Reported Missing Seven Months After He Died: Codi Bigsby

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

September 1, 2025

Codi Bigsby was four years old, living with his father, Cory Jamar Bigsby, and three younger brothers, ages five, two, and two, at the Buckroe Pointe townhomes in Hampton, Virginia. On January 31, 2022, Cory reported Codi missing at nine o'clock in the morning, telling police he had checked on his son around two a.m. and found him sleeping normally, only to wake later and discover the boy gone from the home entirely. Codi's mother, Dina Abdul Kareem, had not actually seen her son in person since November 2020, and had last spoken with him by phone in April 2021, roughly nine months before he was reported missing. Kareem had previously reported incidents of domestic violence involving Cory, adding an already troubling layer of context to a father who was, by that point, the sole caregiver for four young boys.

An Interrogation That Escalated for Days

What followed Cory's initial report to police did not resolve quickly into either a confirmed abduction or a cleared father. Investigators brought Cory in for questioning, and that interview stretched out over an extended period spanning multiple days, an unusually prolonged interrogation that eventually resulted in his arrest, though not initially on any charge connected directly to Codi's disappearance. On February 3, just days after reporting his son missing, Cory was arrested on seven counts of felony child neglect, charges tied to incidents investigators said dated back to the previous December, involving the other children in the home rather than Codi's disappearance specifically. He was denied bond at his child neglect hearing.

The case against Cory expanded considerably from there. By July 2022, he faced an additional twenty three charges, including four counts of child abuse, two related counts of child neglect, fifteen separate counts of child neglect connected to leaving his children home alone, and two more counts tied to failing to secure medical attention for an injured child. None of these thirty total charges were, at the time, formally connected to what had actually happened to Codi himself. According to arrest warrant documentation, Cory had admitted to leaving his children home alone on several occasions, a pattern of neglect that painted a disturbing picture of daily life in the household even before investigators developed any theory about Codi's specific fate.

A Death Investigators Say Happened Months Earlier

The investigation's most significant development came later, when a grand jury indictment revealed a theory considerably darker than a child having simply vanished from his bed one January night. Prosecutors alleged that Cory had actually killed Codi months before ever reporting him missing, placing the boy's death on or around June 18, 2021, more than seven months before the January 2022 disappearance report Cory gave to police. While awaiting trial, Cory reportedly gave investigators several conflicting confessions, with his final account describing how he beat Codi until the boy went into cardiac arrest, then buried his body across state lines in Prince George's County, Maryland.

Investigators pointed to a striking piece of digital evidence supporting that timeline: Cory's phone contained no original photographs of Codi taken after the date he ultimately admitted to killing him, an absence that, however circumstantial on its own, aligned precisely with the death timeline prosecutors were building. At trial, one of Codi's younger brothers testified that he had found Codi bruised and unresponsive in an upstairs bedroom, a child witness account that offered independent corroboration of the abuse and the approximate timing investigators had already pieced together through other means.

A Trial, a Conviction, and a Body Never Found

Cory Bigsby went to trial in March 2024, and on March 12, a jury took roughly two hours to convict him of second degree murder and concealment of a dead body, both charges connected directly to Codi rather than to the separate neglect and abuse counts involving his other sons. He was sentenced on June 18, 2024, receiving the maximum available term of forty five years in prison. Despite the detailed confession describing burial in Prince George's County, Maryland, Codi's remains have never actually been recovered, leaving the specific location where his father buried him unconfirmed even after conviction and sentencing. Cory later appealed his conviction, and the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld it, affirming both the murder conviction and the sentence.

An Investigation That Drew Its Own Scrutiny

The extended, multi day interrogation Cory underwent in the days immediately following his initial missing persons report drew scrutiny of its own, with at least one detective involved in handling that questioning ultimately removed from the case over concerns about how the interrogation had been conducted. That detail has fed into broader public debate about the investigation's early handling, with some observers raising the possibility that investigators fixed on Cory as their central suspect unusually quickly, potentially at the cost of pursuing other leads with equal vigor in those first critical days when Codi's actual whereabouts, dead or alive, might still have been more readily traceable. Whatever role that early tunnel vision may or may not have played, the physical and testimonial evidence that eventually emerged, the conflicting confessions, the phone records, the brother's direct account of finding Codi bruised and unresponsive, ultimately supported the theory that Cory himself was responsible for his son's death.

A Mother Left Waiting

Dina Abdul Kareem, who had already been separated from her son for well over a year before he was ever reported missing, released public statements during the investigation expressing her own anguish and her demand for answers about what had happened to Codi, statements that took on a different, heavier weight once the full timeline of his actual death months before the reported disappearance became clear. Even with a conviction now upheld on appeal and Cory Bigsby serving a forty five year sentence, Kareem and the rest of Codi's family have never received the one thing that would allow any of them anything resembling physical closure, the recovery of his remains from wherever his father ultimately buried him in Maryland.

A Household Already Under Strain

The broader picture that emerged from the separate neglect and abuse charges against Cory painted a household that was struggling badly well before Codi's death, four young children, all under the age of six, being raised by a single father who admitted to leaving them unsupervised on repeated occasions and who faced separate allegations of failing to seek medical treatment for at least one injured child. That context does not explain what specifically happened to Codi in June 2021, but it does help account for how a death of that severity could occur inside a home already generating enough documented concern that investigators would go on to file thirty separate charges connected to the surviving children, none of which, notably, were ever sufficient on their own to have flagged Codi's absence before his father chose to report it seven months after the fact.

Convicted, But Still Missing

Codi Bigsby's case occupies an unusual space in the world of unsolved disappearances, a homicide with a convicted killer, an upheld sentence, and a confession describing exactly where the crime supposedly ends, yet a body that remains, to date, entirely unrecovered. What began as a father's frantic report of a missing four year old resolved, more than two years later, into the far darker realization that Codi had already been dead for the better part of a year by the time anyone outside his own household was ever asked to start looking for him.

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