Name: <\/strong>Madalina Cojocari 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.<\/p>\n\n\n Late that night, according to Christopher, and early the next morning, per Diana,\u00a0Christopher left hurriedly for Michigan; a nine-hour, 550-mile drive.\u00a0Originally 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\u2019s when she noticed her daughter wasn\u2019t in her room or elsewhere in the home. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, Diana waited three more days<\/em> until Christopher returned home to ask<\/em> 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<\/a>.<\/strong> Christopher denied seeing Madalina before he left and up to a week prior. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Curiously, when Christopher returned, him and Diana asked each other<\/em> 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. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn’t until officials from Madalina’s school noticed her accruing absences, that suspicions set on the Cojocari-Palmiter household. <\/p>\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On December 12,\u00a0a resource officer\u00a0and counselor with the school\u00a0visited 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\u00a0in-person on December 15, and to bring Madalina with her.\u00a0Instead, she showed to the appointment alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s all we know so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Madalina was last seen wearing blue jeans, a white t-shirt and a white jacket, and pink, purple and white Adidas sneakers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyone with information on Madalina\u2019s disappearance and\/or whereabouts is urged to call the Cornelius Police Department at 704-892-7773 or 1-800-CALLFBI.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a>. It’s also among the poorest countries in Europe<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So in 2017, Diana obtained the necessary Visas for her and Madalina, and\u00a0they\u00a0moved 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Diana is part of a small, tight-knit religious group that believes a subgroup, of sorts, of\u00a0Kundalini.\u00a0Because we don\u2019t know what happened to Madalina yet, Diana\u2019s religious views may provide some insight into her thoughts<\/strong> and the possible lead-up to Madalina’s disappearance.<\/p>\n\n\n In Hinduism, Kundalini\u00a0is a divine feminine energy, known as \u201cShakti,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t Diana\u2019s belief in Kundalini that\u2019s cause for concern, but her staunch support of\u00a0guru\u00a0Yogi Bhajan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yogi Bhajan died in 2004 at the age of\u00a074, 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 <\/em>the inventor, but in the 1970s he introduced\u00a0his<\/em>\u00a0version of Kundalini to the western world, which included elements of the Indian religion, Sikhism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yogi Bhajan was also hardly<\/em> the esteemed individual he claimed to be. In 1968, a year before he introduced his version<\/em> 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\u2014 Health, Happy, Holy Foundation\u2014which remains active today.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n The truth\u00a0is, Yogi Bhajan was a fraudster\u00a0guilty of sexual misconduct.\u00a0He 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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)<\/a><\/em>. The book encouraged other victims to come forward as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where Diana comes into the equation, is in her continued support of Yogi Bhajan\u2019s specific beliefs, which teeter towards violence.<\/strong> 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\u2014but not Diana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When investigators questioned Diana, she told them she believed Christopher put the family in danger<\/em> before he left. The public is not aware how or why, or what this means. She also claimed that some of Madalina\u2019s clothes were missing from the home, along with her backpack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Officials have conducted several searches of the home on Victoria Bay Drive where Madalina lives. Inside, detectives\u00a0found an area in the kitchen that was sectioned-off with plywood, where Christopher\u00a0said he was\u00a0building a second apartment within the home. Investigators were also seen digging in the backyard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.”<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A probable cause hearing is scheduled for Diana Cojocari and Christopher Palmiter on January 9, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Age: <\/strong>11
Last seen:<\/strong> Monday, November 21, 2022
Missing from: <\/strong>Cornelius, North Carolina
Description: <\/strong>Madalina is 4\u201910\u201d and weighs 90 lbs. She has long brown hair and brown eyes.
Contact: <\/strong>Anyone with information on Madalina\u2019s disappearance and\/or whereabouts is to call the Cornelius Police Department at 704-892-7773 or 1-800-CALLFBI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nIt took Madalina Cojocari’s parents over a month to report her missing.<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Madalina](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/truecrimebeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/DC757130-5C5A-483E-AEC6-6A913C0EBFB7.jpeg?resize=378%2C504&ssl=1\")
\n\n\n\nLying In Plain Sight<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/truecrimebeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/madalina-cojocari-missing-house.jpg?resize=541%2C360&ssl=1\")
\n\n\n\nEstablishing a Timeline for Madalina Cojocari<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/truecrimebeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/WNR_Madalina.jpg?resize=770%2C513&ssl=1\")
\n\n\n\nHow Diana Cojocari and Christopher Palmiter Crossed Paths<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/truecrimebeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/diana-cojocari-christopher-palmiter_1672221747651_hpMain_16x9_99228129.jpg?resize=526%2C296&ssl=1\")
\n\n\n\nDiana Cojocari and Kundalini<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/truecrimebeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/DiagrammaChakraKundalini.jpg?resize=310%2C350&ssl=1\")
Diana’s Support of Yogi Bhajan.<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/truecrimebeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Yogi_Bhajan_1985.jpg?resize=192%2C285&ssl=1\")
\n\n\n\nInvestigation Status for Madalina Cojocari<\/h2>\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/truecrimebeat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/preview.jpg?resize=311%2C514&ssl=1\")
\n\n\n\nResources:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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