A woman from Pennsylvania who had been thought to be dead for 30 years was found living hundreds of miles away.
When Bob Kopta returned to their home in Pennsylvania one night in 1992 and Patricia wasn’t there, he started to worry about where she was.
Patricia, who was 52 when she went missing, worked as a Pittsburgh street preacher, but Bob said ‘nobody’ knew where she’d gone, so he decided to report her missing to the police.
Bob knew that his wife had some mental health problems and that she had said she wanted to go somewhere warm, so he put ads in the newspapers in Puerto Rico to try to find her.
But the search didn’t turn up anything, and for 31 years, the case stayed unsolved at the Ross Township police station. Bob didn’t know that his wife was right where he thought she might be.
Patricia, who now lives in Puerto Rico, was found on the street on June 30, 1999, and she needed help.
She wouldn’t tell anyone about her personal life, but when she got dementia years later, she began to talk about it.
Patricia started telling people things, which helped the staff at an adult care home connect her to Ross Township, where she had gone missing.
Over the course of nine months, the police looked into the case and did DNA tests to try to figure out who the woman was.
Deputy Chief of Police for Ross Township, Brian Kohlhepp, said:
We were contacted by an agent from Interpol as well as a social worker from Puerto Rico who believed they had her in an adult care home in Puerto Rico.
The DNA tests confirmed the woman was Patricia Kopta; news that stunned her family, who thought she was dead.
Patricia’s sister Gloria Smith said:
Shock. I didn’t believe it. It was a total shock.
Smith said that her sister’s disappearance had been “hard” on the whole family and that she, her mother, and their other sister were always worried about Patricia.
We really thought she was dead all those years,
Smith added.
We didn’t expect it and it was a very big shock to find out she was alive, and we are so happy, and I hope I can get down to see her.
After 31 years, Bob said that his wife’s disappearance was “bad” and cost him “a lot of money,” but now that the family is back together, the case is closed.
