November 21, 1987, the Saturday evening Korrina Malinoski mysteriously vanished, was a pitch-black, bitterly cold late autumn night in rural South Carolina.
Korrina, her husband Steven Malinoski, and their three children lived in a remote, isolated cabin deep inside the 6,000-acre Mount Holly Plantation in Moncks Corner.
After the children went to bed, the couple got into a huge argument. Steven later alleged they had had the same fight about his drinking more times than anyone could count.
He initially claimed that during the fight, Korrina could not take it anymore and said she was ‘going for a ride’, before storming out of the house. She got into her Dodge Omni and drove down the curving driveway towards the plantation’s main gate and onto Highway 52.
Steven later changed his story to Korrina’s brother, Leon, saying that he stood on the porch and watched her pull up to the gate before getting out and climbing into a different vehicle being driven by someone else.
This was the last confirmed sighting of her. Korrina was 26 years old.
Steven made no attempt to call the police, notify her family, or contact anyone that night to report that she had stormed off.
At the time, Korrina was working at the Oasis convenience store on Main Street in Summerville. This was seven miles from the plantation, and she had a reputation for showing up despite having a stressful home life.
As the morning progressed with no word or phone call, her employer, Bruce Clarkson, grew deeply concerned.
Unable to reach her, he personally drove from Summerville to the rural Mount Holly plantation to check on Korrina. When he arrived, Clarkson noted the primary security gate was closed and locked.
Parked just inside the gate was Korrina’s vehicle. It was empty, locked, and coated in morning dew. Underneath the vehicle was a trail of leaking transmission fluid pooled on the ground.
Seeing her vehicle at the gate, Clarkson exited his own car, bypassed the gate, and walked the half-mile distance down the dirt driveway to the family cabin. He then confronted Steven, asking him, “Hey, where’s Korrina?”
According to ABC News 4, Steven replied dismissively, “I don’t know. We fought last night, and she left.” Clarkson immediately countered Steven’s claim, saying, “Well, her car is up front.”
Steven then responded, “Oh my gosh, let me call the Sheriff’s Office,” and finally called the police.
Responding deputies from the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office arrived at the plantation. Upon inspecting the locked car and noting Steven’s inconsistent stories, they immediately treated the scene as a suspicious missing person’s case.
Investigators checked the claim against the property itself and determined this was highly unlikely. The drive curved out of sight almost immediately, and there was no line of sight from the porch to the gate, then or at present.
Captain Dean Kokinda of the Berkeley Sheriff’s Office told Fox 28 Savannah, “She went to leave and he was at the front porch, and he could see her getting in another car from her car. The problem with that story is that the house is probably about half a mile from the roadway. It’s wooded, and it’s a curvy driveway to the house.”
Later, Steven flatly denied saying that version of events to his wife’s brother as well as any knowledge of what happened to his wife. Steven claimed Korrina was having an affair and had willingly run away to start a new life with another man.
Korrina Malinoski and the Marriage Marked by Violence
Korrina and her brother, Leon, had a rough childhood in Iowa. Their mother died at a young age, and their father was largely absent, so the two siblings raised themselves.
Despite the situation, family members described Korrina as warm and good with children. She was someone who called relatives without fail on birthdays and holidays.
At 16, Korrina became pregnant with her daughter, Annette, and raised her alone for the first few years, with help from Leon and his wife, Sandy.
In 1981, at the age of 20, she met Steven Malinoski at a carnival where he was working. He was 32 and recently discharged from the army.
Steven was also in his third marriage at the time, something Korrina didn’t know the truth about until much later. They married in Texas six months later and moved to South Carolina the following year when Steven took the caretaker job at Mount Holly.
Steven and Korrina went on to have two sons, Thomas and James.
Family members told investigators the marriage was volatile from the beginning. Korrina’s sister-in-law, Sandy Sagers, said Korrina constantly called whenever things got bad between her and Steven.
Sandy and Leon also relocated more than once to remain close to her. But Korrina was not passive in the relationship. As Sandy described it to Fox 28 Savannah, “She fought right back. She wouldn’t take anything. She’s even hit him over the head with a skillet before.”
The Search
Deputies searched the plantation grounds and surrounding wetlands extensively in the days after Korrina’s disappearance. It yielded nothing. There were no signs of a struggle or personal items.
The only physical detail that investigators kept coming back to was how badly Korrina’s Dodge was leaking transmission fluid. Deputy L.R. Herod commented on how anyone could track her movements from the fluid trail alone if she had driven anywhere before the car stopped at the gate.
Considering the mounting suspicion surrounding Steven, investigators narrowed their focus to him, and he submitted to a polygraph. The results came back inconclusive.
He also emphasised that Korinna had been having an affair with another man. Investigators found no evidence to support this claim and considered it a fabrication layered onto a contradictory account.
Reflecting years later, Herod said the case was defined by its emptiness from day one. Police officers named Steven Malinoski a person of interest, and that designation never changed, but a missing persons report with no crime scene or witnesses gave detectives nothing to build on.
Annette Sagers Vanishes
The case took a tragic turn on October 4, 1988, when 11-year-old Annette Sagers vanished within a critical 15-minute window from a bus stop outside the Mount Holly plantation.
That morning, Annette left the family cabin inside the 6,000-acre plantation and walked down the main gravel driveway to the bus stop located on Highway 52. It was a chilly morning, so Annette sat inside a wooden shelter hut at the bus stop.
The family dog was by her side, and many passing motorists remember seeing her waiting peacefully for the bus. The school bus driver’s route on that road required them to drive past Annette’s stop heading toward Strawberry, to make a stop there, and then turn the bus around to pick Annette up on the return leg.
As the bus drove past her on the northbound pass, at least one of the students on board looking out the window remembered seeing Annette waiting at her usual stop. The bus completed its loop and came back to pick the girl, but she was nowhere in sight.
Her schoolbooks were gone, but the family dog was left sitting alone by the highway. The bus driver assumed she was sick and had decided to stay home, but Annette was never seen again.
Steven knew Annette had walked to the stop with the family dog. The dog returned to the plantation cabin alone earlier that day, but this was normal behaviour considering they assumed she had already boarded the bus.
Alarm started when Annette failed to return home on the afternoon school bus. Her father, Steven, noticed her absence and called Westview Middle School, and the officials startled him by revealing Annette had been marked absent that day.
He walked down to the bus stop to search for any sign of her and claimed to have found a pencil-written note saying her mother had come back and she had to leave with her. Though state handwriting analysts confirmed it matched Annette’s, the circumstances were still very suspicious.
Investigators considered the letter seemed to have been written very hastily. They also strongly suspected that Annette was either forced to write it at gunpoint or was tricked into doing it before being abducted.
If Korrina had truly returned to rescue her children, family members, along with the investigators, argued she would never have only taken Annette, abandoning the other two boys.
Captain Kokinda mentioned to Fox 28 Savannah, “It’s not a mom thing to leave the two behind and just get one.”
True crime platforms like the Coffee and Cases Podcast, by Allison Williams, later concurred, reporting, “If she was missing herself, she would have called long enough to say, hey, I’m OK, don’t worry about me. 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 anything.”
Law enforcement immediately eyed Steven Malinoski as a primary person of interest because of the series of events leading up to that morning. Months after Korrina went missing, he began severely neglecting the children.
Kokinda explained to ABC News 4, “He started neglecting the kids, and it ended up that Annette contacted the caretaker and asked if he could provide her and the brothers with food because they hadn’t eaten in three days. So when the caretaker went down there, and kind of saw the situation, he notified DSS, and it was at that point that Steven may have figured that Annette may have been a liability.”
Korinna’s half-sister, Cheryl, also revealed to investigators that just before Annette went missing, the girl had pulled her aside and whispered that she wanted to show her aunt something in the attic.
Steven suddenly intervened, preventing them from going upstairs and refusing to ever leave Annette alone with her maternal relatives again.
Steven remained a central person of interest in both missing person cases, though he was never arrested or charged in either case. Oxygen reported Herod’s and the rest of the department said, “He didn’t seem very upset, not much emotion.”
Annette’s disappearance remains one of the more disturbing cases involving children who vanished within minutes in public. The disappearance of Jo-Anne Pedersen also followed a similarly narrow timeline after a phone call to her mother.
The Carpet in the Pond
Years after Annette Sagers disappeared, a worker on the 6,000-acre plantation noticed something unusual in one of the property’s ponds. Submerged in the water was a large piece of carpet which seemed to have been intentionally rolled up and securely bound at both ends.
Because this was a notorious method used in homicides to conceal a human body, the caretaker reported it to the authorities. During the early 1990s, the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office was handling the case as a standard missing person file rather than an active homicide investigation.
Instead of securing the carpet and logging it into the evidence room or even calling forensic teams to cut it open and check for skeletal remains, the deputies dismissed its significance.
They considered it discarded plantation trash or regular debris and threw it away without forensically processing it.
An Anonymous Letter
In 2000, after the case had languished in silence for almost a decade, the investigation into both disappearances suddenly reignited when the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office received a letter and accompanying phone tip.
By then, Steven Malinoski had long moved away to Florida and abandoned his remaining sons. James and Thomas were left to grow up in the foster system and were eventually adopted.
The Mount Holly property also had new owners. Out of nowhere, an unknown person mailed a letter to the police claiming that both Annette and her mother, Korrina, were dead and buried in Sumter County, South Carolina.
It was an area located about an hour and a half north of the plantation.
Captain Kokinda, who was working in forensics at the time, told ABC News, “The anonymous letter said that they were buried in Sumter County. It gave a very specific location, kind of a crossroads.“
Because the letter writer possessed specific spatial awareness of the rural South Carolina back roads, detectives treated it as a credible tip from an individual who probably had direct knowledge of the case.
The Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office immediately set up a joint operation with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, descending on the specific Sumter roads.
The teams combed through the woods, digging into the dirt at the coordinates provided by the anonymous map. Despite an exhaustive multi-day effort, the search turned up no human remains or physical evidence.
Deflated by the failed dig, investigators turned their attention to the letter, trying to identify the sender. Though they processed the paper and envelope for prints and DNA, they were unable to pull a viable profile from the documents.
Investigation Reopens but Suffers Setbacks
After the letter debacle, the trail went cold for another 16 years. In 2016, a former friend of Steven Malinoski came forward with a disturbing detail.
He recalled riding back roads through the Mount Holly plantation with Steven before Korrina went missing, and they passed a giant, freshly piled hill of dirt near a pond. According to Fox 28 Savannah, Steven turned to him and remarked, “That’d be a good place to bury a body.”
Sheriff Duane Lewis has also recently taken office and prioritised allocating investigators to cold cases. He assigned Captain Dean Kokinda to re-analyse the Malinoski-Sagers case from the beginning.
By 2019, Thomas and James had grown up to adulthood and began pressuring law enforcement for answers. They also partnered with true-crime investigative journalists, tracked down Steven at his Florida home, and confronted him on camera.
When hard pressed about what he did to Korrina and Annette, Steven became very defensive. He flatly denied any involvement and refused to provide any more information. These factors, combined with new technology, led to the reactivation of the case.
The Sheriff’s office also partnered with a hydrologist from the Department of Natural Resources and the Geology department at the College of Charleston. They built a mathematical equation of the plantation’s shifting swamp currents.
Because water moves and deposits sediment at the same time, the model computed how far a body would have drifted and become buried upstream after three decades. Using the map, investigators deployed cadaver-sniffing dogs to the swamp channels.
The dogs apparently alerted that there was a scent of human decomposition from the wet soil. Teams drilled more than 20 deep core holes into the mud to pin down the source of the scent, but found nothing.
The investigation stalled since then pending new information. Detectives still have the working theory that neither Korrina nor Annette ever left the Mount Holly plantation alive, but without physical evidence, there is no way to level charges on anyone.
Steven Malinoski was arrested in Florida in 2019 on a felony charge of domestic abuse. After pleading guilty, he served a short prison sentence and was released in 2022.
He continues to live in Florida with a new family. Since his tense, on-camera confrontation with his sons, Thomas and James, Steven has strictly maintained his innocence and completely shut down communication.
The investigation into the disappearance of Korrina Malinoski and Annette Sagers remains an active cold case double homicide investigation. Anyone with information on the case is encouraged to call the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office at (843) 719-4412 or the Lowcountry Crime Stoppers at (843) 554-1111.
For more stories on unsolved disappearances, explore our articles on Kristina Porco and Leigh Occhi.
