CORNELIUS, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) – Queen City News has learned Diana Cojocari, the mother of missing 11-year-old Madalina Cojocari, appeared in an online reality weight loss challenge years ago.
A former FBI special agent-in-charge says that old publications could be a new tool for investigators.
The rough translation from the headline in the online video QCN found says Diana Cojocari is looking for love and wants to remarry, but she believes she must lose weight first.
Cojocari says she wants to “start a new life,” according to a rough translation of Romanian in the YouTube clip posted in 2014 from Unica, an online women’s magazine in Moldova, Diana’s home country in Eastern Europe.
The story in the video is about Diana’s life and weight loss journey.
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Still, former FBI special agent-in-charge Michael Tabman says now, more than eight years later, the narrative back then might tell investigators even more.
“It could help if we look at it from the perspective she certainly seems, being mom, to have some regrets about being left with a three-year-old at the time. She appears to possibly have some self-esteem issues,” said Tabman.
A three-year-old girl, likely Madalina, appears with Diana in the video.
When Diana participated in the recording, she was 29 years old, divorced, and looking to remarry.
She did.
Now she’s 37 and in jail in the United States. Along with her American husband, Christopher Palmiter.
They’re charged with not reporting Madalina missing to the police for three weeks.
“If I recall correctly, she was quoted as telling the police that she didn’t report the girl missing to her husband, her (Madalina’s) stepdad, because she was worried about angering him,” said Tabman. “If that is true, all of that would fit into the fact that mom knows something. But she’s putting her relationship with this man ahead of her daughter’s safety or solving her disappearance.”
Tabman says that video doesn’t really give investigators any new leads to pursue. Still, it could help them develop a psychological profile of Diana Cojocari, and they could use that to get her to talk.
