cases podcast, because as we all know, conversation helps to keep the missing person in the public consciousness, helping keep their memories alive.
Host Introductions and Context
00:02:12
Speaker
So sit back, sip your coffee and listen to what's brewing this week.
00:02:17
Speaker
our case this week. I wanted to let you know, Sleuthhounds, I am flying solo. ah We ran into some schedule conflicts this week and we're not able to get together to record, but do not fear, we will find a way to be back together next week.
00:02:34
Speaker
But this case that I'm covering this week, it isn't just a case of two potentially connected disappearances. It is actually unlike any case that we have ever covered on this show, and you will soon see why. So let's start with Karina Malinowski.
Karina's Early Life and Marriage
00:02:55
Speaker
The show, Up and Vanished, was luckily able to gather some information about Karina called Corey by her family and her upbringing by interviewing her brother Leon and his wife Sandy.
00:03:08
Speaker
Since Leon has since passed, having that source is very important. The siblings, Leon and Karina, didn't have the easiest childhood. But navigating that situation together just brought Karina and her brother closer. And even when Leon later married Sandy, Sandy and Karina also grew extremely close.
00:03:35
Speaker
When Karina was just 16, her family grew as well. In 1978, Karina found out she was pregnant. Interestingly, and I didn't read any explanation for this, Karina decided to not reveal the identity of her baby's father.
00:03:55
Speaker
As a young girl raising an infant on her own without the traditional family support, Leon and Sandy stepped in to help. Again, we don't have many details about this time in Karina's life. We do know that in 1981, Karina met a man named Stephen Malinowski, who was 12 years her senior. The two had met when Karina was attending and Stephen was working at a carnival.
00:04:25
Speaker
After Stephen had left the army, he had taken whatever work he could find, which in 1981 was as a carnival worker.
Life at Mount Holly Plantation
00:04:33
Speaker
Something must have clicked for the two because they married on October 16, 1981, just six months after meeting one another.
00:04:43
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perhaps looking for more stable employment or perhaps just being bored with the carnival. For whatever reason, Stephen left his job with the carnival and in 1982, accepted a job as a caretaker on a 6,000 acre plantation called Mount Holly Plantation, which according to an article for WCIV, quote, stretches from Highway 20 to Highway 176.
00:05:12
Speaker
all the way up to Cypress Gardens Road." end quote And Stephen moved his small family to Berkeley County, South Carolina. The land, later home to an aluminum factory, isn't the kind of plantation that I pictured in my head when I hear that word. While there are some of the more traditional elements that I think of when I think of a plantation,
00:05:36
Speaker
like a long winding driveway through rows of Spanish moss to get to the cabin about half a mile up the driveway where Stephen and the family would reside. What doesn't fit with the image in my head of a plantation is that I always imagined a plantation to have rolling green pastures.
Karina's Disappearance and Stephen's Stories
00:06:00
Speaker
That was not at all what Mount Holly plantation looked like.
00:06:06
Speaker
Much of Mount Holly was wetlands, swamplands, The area was, as again, I would imagine, a timeless sort of place, not marred by the marks of industry and progress. I say that because Berkeley County Sheriff's Office Captain Dean Kokinda said in that same WCIV article, quote, really it hasn't changed a whole lot. It's woods, woods and swamp and a lot of it, end quote.
00:06:39
Speaker
With the move, it meant that Karina needed to find a new job as well, and she quickly found one working at the Oasis convenience store in Somerville, South Carolina, which was a neighboring town, but only about a 15-minute drive from her cabin on the plantation.
00:06:56
Speaker
Karina's boss loved having her because she was friendly and she was reliable. Karina was always at work on time, and that soon became harder when she and Stephen welcomed their first child together, a son, in 1982.
00:07:14
Speaker
and then a second son in 1984. Now, before you go thinking that this little family sounds like the ideal family unit and everything with sunshine and roses, let me stop you. The reality was far from it.
00:07:30
Speaker
Let me backtrack to tell you that Karina's family weren't the most fond of Stephen. According to Karina's brother Leon, Stephen was a drinker. Later allegations against Stephen mentioned drugs as well. And his addiction led to many heated arguments. It is widely discussed in most every resource I read that there was physical violence in the marriage as well.
00:07:59
Speaker
Since there were recurring issues related to addiction and to money, those fights happened quite often. So often that Karina's family said that she had considered leaving Steven, but had confided that she didn't want to leave the kids.
00:08:17
Speaker
Leon and Sandy let her know that if she ever decided to leave, she and the children would have a welcomed place to stay with them. They knew of most every time the couple argued because Karina would call them afterward to talk. Sandy said those calls came several times a month.
00:08:40
Speaker
For Karina's part, they said she would always defend herself and that she herself would resort to physicality right back when she felt she needed. One time she had even hit Stephen on the head with a frying pan. Karina's sister-in-law told Mel Orlins of WCIV, quote, she fought right back. She wouldn't take anything, end quote.
00:09:05
Speaker
To me, knowing what was going on in the home, knowing what it takes to care for young children, in her case, three young children, that statement from Karina's boss about her always being so punctual and always being friendly seems even more impressive.
00:09:25
Speaker
So on November 22nd, 1987, just days before Thanksgiving, when the then 26-year-old Karina didn't show up for her work shift, her boss knew something was wrong. With Karina's home only being a short drive away, a little over seven miles, he decided to make that drive and check on her.
00:09:50
Speaker
When he got to Mount Holly Plantation, he saw something peculiar. There, at the end of the driveway, behind a locked gate, sat Karina's car. It was covered in a layer of dew, indicating that it had likely been sitting there for quite some time.
00:10:08
Speaker
He wondered where she could have gone and why her car was parked where he had found it. And it's not like her boss had a lot of other established places to search because the cabin was the only housing for some distance. They weren't close enough to anyone else to have what you would call a quote unquote neighbor. Their neighbors were only, according to reporter Mel Orleans, bears and alligators.
00:10:36
Speaker
not exactly the neighbors that I'd like to have." When he knocked on the door, Steven answered. Asked where Karina was, Steven said he didn't know and that they had had a fight the night before that Karina had left.
00:10:50
Speaker
It was then that her boss told Stephen about her car being at the end of the driveway, which was later verified to have sat in that spot near the gate for quite some time because Carina's car had been leaking transmission fluid and there was a rather significant puddle under the car.
00:11:10
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It was at this point, hearing that Karina's car was not someplace else, she had not gone anywhere, that her car was parked at the end of the driveway, that Stephen called the sheriff's office to report Karina missing.
00:11:26
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As an adult, particularly one who was likely in a violent living situation, there are some who believed that Karina had finally made the decision to escape that situation. For those closest to Karina, they argued that she would have never left her then 10 year old daughter and her four and three year old sons behind. They said, if you knew how much she loved those kids, you'd know that that theory should be thrown out immediately.
00:11:56
Speaker
After all, they argued, she had the offer before to leave and a place where she could stay when she did, but she said she couldn't leave the kids. And I don't know if by that statement, by saying I can't leave the kids, she meant that she couldn't leave them in that situation alone to fend for themselves, or whether she meant she wouldn't want to just have visitation with them and not have them with her every day.
00:12:27
Speaker
I'm unsure exactly what she meant, but the fact that she said she would never leave her kids or couldn't leave the situation because she didn't want to leave her kids does make me question whether she left in this scenario of her own volition. Plus, if she were planning to run away, why wouldn't she have taken her car? And wouldn't she have contacted her family, whether that be her brother,
00:12:55
Speaker
who had already offered for her to stay, or at least her relatives in Iowa and Illinois who were a greater distance away. But she didn't do either. For his part, Karina's husband Stephen told a different story, actually several different stories.
00:13:18
Speaker
Initially, he said that they had had an argument, one source said it was about his drinking, and that Karina had left the cabin between 11 and 11.30 p.m. on November 21st, saying she was going to, quote, go for a ride, end quote.
00:13:34
Speaker
In the time since, Stephen has also argued that Karina had been having an affair and that maybe she had run off with that other man. The accusations of an affair were never verified.
00:13:49
Speaker
Steven has also stated in an apparent clearer recollection of that night said that he watched Karina drive away while he was standing on the front porch and that when she got to the gate, she had gotten out of her car and had gotten into someone else's car there. Asked if he remembered anything about the car or had any idea who the driver may have been, he said he didn't know.
00:14:15
Speaker
Of course, in cases like this one, anything is a possibility. But we have to question, is it a probability? In 1987, before cell phones, we're presented with a problem here. Had Corinna not called someone, then whomever had picked her up couldn't have known at what time to meet her. However,
00:14:41
Speaker
Had she made a call, it would have been on a home phone line, in which case Stephen would likely have overheard it and known where she was going. All of this would mean, if it were true, either way, if Karina left with someone else, then she not only left her children behind, but she got into a car with a stranger.
00:15:07
Speaker
But police didn't question Stephen's story because of the small probability that what he was saying were true. They questioned his story because of the details he provided. With the cabin being a good half mile from the gate, and the only line of sight being through the trees, so through the woods,
00:15:28
Speaker
They didn't believe that he would have even been able to see the gate at all from his vantage point on the porch to even speculate that someone had picked her up. However, if he were telling the truth, whoever had picked Karina up could have been any anyone.
00:15:49
Speaker
You can imagine that most who are familiar with this case, or even the little you've heard so far, had one prime suspect of who could be responsible for Karina's disappearance, her husband, Steven. But there was literally
Annette Sagers' Disappearance
00:16:04
Speaker
no evidence to back up that theory either. It was just as much speculation as any of the other theories.
00:16:14
Speaker
Local police called in help from state law enforcement and other search and rescue teams to comb the property on foot. They searched by air as well, and they found nothing. Now is where we get to the part of the case that I said is unlike any other comparison of two cases that we've covered on the show. Less than a year later, on October 4th, 1988,
00:16:42
Speaker
an 11-year-old little girl went missing from that exact same location. That little girl was Annette Sagers, the second name in our case this week, who just happened to be Karina's daughter.
00:17:03
Speaker
So let me tell you about her disappearance because there are some unexpected things that you'll hear in her case as well before we really get into the shared theories.
00:17:15
Speaker
Annette had been waiting with her dog at the bus stop, ready to start the day in her sixth grade classroom at Westview Middle School. She had have been sitting in a homemade structure near the gate to Mount Holly Plantation, a structure to protect her from the weather that had been built by her stepfather, Stephen Malinowski.
00:17:37
Speaker
The bus driver's route was such that he would drive past Annette's stop into another neighborhood and then pick up Annette on the return trip. When the bus driver passed the structure around 7 a.m., he saw Annette sitting there with her dog by her side.
The Mysterious Note from Annette
00:17:56
Speaker
This sighting was corroborated by several others who drove by and remember Annette sitting there.
00:18:02
Speaker
However, by the time the bus returned to pick up Annette, sometime between 7.15 and 7.20 a.m., sources vary on the exact time. Annette, nor her dog, were there any longer. She did not arrive at school that day.
00:18:21
Speaker
It wasn't until Annette didn't return home from school on the bus that Stephen had said he realized that something was wrong. And for the second time in less than a year, Stephen Malinowski went to the police to file a missing persons report. This time he brought something with him as evidence to a theory.
00:18:46
Speaker
Steven said that in looking for Annette, he had looked at the structure, the bus stop. And that's when he noticed a piece of notebook paper that he picked up and read. Here is what the note said. It reads, dad, mom came back. I have to go with her. Give the boys lots of kisses and hugs and also you too. Love, Annette.
00:19:17
Speaker
Steven took this letter to police to show that Annette was gone and that she was with a very much alive Carina. So let's pause and talk about this note for a little bit. First, I will tell you because initially there was a lot of speculation that Annette likely didn't write this note and that it was probably written by someone else. Handwriting experts have ruled that they feel Annette did truly write this note.
00:19:48
Speaker
What they cannot tell is whether the note were written under duress. I will tell you, and I will post pictures on our social media, the writing does get bigger and messier as the note goes on, which could indicate heightened emotions. For me, there's something that just makes me feel in my gut, and this is just my gut.
00:20:14
Speaker
that the content of the letter was not left by a little girl about to leave with her mother, whom she hadn't seen in nearly a year. Although we will talk about that theory here in just a few minutes. It's all of the scratched out phrases and added words that lend this gut feeling that this was not a letter, a note written out of excitement.
00:20:45
Speaker
I don't know if I've ever told the story on the show because it's very personal. When I was around this same age as Annette, a person I love very much forced me to write a letter that I did not want to write. The letter was begging someone to come back into their life.
00:21:07
Speaker
I remember that moment so vividly and I remember crying and pleading with this loved one to not make me write the letter because I didn't love the letter recipient like a parent as this person told me to write.
00:21:30
Speaker
I remember the feeling of desperation that I felt when this person told me that if I loved them, I would write the letter. So because of that, I'll admit I could be projecting onto this letter from Annette.
Community Efforts and Theories
00:21:46
Speaker
But my letter, and i I did write it, it sticks with me to this day, looked very much like this letter that was left by Annette, where I would start a sentence incorrectly and be corrected by the person who was dictating it to me. Or I would be in such a hurry to get it done that I would leave out a word
00:22:09
Speaker
and have to add it in. Regardless, I will just say just because handwriting experts argue that Annette wrote the letter, it doesn't tell us nor can they ever tell us when the letter was written and under what circumstances the letter was written.
00:22:33
Speaker
In 1988, just after Annette went missing, her friends and classmates began hanging missing person flyers around town. One said to an ABC News 4 reporter, quote, if she knows people care about her, she might let someone know where she's at, end quote. That is so sad to me that these little children are having to think about a situation like this.
00:23:01
Speaker
Another of Annette's friends named Sharon Kirkley told reporter Ashley Blackstone for ABC News 4 in an article published February 27th, 2019, quote, there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about her, end quote.
00:23:18
Speaker
shown a photograph of Annette at that age, at 11. She said, quote, it's hard to look at it because I can remember that sweater. I remember her haircut, her earrings, end quote. We've said it before and I'll say it again. Trauma changes you.
00:23:40
Speaker
I will post a picture of Annette on social media as well. And I'm telling you, you look at her sweet face and all I can think of is innocence to its core.
00:24:05
Speaker
So let's talk about the theories and let's start with the one we're addressing. The possibility that Karina came back to get Annette and apparently Annette's dog as well and that the two had left together.
00:24:20
Speaker
Many people want to immediately discredit this theory by saying Karina would never have come back for one child and not all three of them. Even Captain Kokinda told WCIV, quote, it's not a mom thing to leave the two behind and just get one, end quote.
00:24:40
Speaker
I completely understand where he's coming from at the same time that those who argue this theory is possible also bring up a good point. That Annette was the only child in this situation for whom Stephen was not the biological father. Perhaps she needed saving. And because of her age, she was in a place where she was alone, she could be retrieved by Karina. Her brothers, ages three and four, would never likely be in a space where if Karina did come back for them, she would have been able to get them without anyone else around.
00:25:26
Speaker
Of course, conversely, there are other things that might make us question this theory. One of those things that people have pointed out over the years was the odds of Steven finding this note. They argue that Annette would have left the note around seven in the morning and Steven wouldn't have found it until that afternoon after he realized that she hadn't returned home from school.
00:25:54
Speaker
With the wind, passing cars, passing buses, they argue that any note would likely have blown away and not still been in the spot where it was left. Also, and back to the note itself, again, if my mom, who I didn't know what happened to, came back for me after a year,
00:26:20
Speaker
I probably wouldn't likely have even left a note in the first place. And in the second, if I did, I wouldn't be concerned about proofreading it before I left it to realize that I had left out some words. Plus, if this theory were true, if Karina had come back to get Annette and the two had left together,
00:26:46
Speaker
If I'm Steven and I really think that Karina is still alive, I'm going to make a huge deal about this letter and make sure that my name is off of any person of interest list about Karina's disappearance. But I didn't read that any big show was made about the fact that Annette said, mom came back.
00:27:18
Speaker
We also, in questioning this theory, if Karina had picked up a net and the two had left together, have the lack of contact with Karina's family. Sandy, Karina's sister-in-law, told WCIV, quote, if she was missing herself, she would have called long enough to say, hey, I'm OK, don't worry about me.
00:27:40
Speaker
And if she had taken Annette, she would have done the same thing and said, hey, I've got Annette, I'm going to get the other boys, don't worry about me, but we haven't heard nothing, end quote. Nevertheless, here we are at theory number one, that Karina is still alive somewhere and that she picked up Annette before they both disappeared again.
Suspicions Around Stephen's Involvement
00:28:06
Speaker
Theory number two,
00:28:08
Speaker
is that both were abducted by a serial killer. This theory may seem far-fetched on the surface, but there was another incident that those who believe this theory have linked. In 1987, a woman named Sarah Boyd, along with her two-year-old daughter, Kimberly Boyd, and a friend named Linda McCord, were returning home from attending a gospel concert.
00:28:35
Speaker
A car had been seen following closely behind them, and the next day, after Sarah's husband reported them missing that evening when they hadn't returned, their car was found broken down alongside the road. Where they went missing was only about 20 miles away from the plantation.
00:28:57
Speaker
might there have been a killer operating in this area and it just so happened that Karina and Annette fell victim to the same person. The Boyd-McChord case also remains unsolved.
00:29:16
Speaker
On the other hand, the three individuals in the other case were together and their car had broken down. In this case, with Karina and with Annette, the person would had to have come back to the same place within a year, the exact same place, to abduct two different people on two different occasions. And we would have to then believe that in the case of Annette,
00:29:45
Speaker
The person would have taken the time to let her write a letter to her stepdad and leave it behind. I don't want to discount the possibility of this theory entirely. Of course, a person, especially one responsible for Karina's disappearance and its mother, could have said, hey, I know where your mom is. She wanted me to take you to her. That is a possibility.
00:30:15
Speaker
But with a bus coming back and other traffic, remember Annette's abduction happened during daylight hours. Allowing the time for a letter to be written sure makes the probability of this theory go down, in my opinion, because the possibility of being cited would increase.
00:30:39
Speaker
Then we come to the theory that most people believe that Stephen Malinowski was responsible in both disappearances. So this will be our theory number three. Let's explore both sides of this theory. To support the theory that Stephen was responsible, we have to establish motive.
00:30:59
Speaker
That is much easier to do in the case of his spouse, Karina, and the fact that they argued constantly and that there was a belief she were going to finally leave him. It becomes harder for a lot of people when it comes to Annette to come up with a clear motive. But that doesn't mean that some possibilities haven't cropped up over the years. The family believe Annette may have known something about her mother's disappearance.
00:31:28
Speaker
Karina's father and her half-sister came to visit Stephen and the kids just after Karina had disappeared. On that visit, there was a memory and also a feeling that stuck with Karina's half-sister. The memory was that Annette had wanted Karina's half-sister Cheryl to come to the attic with her to see something and that Stephen had stopped them from going up there.
00:31:57
Speaker
The feeling during the whole trip, Cheryl recalled, was the sense that Stephen didn't seem to want Annette to be alone with them. Was he afraid that she would tell them something about Karina? I will add here, since we're talking about this theory, the attic was searched after these comments from family had been reported and nothing was found there.
00:32:26
Speaker
Others have stated, as reported by WCIV by Captain Kokinda of Stephen, quote, he started neglecting the kids and it ended up that Annette contacted the caretaker and asked if he could provide her and her brothers with food because they hadn't eaten in three days.
00:32:45
Speaker
So when the caretaker went down there and kind of solved the situation, he notified DSS and it was at that point that Steven may have figured that Annette may have been a liability, end quote. In essence, what Captain Kokinda is saying is that by contacting the Department of Social Services, there would at minimum be an investigation into the living situation which could then reopen an investigation into the children's missing mother. Either way, this likely would have been a tension that Stephen Malinowski did not want. Whether for the first reason or the second, it seems to me that Karina's family, both her sister-in-law Sandy and her half-sister Cheryl, felt that Annette in particular was not safe in the home.
00:33:43
Speaker
I say that because both of those individuals had researched and found that after Karina was missing for a full year, they themselves could file for custody of Annette since she was not Stephen's biological child. Annette disappeared little more than a month before that filing could have happened.
00:34:06
Speaker
Additionally, according to Sandy, until that time, she had attempted to convince Steven to let Annette come stay with her and Leon for a month or so. This was the summer before Annette's disappearance. And even though Steven had initially agreed, he changed his mind at the last minute.
00:34:26
Speaker
Karina's half-sister Cheryl too was determined to spend time with Annette. She had called Steven to try to make plans. She was to be off work for surgery, which would give her the capability to have the time off also to travel to visit. Cheryl and Steven had spoken on the phone and but about various excursions she could have with the kids on her upcoming trip, but she never got the chance because only one week before that visit Annette went missing.
00:34:56
Speaker
What was even more odd to her was that although she had been in close communication with Steven about the visit, when Annette went missing, Steven didn't even call Cheryl to let her know. However,
00:35:11
Speaker
not calling to let someone know or not acting how we would deem natural or appropriate, I understand, doesn't mean that that person committed murder.
New Discoveries and Ongoing Investigations
00:35:22
Speaker
And without some sort of substantial information or evidence, there wasn't enough to even move Stephen Malinowski up from a person of interest to a suspect, even though we know he wasn't a good guy.
00:35:40
Speaker
Here's what I mean. Just months after Annette went missing, Stephen moved into his parents' home in Florida, taking his two boys with him. However, once down there, he dropped the two boys off with a neighbor to watch them, and he never came back for them. By abandoning them, Stephen Malinowski had effectively cut all evidence of his time with Karina out of his life.
00:36:10
Speaker
As a side note, because I want you to at least have something positive here, is that while the boys did spend about a decade in the foster care system after Stephen had left them, they did eventually find loving homes, and in the years since, have been able to reconnect with their biological family. The two boys have been vocal in the search for their moncarina and for their sister in it.
00:36:39
Speaker
Years later, Stephen Malinowski was charged with child abuse in a case unrelated to the people I've been discussing today. Interestingly, those that argue that Stephen Malinowski might not be responsible for the disappearances will sometimes bring up that child abuse charge as support. You might be confused about why, but it's because in that case, he pled guilty But as it relates to Karina and Annette, Stephen has always proclaimed his innocence. They wonder why he would have admitted to one and not the other.
00:37:20
Speaker
But in my mind, that answer is clear. The prison sentence for those two crimes would be vastly different and I don't know the details of the abuse case, but my suspicions would be that there was enough evidence since he was charged with a crime.
00:37:38
Speaker
to force him into admitting guilt. But in the cases of Karina and Annette, that evidence just isn't there. If he were responsible, why would he admit to a crime if he's gotten away with it so far?
00:37:54
Speaker
Then there's theory number four, that the truth is a combination of some of these theories, meaning Stephen may have been linked to one of the disappearances and a stranger to another, or despite the highly unlikely scenario, both could have been abducted separately, each by a stranger.
00:38:18
Speaker
But before we leave, I wanted to share with you some other information that has come out in the years since in this investigation, due primarily to the fact that, thankfully, the Berkeley County Sheriff's Office has kept looking into new leads and information. They will not let this case be forgotten.
00:38:37
Speaker
Detail number one related to the case came to light in the 90s. On the Mount Holly plantation in an area near the cabin is a pond. In this pond, someone I've not read a name anywhere ordered the pond drained for maintenance. When they did so, they found either a rug or a portion of a carpet rolled up and tied with electrical cord.
00:39:03
Speaker
The person who found it thought it at least strange enough to report it to police. However, the rug or carpet held nothing inside of it, or if it had held anything, it had been so degraded that there wasn't anything obviously in it. So the rug was never linked to either disappearance, nor was it ever tested.
00:39:29
Speaker
and even worse, it has since been discarded. If it were linked to either case, we will now never know. Detail number two related to the case was 10 years later in 2000. The sheriff's office received an anonymous letter saying that both Carina and Annette were buried in Sumter County, and it went on to provide a very specific location detailed by a map.
00:39:59
Speaker
Taking every tip seriously, the sheriff's office teamed up with South Carolina law enforcement to search the land. They searched on the ground with cadaver dogs, but they found nothing. So they attempted to gain information from the letter itself, testing it for DNA and fingerprints. At least then they could question the letter writer.
00:40:20
Speaker
However, again, they came up with nothing. Was this someone with information or was this a hoax? Again, we do not know.
00:40:35
Speaker
Finally, a third detail, detail number three, related to the case, revealed itself in 2016 in the form of one of Stephen Malinowski's friends. He said that prior even to Karina going missing, he and Stephen had been riding the back roads of the plantation when Stephen pointed out a big dirt pile near a pond and said, quote, that'd be a good place to bury a body, end quote.
00:41:03
Speaker
That is a red flag comment, if I've ever heard one, but is even more so with the rug in the pond connection that had been discovered as well. Again, I know we can't convict a person based upon horrible comments they've made to someone. and I also know that without proof, we stand where we've always been.
00:41:29
Speaker
suspecting that both Karina and Annette met with foul play, but without enough evidence to charge any suspect. Law enforcement still haven't given up.
00:41:43
Speaker
As recently as 2019, the sheriff's office was, according to WCIV, working with a, quote, hydrologist with the DNR and the geology department at College of Charleston to develop a mathematical equation that helped narrow their search area, end quote. This is fascinating to me. So basically, because the plantation is swampland, and it is highly likely that neither Carina nor Annette ever left the property. Searchers had to figure out a way to determine where on the 6,000 acres would be their best place to look, hoping to narrow the 6,000 acres to a much more manageable 100 to 200 acre search area. The professor, Dr. Norman Levine, told WCIV, quote, because it's wet, things can be degraded faster, end quote.
00:42:42
Speaker
In other words, the land being a swamp brings a whole new set of problems with it. He said, quote, if we're talking about bodies or parts or a crime scene, it's going to move that part down with it and deposit it where that water then spreads out or slows down. So they get moved and buried often at the same time, end quote.
00:43:10
Speaker
He was developing a scientific formula for the composition of the ground and water to tell where the possibility of human decomposition were the strongest because, sleuthounds, dogs did hit multiple dogs on the scent of human decomposition on the Mount Holly plantation.
00:43:35
Speaker
Sadly, despite multiple digs on the property over the next year and a half, the nearly two dozen holes dug revealed nothing.
00:43:49
Speaker
As I mentioned earlier in the episode, Karina's brother Leon passed away in 2022. He died of a heart attack, but his wife Sandy is convinced that the primary cause was heartbreak for never finding answers concerning what happened to both his sister and his niece. It's a feeling no family should have to feel. Thankfully, there are many in the family and in local law enforcement who refuse to give up the search for answers. And while the passage of time can degrade evidence, it can also degrade fear of retribution.
00:44:30
Speaker
Perhaps someone out there knows what happened to either Karina Malinowski or to Annette Sagers, has heard information over the years or recalls something they previously believed inconsequential. No matter what it is, I urge you to come forward, share, even if you believe it has already been shared.
00:44:54
Speaker
and talk about their cases with other people, you'd be surprised, Sleuthhounds, by the power of sharing and by what it means to these families. any Anyone with information about the disappearance of either Karina Malinowski or Annette Sagers should call the Berkeley County Sheriff's Office at 843-719-4465.
00:45:22
Speaker
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00:45:51
Speaker
Stay together. Stay safe. We'll see you next week.