On a quiet morning in Mount Holly, South Carolina, eleven-year-old Annette Deanne Sagers vanished while waiting for her school bus. She was last seen at approximately 7:00 a.m. on October 4, 1988, standing with her dog at the bus stop located at the entrance of the Mount Holly Plantation where her family resided. A student on the bus, which routinely passed her stop before circling back, recalled seeing her there that morning.
However, when the bus returned about twenty minutes later to pick her up, Annette was gone, with only her dog remaining at the scene. Her stepfather, who was the caretaker of the 6,000-acre plantation, reported her missing that afternoon when she failed to return home from Westview Middle School and he discovered she had never arrived.
The circumstances surrounding Annette's disappearance were made all the more unsettling by the fact that her mother, Korrina Lynne Sagers Malinoski, had vanished from the very same location nearly a year prior, in November 1987. Following Annette's disappearance, a handwritten note was discovered at the bus stop. The note, addressed to her stepfather, read, 'Dad, Mom came back. I have to go with her. Give the boys lots of kisses & hugs & also you to. Love, Annette.' Handwriting experts confirmed that the note was indeed written by Annette, though it remains unknown if she wrote it under duress. This cryptic message left investigators and her family with more questions than answers, as there had been no sign of Korrina since her own disappearance. Korrina's family expressed doubt that she would return for Annette and not her two younger sons, or that she would leave without contacting them.
Extensive searches of the vast plantation grounds and the surrounding areas were conducted on foot and by air for both Annette and her mother, but no trace of either of them was ever found. The lack of physical evidence has made the investigation incredibly challenging over the decades. Law enforcement has treated the cases as probable homicides, believing it is unlikely that the mother and daughter ever left the plantation. The disappearances of Annette Sagers and her mother, Korrina Malinoski, from the same location almost a year apart, remain a baffling and unresolved mystery that has deeply affected their family and community. Despite the passage of time, the investigation into what happened to them is ongoing.Last Seen: Oct 4, 1988
