At A Glance
Name: Madalina Cojocari
Age: 11
Last seen: Monday, November 21, 2022
Missing from: Cornelius, North Carolina
Description: Madalina is 4’10” and weighs 90 lbs. She has long brown hair and brown eyes.
Contact: Anyone with information on Madalina’s disappearance and/or whereabouts is to call the Cornelius Police Department at 704-892-7773 or 1-800-CALLFBI.
It took Madalina Cojocari’s parents over a month to report her missing.
The 11-year-old, sixth grader from Cornelius, North Carolina, who loves horses and ice cream, was last seen by her mother on Wednesday, November 23, 2022; the night before Thanksgiving. That evening, Diana Cojocari, 37, was arguing with her husband, 60-year-old Christopher Palmiter, when Madalina took herself to bed around 10 pm.
Late that night, according to Christopher, and early the next morning, per Diana, Christopher left hurriedly for Michigan; a nine-hour, 550-mile drive. Originally from Michigan, Christopher was visiting family to “collect some belongings.” Diana spent the morning alone and checked on on Madalina around 11:30 am. And that’s when she noticed her daughter wasn’t in her room or elsewhere in the home.
In Cornelius, North Carolina, Diana and Madalina were far from home. Mother and daughter immigrated to the U.S. from Moldova, a country in east Europe, in 2017. The life-changing move brought them halfway across the world so Diana could marry Christopher; a man she met online and hardly knew. Nonetheless, worried friends and family in Moldova still pled with Diana over the phone to report Madalina’s absence. Still, she didn’t.
Instead, Diana waited three more days until Christopher returned home to ask if he’d seen Madalina. She later told investigators she was afraid to report her daughter missing while Christopher was away, because she feared it might cause “conflict” or damage her marriage. Christopher denied seeing Madalina before he left and up to a week prior.
Curiously, when Christopher returned, him and Diana asked each other if the other was “hiding” Madalina somewhere, to which they both answered “no.” Despite this proclamation, and the fact that their local police station was only a mile from their home, neither reported Madalina missing for another 20 days.
Lying In Plain Sight
Madalina Cojocari’s mother, Diana, and stepfather, Christopher, didn’t plan to report their daughter missing. From all accounts, it was a topic that neither dipped into. Madalina promised to alert authorities and Christopher “encouraged” her too, but neither of them actually did anything.
It wasn’t until officials from Madalina’s school noticed her accruing absences, that suspicions set on the Cojocari-Palmiter household.
Because of Madalina’s repeat absences, officials from Bailey Middle School, where she attended sixth grade, sent letters and placed a few calls to the home. All these attempts went unanswered.
On December 12, a resource officer and counselor with the school visited the home. Their knocks also went unanswered, but they left a truancy packet at their doorstep. Two days later, Diana called the school and agreed to meet in-person on December 15, and to bring Madalina with her. Instead, she showed to the appointment alone.
Figuratively cornered with nowhere to turn and without any “believable” excuses to offer, she admitted to school officials that her 11-year-old had been missing for three weeks. The school contacted local authorities, who contacted the FBI, and an official investigation began to find the missing child.
Diana and Christopher were arrested and charged with failure to report Madalina missing. They were brought to Mecklenburg County Detention Center in Charlotte, where Christopher received a $200,000 bond and Diana, $250,000. The judge later revoked Diana’s bail and required them both to surrender their passports.
Establishing a Timeline for Madalina Cojocari
The only semblance of a realistic timeline starts with Monday, November 21, 2022. Security footage inside of a Bailey Middle School bus captured Madalina exiting her normal bus at her usual stop at 4:59 pm. That’s all we know so far.
Madalina was last seen wearing blue jeans, a white t-shirt and a white jacket, and pink, purple and white Adidas sneakers.
Anyone with information on Madalina’s disappearance and/or whereabouts is urged to call the Cornelius Police Department at 704-892-7773 or 1-800-CALLFBI.
How Diana Cojocari and Christopher Palmiter Crossed Paths
Diana and Madalina are from Moldova, a country that sits between Romania and Ukraine. Compared to its neighboring countries, Moldova is small, with a population of 3.5 million. It’s also among the poorest countries in Europe with a considerable amount of crime and substance abuse, and is home to the world’s heaviest consumers of alcohol. Diana and Madalina lived in one of its impoverished areas.
Internet sources speculate whether Diana wanted to leave Moldova to establish a better life for her and Madalina. Nonetheless, she started chatting with men online from across the world. One of these men, who she met on an international dating site, was Christopher Palmiter. At the time Diana was 32 and Christopher was 55.
Christopher, who is 33 years older than Diana, was a creative designer who worked for various manufacturing firms. His career began in Michigan, where he is from, and took him to Virginia and North Carolina, where he eventually purchased a two-story brick home in the residential neighborhood of Victoria Bay Drive. When he moved to Cornelius, he opened his own design business: Christopher James Studios.
Christopher lived more than 5,000 miles from Diana and Madalina, but he made a decent living and could surely provide them with a stable lifestyle, at least financially.
So in 2017, Diana obtained the necessary Visas for her and Madalina, and they moved to join Christopher. The home he purchased for them has four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a beautiful fenced-in yard for Madalina to play in, and is located just 20 minutes from Charlotte. The cozy community also had a private pool, tennis courts and picturesque views of nearby Lake Norman.
With so many differences between Diana and Christopher, from their ages and lifestyles to their beliefs, it was only a matter of time for disagreements, and they surely did happen. One of their most-disagreed-upon subjects is religion. Diana’s beliefs are very strong and specific, and Christopher doesn’t share in them.
Diana Cojocari and Kundalini
Diana is part of a small, tight-knit religious group that believes a subgroup, of sorts, of Kundalini. Because we don’t know what happened to Madalina yet, Diana’s religious views may provide some insight into her thoughts and the possible lead-up to Madalina’s disappearance.
In Hinduism, Kundalini is a divine feminine energy, known as “Shakti,” or the formless goddess. Shakti is stored in the base of the spine. Kundalini yoga focuses on releasing this energy to experience a spiritual awakening characteristic of consciousness expansion, freedom from ego and feelings of euphoria. The experience occurs as the energy from the base of the spine rises to awaken all seven of the body’s chakras: root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye and crown.
Followers believe awakening is reachable through years of dedicated yoga practice, as well as intense personal experiences such as childbirth, near-death encounters and extreme emotional duress.
Diana’s Support of Yogi Bhajan.
It wasn’t Diana’s belief in Kundalini that’s cause for concern, but her staunch support of guru Yogi Bhajan.
Yogi Bhajan died in 2004 at the age of 74, but in life he was known as the founder of Kundalini yoga. Kundalini yoga originated around 1,000 B.C., so Yogi Bhajan was hardly the inventor, but in the 1970s he introduced his version of Kundalini to the western world, which included elements of the Indian religion, Sikhism.
Yogi Bhajan was also hardly the esteemed individual he claimed to be. In 1968, a year before he introduced his version of Kundalini yoga to Canada, and then Los Angeles, he was Harbhajan Singh Puri, a customs officer at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, India. But that all changed when he reached LA and started teaching yoga classes. A year later, he founded the nonprofit 3HO— Health, Happy, Holy Foundation—which remains active today.
The truth is, Yogi Bhajan was a fraudster guilty of sexual misconduct. He had a wife and three daughters, but claimed to be celibate. Instead, his sexual abuse and misconduct left a smear of multigenerational trauma that changed his of victims and their families forever. Conveniently for Yogi Bhajan, the truth emerged after his death. The allegations against him involve 299 victims.
Pamela Saharah Dyson, Yogi Bhajan’s former student and employee, exposed his actions in her 2020 book, Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage (My Life with Yogi Bhajan). The book encouraged other victims to come forward as well.
Where Diana comes into the equation, is in her continued support of Yogi Bhajan’s specific beliefs, which teeter towards violence. Yogi Bhajan encouraged violence, abuse and trauma as a way to trigger a Kundalini awakening. Majority of those who practice Kundalini reject Yogi Bhajan today—but not Diana.
Investigation Status for Madalina Cojocari
When investigators questioned Diana, she told them she believed Christopher put the family in danger before he left. The public is not aware how or why, or what this means. She also claimed that some of Madalina’s clothes were missing from the home, along with her backpack.
Officials have conducted several searches of the home on Victoria Bay Drive where Madalina lives. Inside, detectives found an area in the kitchen that was sectioned-off with plywood, where Christopher said he was building a second apartment within the home. Investigators were also seen digging in the backyard.
Officials expanded their search to include Lake Norman, which hugs the town of Cornelius along a 70-mile shoreline. Police also went door-to-door to 245 homes in the Victoria Bay neighborhood in Cornelius to find information on possible leads.
Captain Jennifer Thompson with the Cornelius Police Department released a statement, “This is a serious case of a child whose parents are clearly not telling us everything they know.”
A probable cause hearing is scheduled for Diana Cojocari and Christopher Palmiter on January 9, 2023.