On the morning of November 22, 1987, Bruce Clarkson drove out to Mount Holly Plantation in Berkeley County, South Carolina. Korrina Malinoski had not shown up for her shift at the Oasis convenience store in Summerville, and she had never missed a day. When Clarkson reached the plantation’s main security gate, he found it closed and locked. On the other side of it sat Korrina’s Dodge Omni. The doors were locked. Morning dew covered the hood. A trail of transmission fluid pooled on the ground underneath it.
Korrina was not inside.
Clarkson bypassed the gate and walked the half-mile dirt driveway to the family’s cabin. He knocked. Korrina’s husband Steven answered. “Hey, where’s Korrina?” Clarkson asked. “We fought last night and she left,” Steven replied. Clarkson told him the car was still at the gate. “Oh my gosh, let me call the Sheriff’s Office,” Steven said.
He had been on the property all night. That was the first phone call he made.
The marriage turned dangerous
Korrina Lynne Sagers came from a hard start. She and her brother Leon grew up in Iowa after their mother died when the children were young and their father largely disappeared from their lives. Leon and his wife, Sandy, helped Korrina raise Annette, her daughter from an earlier relationship, after Korrina became pregnant at 16.
In 1981, at 20 years old, Korrina met Steven Malinoski at a carnival where he was working. He was 32 and, unknown to her, already on his third marriage. Six months later, they married in Texas. The following year, Steven took the caretaker job at Mount Holly Plantation and the family relocated to the remote cabin on the 6,000-acre grounds. Korrina and Steven went on to have two sons together, Thomas and James.
Family members told investigators the marriage was volatile from the beginning. Leon and Sandy relocated more than once to stay close to Korrina as conditions worsened. The fights were constant and frequently physical. Sandy Sagers told Fox 28 Savannah, “She fought right back. She wouldn’t take anything. She’s even hit him over the head with a skillet before.”
Annette was not Steven’s daughter. She was Korrina’s child from before the marriage, and she had no biological or legal tie to him. In the years that followed, that distinction would prove significant.
Two weeks after Korrina disappeared, her father and stepsister drove to the plantation to check on the children. Annette, then 10, told her aunt she wanted to show her something in the attic. Steven would not allow it. The family drove home. It was only after Annette vanished herself that anyone registered what she had been trying to do.
Disturbingly, there was another sign no one acted on in time. At some point during those 11 months, Annette knocked on a neighbor’s door and asked for food. She told the neighbor that she and her brothers had not eaten in three days. The neighbor notified the South Carolina Department of Social Services.
Police found almost nothing
Deputies from the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office arrived at Mount Holly after Clarkson’s call and immediately identified inconsistencies in Steven’s account. He initially told police Korrina had driven off in anger after their argument. But then, he told Korrina’s brother Leon something different: that he had stood on the front porch and watched her pull up to the gate, get out of her car, and climb into a vehicle driven by someone else.
Investigators checked the sightline from the porch to the gate. It did not exist. Captain Dean Kokinda of the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office told Fox 28 Savannah, “The house is probably about half a mile from the roadway. It’s wooded, and it’s a curvy driveway to the house.” Steven later denied ever saying it to Leon.
The transmission fluid told a different story. It traced every foot Korrina’s car had traveled. It had not traveled far.
Steven submitted to a polygraph. The results came back inconclusive. He then introduced a new claim: Korrina had been having an affair and had willingly disappeared to start over with another man. Investigators found no evidence of any affair. They searched the plantation grounds and surrounding wetlands. They found no signs of a struggle, no personal items, and no trace of Korrina.
The Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office named Steven Malinoski a person of interest. That designation held for decades. But there was no body, no crime scene, and no witness to anything that happened after the argument ended. As Deputy L.R. Herod reflected years later, the case was defined by its emptiness from the very first day.
Annette disappeared next
On October 4, 1988, nearly 11 months after her mother vanished, 11-year-old Annette Deanne Sagers walked to the bus stop outside the plantation’s main gate to catch a ride to Westview Middle School, where she was a sixth-grader. A bus passed the stop at approximately 7:00 a.m. Both the driver and a student on board saw Annette sitting under the shelter with her dog. When the bus circled back minutes later, both Annette and the dog were gone.
Steven did not realize she was missing until she failed to come home that evening. He called the police and went to search himself. At the bus stop, he found a handwritten note addressed to him. According to Oxygen’s coverage of the “Up and Vanished” investigation, the full note read: “Dad, Mom came back. I have to go with her. Give the boys lots of kisses and hugs and also you to. Love, Annette.”
Handwriting experts confirmed the note was written in Annette’s hand. What they could not confirm was whether she had written it freely.
Two other details landed alongside the note. The custody hearing over Annette, which Leon and Sandy Sagers had initiated, was scheduled for the week immediately following her disappearance. Korrina’s half-sister had been planning to visit the plantation that same week.
The dog was never found.
The two theories pointed opposite ways
The note split investigators and family members down the middle.
The first theory holds that Korrina came back for her daughter. On this reading, the note is exactly what it appears to be: a child telling her stepfather her mother had returned. Annette was not Steven’s daughter, and the custody hearing would have placed her with Korrina’s family within days regardless. A mother watching from a distance might have acted before that process concluded. The disappearance of the dog fits a departure more readily than a violent one. And Annette’s repeated attempts to signal visiting relatives, including the blocked attempt to reach the attic, suggest a child who had been communicating with someone from the outside.
The second theory is darker. On this reading, Steven killed Korrina on the night of November 21, 1987, and Annette spent the next 11 months living alongside evidence of it. The note, on this reading, was written under duress. The dog was taken to make the departure look voluntary. One of Korrina’s sons, now an adult, has said publicly he believes Steven killed his mother, though he believes someone else was responsible for what happened to Annette.
Steven denied both when confronted by Payne Lindsey, host of the true crime podcast “Up and Vanished,” which covered the case in Season 1. “I had nothing to do with Korrina’s disappearance nor did I have anything to do with Annette’s disappearance,” he insisted. Asked whether physical confrontations with Korrina had occurred, Steven replied, “My memory doesn’t serve me that well.” He was later charged with domestic child abuse in Florida, in a case unrelated to either disappearance.
The family fell apart after
Shortly after Annette disappeared, Steven packed Thomas and James into his vehicle and drove to Florida. He moved in with his parents, then relocated again. One evening, the boys asked if they could go to a friend’s house. Steven told them yes. He never came for them. After midnight, the friend’s parents called the police. Thomas and James were taken into protective custody and eventually placed with other families. They grew up and stopped referring to Steven as their father.
In 2000, an anonymous tip sent investigators to a wooded area of Sumter County, roughly 90 miles from the plantation. Nothing was found. In 2019, the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office began working with the College of Charleston to identify areas on the plantation grounds where remains might be buried. Investigators also examined a suspicious carpet found during that effort. The search narrowed the possibilities. It did not produce answers.
The Charley Project, which maintains records on long-term missing persons in the United States, notes that authorities believe it is likely that both Korrina and Annette met with foul play, and that neither of them ever left Mount Holly Plantation after they disappeared.
Both cases remain open. Neither Korrina Malinoski nor Annette Sag
