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In today's episode, we're going to discuss the Malinowski-Sager case, which was featured in the second episode of the Up and Vanished TV series. If you haven't seen the show yet, don't worry. You can stream the episode from the Oxygen app whenever you want. As a refresher, and for those of you that haven't seen the show yet, here's a quick summary and timeline for Karina Malinowski and Annette Sager's case. In 1987, in rural South Carolina...
26-year-old mother, Karina Malinoski, disappeared without a trace. Then, almost one year later, her 11-year-old daughter, Annette Sagers, went missing from the same place. You just don't see two members of the same family disappear a year apart, and no trace of either one is found. It's a very suspicious set of circumstances.
Both mother and daughter were last seen around the plantation grounds they called home with their family. Stephen Malinowski, Karina's husband and Annette's stepfather, was the caretaker for the plantation grounds. The couple also had two young sons. Not only did we not know our mother's name, we didn't know anything that had happened. Karina was my sister. She loved life. She loved her kids.
When 11-year-old Annette Sagers disappeared, her stepfather found a note in a nearby bus shelter, allegedly written by young Annette, explaining that her mom had come back for her.
Bus driver come to pick up my niece. She wasn't there. There was a note. The note said that mom came back and got me. Did mom actually come back? Did someone else force her to write that note? It's been over 30 years, and no one has heard from either of them since. Nothing ever turned up. We thought Nanette was in Texas. They found a carpet that was rolled up and tied with an electrical cord. Could it be the most perfectly planned escape?
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The following is an extended interview from the Malinowski-Sager case. My name's Leon Sagers and Karina was my sister. I'm Sandy Sagers and Karina was my sister-in-law. But she went by Corey. Corey. Yeah. She was a fun, loving, and exciting person. She loved life. She loved kids. She liked to do things. She loved to work. Me and her were brothers and sisters. We got along great.
I mean, we were there for each other. Oh, she was a good person. I met her when I, of course, when I married him. And I mean, she was always there for you. She always called on holidays and birthdays. And she was just a good person, a very good person. When and how did Karina meet Steven Notnosky? Well, she met Steven through the carnival. He worked in the carnival. What did he do? Well, he called him Carny Guy. Carny Guy. Yeah.
Carny people. He worked for the carnival. He done rides and whatever, I don't know. How'd you guys feel about him? Steve, he could never hold down a job. And he was into drugs. Am I allowed to say that? Yeah. Well, he was into drugs, marijuana, pills, acid. He could never keep a job. And my sister was working all the time. And Steve was very...
abusive to my sister. I've got after him several times. Doing what? He used to hit her, beat on her, and I went after him several times, and he intimidated my niece. She was always scared, intimidated. I mean, as Karina's brother, were you concerned about her being in this relationship? I was. He always talked to my sister. I told him to get rid of him. He's no good. He's no good for her or for Annette. After they got to North Carolina,
She had called us and told us they moved into that plantation. But like I said, she has always called on birthdays, holidays. Every time they got into a fight, she was always calling. And then it stopped, and that's when Steve called us and told us that Corey disappeared. They found her car at the end of the plantation at the gate, and he said she must have went with somebody else. Well...
We knew right off the bat that not what happened. She would not go and leave them kids. And then she wouldn't come back almost a year later and just grab one and not the other two. But we almost had a net. The summer after Corey disappeared, we almost had Steve talked in to letting us have a net for the summer. He was all for it, and then at the last minute he canceled. Why? I don't know, but if she had gotten to our house, she would have never went back.
Because there was nothing he could have done. He wasn't the father, but he wouldn't let us. So when Steven calls and says, "Corey's missing," what are you thinking? Well, he called the house and asked if Corey was at our house. I said, "No." And I asked him, I said, "What's going on?" He said, "Well, your sister up and left." And I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, we got into it and she up and left." So I says, "Well, what'd you do to her?"
He said, "We just argued. It was always about money, him not having a job or what." So the conversation didn't last very long. He told us if we heard anything, let him know. And then later on, somehow the detectives or somebody got ahold of us and asked us. And I said, "Well, he called and asked if she was here." And I said, "No." And then later on, Steve called again. So the detective said to try to get more information as much as you can.
I talked to Steve again. He said Corey left, she got in the car and drove to the end of the gate, got out of the car and jumped into another vehicle with somebody else and took off. Did he see that happen? Yes. It's what he told me. So he told you that she drove to the end of the property and then jumped in another vehicle? She got out. She had to open the gate, close the gate, got into the vehicle and took off. So I said, "Well, what color was the van?" I asked him, "Who was it? Do you know?" He says, "No," and this and that.
Well, anyway, I called the detective and told him what was going on. He said, Mr. Thagers, he says, there ain't no way Steve could have seen that because from the house to the gate was three miles. And it's nothing but timbers. So he lied. He's already told two lies to the detectives. Plus, he lied to me. So we listened to what he had to say, told him what Steve told me. And then all of a sudden, the phone contact stopped. We didn't hear from him.
and then talked to the detective and he said, "Well, they had to stop because Steve pulled a deal saying he was being harassed by the police department." We tried to get a net at this time and he was going to go with it, but he changed his mind because like I said, if we would have got a net, he would not have got her back. My half-sister, her and her husband, and my dad went to South Carolina. She told us that when they were up there,
Annette tried to get my sister to go upstairs and show her something. And my sister didn't. What do you mean? Annette tried to get my sister to go upstairs. And like I told my sister Cheryl, I said, "Well, it could have been possible that Cory was upstairs wrapped up in a bag or up there somewhere out of the way so nobody knew if anything happened." Like she saw something maybe. Annette, she was a smart little girl.
Yeah, Steve wouldn't let her take Cheryl upstairs. Unless Annette was going to show her maybe something new, a dress or, you know, new toys or toys or whatever. I don't know. I don't know if Cory was upstairs. I don't know that. She could have been tied up. She could have been dead. She could have been alive. I don't know. Nobody knows, but Annette and Steve.
What's your gut tell you about what Annette was trying to say that day? My gut feeling tells me that my sister was up there dead, wrapped up in a plastic bag, and he was trying to figure out how to get rid of the body. Do you know how long it had been since Corey had been missing? Oh, it wasn't long because his dad and sister went up there not long after Corey disappeared so they could find out what was going on.
Annette tried to get Cheryl to go upstairs and she didn't. He wouldn't even let her take her into town to buy her anything. Steve wouldn't let her do, you know, everybody had to be downstairs. When Steve made contact with me on Cory being missing, I had that gut feeling, I had that feeling that she was already dead. It was on a plantation and there was a pond there or whatever and they had alligators and stuff.
That went through my head a lot of times. Let's flash forward to October that year. Annette goes missing. Walk me through what you learned about that. Annette was at the bus stop. The one bus driver went by and seen her there. Driver come to pick her up. She wasn't there and there was a note left. And they said it was Annette's handwriting. Said that mommy come and pick me up. I mean, I don't know what all the notes said because the detective was supposed to send us a copy of it. Never done.
Never got any of that. Did Steven ever call you guys? No. He never called us after. We ain't talked to him. Since the last time he called you about Corey. Yeah. Wait, so he didn't call you guys to say that Annette is missing? Nope. No. You know, he was trying to cover his bases in case Annette did actually see what happened to my sister. After Steve left South Carolina and moved to Florida, we didn't know nothing about it. Detectives never called us and told us.
We found out later on that he up and left, took the boys, dumped them off somewhere. Found out that he signed his waiver over and adopted the boys out. Then we called us. We took care of the boys. Then we heard he got married again and had more kids. Wow. How can he get married? I've asked different people, how can a man get married when they're still married? When's the last time you talked to Steve? I ain't talked to Steve. When Cory disappeared.
We only talked to him a couple times. It's been 30 years. We sent papers down to every state that we knew she would go and never had no luck. We know, like I said, Cory called us all the time. If she was to go on her own,
And even if she did come back and get Annette, she would have called long enough to say, "Hey, I'm okay. I got Annette. Goodbye." She would have called. And she wouldn't have come back and got one kid and not take the other two. She just wouldn't. - Doesn't make sense. - No. - No. - Tried to get it on Unsolved Mystery at the time when they were there, and there was another one. And I had talked to both of them, and they said, "Well, we're not airing it because
We already talked to the husband, and we believe the husband. We don't believe you. The husband as in Steven? Yes. What did Steven tell them? I don't know. They believed him, but they wouldn't believe us. They wouldn't give us a second chance. I find that mind-blowing. Well, it's the way the world is. Nobody told us nothing. We've never heard no more. What was it, about maybe 10 years ago, some lady called. She was a detective.
We gave her all the information again. She said she wanted some pictures and stuff. I sent her pictures of stuff of me and Cory when we was kids. They wanted stuff for DNA. I told them that they can have these pictures, but I need them back. They can take copies. Them pictures are the only ones I have left of me and her being kids. I don't have them now. All that stuff I sent them of pictures was the only copies I had. I lost my mom when I was 16 months old.
Cory and I never had nothing. We raised ourselves by ourselves. Our dad was never around, so we depended on each other. We took care of each other. She was there for me and I was there for her. Only thing we had was each other. And to have somebody ripped away from you and you never see again. I mean, I don't know how anybody else would feel, but I love my sister and she's gone. I don't get no phone calls from her. I don't see her. She's gone. I feel that they let me down.
I'm sorry, but I ain't heard from nobody in years and years. So she's been put on the back burner for all these years. And my kids are grown up and gone now. I had one in the Navy and one in the Army and one graduated from college. And to this day, I can call my boys to see where they're at. I can't do that to my sister. She's gone, and I can't call her to tell her I love her. Happy birthday. Merry Christmas. Happy Valentine's Day. Or call her and just say, hey, I'm thinking about you.
I can't do that. My sister's not here. You lie once, you gotta keep lying till the day you die. 'Cause you gotta cover that same lie over and over. 'Cause if you don't, somebody's gonna remember the first word you said about a lie.
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Now for our team's roundtable discussion, where we talk about the Malinowski-Sager case. Number one, let's start with it's very hard to predict how someone should act. A lot of times you'll see people act a certain way that you would think is abnormal, but it turns out that that's just how they act and they're actually innocent. But this is very, very strange because there are certain things that you're just going to do, emotions aside.
Like you said earlier, Payne, when you find out that not only is there a child missing, but that child is with someone else who was presumed missing and has now reappeared. If you believe that, you have two stories that you need to tell the authorities and the family members of Annette and Karina. So emotion aside, you have the obligation. You're also no longer a suspect. If you were a suspect in Karina's disappearance...
even not necessarily officially, but unofficially with the family, you would at least say, hey, I told you this wasn't me. She's back. She took our daughter. And now let's, you know, let's go find them or let's, you know, alert authorities. But like you said, no call. But I do think it's, you know, like you said, Meredith learning that that wasn't his biological daughter. Also, her age stood out to me because she's much older than her younger brothers. So I
If she had any sort of knowledge or had a memory come back to her from what happened the year before, you know, she's old enough to be a credible witness to talk and let people know what she heard or saw that night. So you just never know what was going on over that past year in between the mother disappearing and the daughter disappearing that may have led up to this. Yeah. To your previous point about the way people act when a tragedy happens, you can never—
Yeah.
We know that when someone he loves goes missing, he finds it necessary to call Leon. That's a very normal thing to do. When that same thing happens again, he doesn't. So to me, that's a contradiction in the way he's previously behaved. It's not exactly what I would do or what someone else would do or what I think someone should do. It's more about, well, you've done this in the past. Why not this time?
And it makes you look at that particular incident a little bit differently and beg the question, well, why? Why is it different this time? Did it slip your mind this time? You know, what exactly is different about this scenario? What do you guys think about the note in the bus shed? I mean, pretty odd. It does seem very neatly and obviously placed. I mean, I can't, I didn't get to see the original bus shed, but the first thing that comes to my mind is,
why didn't it blow away or something, you know, to find this neat note just kind of sitting there. How long had it been there? It just seems so perfect. I mean, things happen, but it just seemed like it was just too perfect to be laying there like that. Yeah. I mean, the timing of it is just the timing to write the note. Is it preplanned? Was she, you know, was she contact, had she contacted her daughter prior to that? Like,
What do you actually believe if you believe that note is real? You know, how exactly does it work? And it just doesn't add up to me. Then why is the note crumbled up and then flattened out again? That makes absolutely no sense in the scenario that she's coming to pick up her daughter and take her away, but she's leaving a note really not for the father, but for the boys, right? Interesting and odd. Do you remember who told us that Stephen Malinowski –
picked up the note and crumpled it in rage. Stephen told us that. Stephen said that. Okay. That seems like an odd thing to me. Wait, he said that? Yeah. And we talked about it earlier, like, you know, the inconsistencies. Not emotive when talking to the police, yet sees a note from his essentially stepdaughter and crumples it up with, like, rage and upset. And then later doesn't even call Leon. Yeah.
It's kind of odd to me. It does feel sort of weird and convenient. I think that I go back to the wording of the note, too. It just seems strange. I'm actually so mystified that it's really in her handwriting, though that's what the experts say. But, you know, it's a kid, like we said earlier. They can be coerced to do things. They could be persuaded to do things.
You know, here's an assignment. Write this. Not knowing that it will be used against them. They talked a lot like, was this done under duress? Is that why it's crumpled? Is that why there's words crossed out? I don't know. It's interesting because they said it didn't look like it was done under duress. It looked like it was written freely of her own accord in her own handwriting.
I wish we had that note and could bring it to, you know, some more experts. I would be really interested to see what people said about it today. Right. 30 years later, what kind of different technology and different eyes can get on that and really give us another opinion? Or maybe, you know, hold up the original opinion. You never know. Yeah, that would be if we could do one thing ourselves now, I would really like to take a look at the original note and bring it to more people. What happened to the note?
They showed us a copy of it. They have it, I think, in the police station. Yeah, they still have it, yeah. I think also the bus shed thing is weird. When we were told by the police that the bus driver said they saw her there, then looped around, came back, and she wasn't there. I just really wonder if they actually saw her. Yeah, there's so many variables here that if one thing changes that we're considering as fact, you know, it opens up completely new doors, right? Like if it was another...
Was she never at the bus stop? Was that another child that then left the bus stop and was there for another reason? I mean, you just never know. But going by what the police believe are facts, it doesn't really point us in any direction outside of this all being very suspicious. And the one person who's at the center of both the disappearances is Stephen.
I think one thing that's kind of weird, too, is that the only child that would be there would be Annette. If the bus driver indeed did see a child, it would have to be her because no other children were picked up at that bus stop. It's really odd. This was a unique experience. We drove up there. We didn't know what to expect. We're taking a couple cars. We're in there with Stephen Monowski's sons. They haven't seen their father in years.
And we don't know if he's going to be home. We don't know if he's going to let us in, if he'll talk to you, Payne. I think it worked out. I mean, you were able to get in the house. And I think they spoke to him first. He didn't realize they were coming over. And they said, hey, you know, we're still looking for our mother and our sister. And we have someone here who wants to talk to you about it. He let you in the house. What were you thinking then?
Number one, did you think he was going to let you in? And what were you thinking when you first got in there? Kind of set that up for us. I didn't think that he was going to be super excited about letting me in or talking to me at all. But I thought it was possible. I thought that, I mean, if his two sons were there and they hadn't seen each other in that long and he saw in their eyes how much they wanted to know and ask questions about their mother,
I think that it was the perfect recipe for Steve and Malinowski to talk. And that's kind of, that was my mentality going into it. And I'll be honest, I think the rest of the crew was probably pretty doubtful that we would get any sort of interview out of this, just because it was so challenging to kind of create the scenario for it to happen. But I think really it was Thomas and James who just,
came to the front door and broke the ice and in a way kind of shocked Stephen with their presence. And then from there kind of broke the ice. And from the outside, I was actually texting them and just kind of seeing how it was going. And they mentioned that I was there and that we were doing this documentary piece for the TV show on Karina and Annette. And, um,
Then they all came outside and we talked for a minute and he let me in. Some of Steven's answers are just ridiculous in there. I asked Steven just point blank if he ever laid his hand on Karina and he kept saying, I don't remember or to the best of my memory, I don't think so. I mean, who says that about, I don't care how long it's been.
That means that, like, what do you mean? Either you've never laid a hand on a woman like that or you have and you're just answering it in this weird way.
That doesn't make any sense to me. You should definitively know if you ever abused your ex-wife. Yeah. I don't care how long it's been. Absolutely. That answer tells me that he probably has and on multiple occasions, but he knows that by saying that, it makes him look bad. So, and he also doesn't want to lie for some reason. He's lying about, I think he's lying about other stuff, but he's trying to get away with, you know, the safest answer possible without telling a lie, but...
it's pretty obvious that you would know that answer definitively if you have never done that before. He just, I mean, he kind of screwed himself because I asked him that and he immediately went to a default answer
liar's answer of, you know, I don't recall that, when really, you should really know that or not. Yeah. Not, ah, to the best of my memory, what do you mean, to the best of your memory? You remember everything else very clearly. You remember crumpling up this note. Yeah, those things that benefit him.
You never went to the attic. You know all these things. These are facts to you. But you can't recall. It's kind of fuzzy on whether or not you were abusive towards Karina. Physically abusive. You can't say for sure, but everything else you can say for sure. Or is that just how you answered that question in this particular instance because you're lying? That's what I think. How do you think...
Thomas and James reacted to seeing their dad for the first time in so long and really it being kind of about what happened to their mother. I think Thomas and James were going through a whole bunch of emotions at once. But they I mean, they put a lot of that to the side, I think.
and had their game faces on and knew that when we were sitting in there like that, this was their chance to ask their dad straight up to his face point blank about their mother and they may not get another chance like this. And so they really, they were stone cold in there. I was sitting on a couch by the door. They were sitting on another couch across the room and
front of me and to my left and to their right was Steven sitting in this chair and so I could see both of their faces kind of scanning the room as we were all talking and I mean they were stone-cold and they were trying to get answers were there any moments where it was really tense I think the whole thing in there was pretty tense and I think at first we
just sort of let him talk. I mean, really, in the show, we play about five minutes of what was really close to 45 minutes of us sitting in there talking. All the really important stuff we put in there. But there was a lot of letting them talk and me sort of building up to the point where I was asking him some of the harder questions, which isn't really easy to do because it's uncomfortable and no one wants to
face the music like that because it just makes you feel weird but it was the only chance we had to ask him these questions and I don't even know for sure if he's ever been asked them and if he has it's been 30 years so didn't he get up at some point during a question yeah he did what question was that I was I was essentially telling him that the that the police precinct now has this cold case unit that
that is working this case full-time. And I told him that there was four officers on it full-time and they're working it every day. Isn't that great? And he was like,
Absolutely. And you could tell he was super nervous. And in hindsight, here's what I think happened. I mentioned police and I mentioned cold case and just like law enforcement in my statement. And immediately his tune changed and he just he sat up and he walked into his kitchen to warm up his coffee and
and he looked very nervous and like he was looking around. And for a brief moment, I thought, where is this guy going? What is he going to grab? I think that when I mentioned police, he thought this was to catch a predator or something and that the cops were outside and about to just ambush him, and this was it. I really think that when I said, yeah,
The police are working on this now. You know, he's thinking they're outside. There's already been two big surprises. Hey, here are your sons. Hey, here's this investigative journalist. Hey, here are these cameras. What's next? Well, obviously the police, right? Nope, not today. Maybe next time. This Saturday at 7, 6 central oxygen network will play the next episode in the up and vanish TV series where we cover crystal risingers case. Next week, we'll have a followup podcast episode on the same case.
If you have any questions about the cases covered by the Up and Vantage TV series, please call us at 770-545-6411. Again, that's 770-545-6411. Executive produced by Payne Lindsey and Donald Albright. Additional production by Mike Rooney, Meredith Stedman, and Cooper Skinner. Voice narration by Rob Ricotta. Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set.
A big thank you to the crew and everyone we spoke to during filming. Check out the show this weekend, only on Oxygen.
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