Pennsylvania woman who vanished in 1990s is found in Puerto Rico nursing home

In 1999, social workers in Puerto Rico found a woman wandering the streets and took her into an adult care home. She spoke little about her life and where she came from, a social worker later told police in Pennsylvania. But over the years, the woman began sharing more details, authorities said last week.

Those details led caregivers and investigators on a trail to Ross Township, just north of Pittsburgh, and a decades-old missingperson case. In 1992, Robert Kopta had reported his wife, Patricia, missing. But investigators turned few leads, and the family believed her dead.

Patricia Kopta was in fact alive and living in the Caribbean, an Interpol officer and a staff member from the Puerto Rican care home told the Ross Township Police Department in early 2022. They believed she was the woman first taken into care in 1999.

On Thursday, Deputy Chief Brian Kohlhepp of the Ross Township police announced at a news conference that an investigation had confirmed that the woman in Puerto Rico was Patricia Kopta, concluding three decades of uncertainty for her family.

“We didn’t expect it,” Gloria Smith, Patricia Kopta’s sister, said at the news conference. “It was a very big shock to know that she’s still alive.”

Robert Kopta and the Ross Township Police Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday evening.

Patricia Kopta, 83, worked several jobs but had become known in Pittsburgh as a street preacher, according to her family and reports from around the time of her disappearance. People nicknamed her “the Sparrow” – “short and birdlike,” a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist wrote in 1998.

“She thought she was doing God’s will,” Smith said. “… She was just trying to help people.”

Kopta struggled with mental health issues, according to Kohlhepp, and the few leads for police suggested she’d left town by choice. Smith said at the news conference that Patricia had told another one of her sisters that she wanted to leave her family and Pittsburgh out of fear of being institutionalized.

“She didn’t want us to find her,” Smith said.

Robert Kopta said Patricia had long expressed a desire to go to a warmer climate. He suspected that Patricia had traveled to Puerto Rico and ran ads in a local newspaper looking for her with no success, he said. For years, the family worried she’d turn up dead.

“It’s been sad,” Robert said. “Especially when it first happened, every time someone found a body somewhere [we’d wonder], ‘Was it Patricia? Was it Patricia?’”

The case went cold for more than three decades, when an Interpol agent in Puerto Rico contacted the Ross Township police in 2022 with news of the care facility’s suspicions. The woman they believed to be Patricia had told the staff she’d arrived on a cruise from Europe, Kohlhepp said.

Upon investigating, police determined the lead was credible and informed Patricia’s family, according to Kohlhepp. A DNA test, which took several months to process, confirmed her identity.