Roberta Michels-Hopkins

The Vanished Podcast

Wondery

True Crime, Society & Culture, Cold Case, Investigative, Find The Missing, Vanished, Missing Persons, Documentary, News, Disappeared, Exhibit C

4.5 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2025

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In February of 1981, Roberta Michels-Hopkins, a 29-year-old mother of two, disappeared from Camden, New Jersey, without a trace. The story goes that she left her home, heading out to buy a pack of cigarettes, and never returned. Roberta's sister said she received a phone call from the man Roberta was in a relationship with, asking if she had seen or heard from Roberta. This phone call prompted her sister to try to report Roberta as missing. However, no official record of a missing persons report was filed until 41 years later. Roberta's sister was told that Roberta had the right to disappear if she wanted to. It was as if Roberta had vanished, slipping through the cracks of time, and her name became seemingly forgotten.

Roberta's son, who was an infant at the time of her disappearance, spent much of his childhood in foster care, lost in a world without answers. Years later, he had a daughter named Trinity, who would unknowingly step into a mystery much larger than she could have imagined. In 2019, just for fun, Trinity sent a DNA sample to one of those commercial databases, never expecting it to lead her to the unsettling truth that her grandmother had vanished and, shockingly, that no one had been searching for her.

What began as a simple curiosity soon became an obsession for Trinity. She dug deeper, uncovering a tangled web of unanswered questions and missing pieces. By 2022, she had ensured that Roberta's disappearance was finally acknowledged by law enforcement, officially reporting her grandmother as a missing person. But how did Roberta's story remain buried for so long? The mystery still lingers, and Trinity is determined to uncover the truth.

If you have any information regarding the disappearance of Roberta Michels-Hopkins, please contact Detective Geoffrey Chiumento of the Cinnaminson Township Police Department at 856-829-6667, ext. 2075, or the New Jersey State Police Missing Persons Unit at 609-882-2000, ext. 2554.

If you have a missing loved one that you would like to have featured on the show, please fill out our case submission form.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	His whole life.
0:11.0	He grew up thinking that his mom had abandoned him.
0:14.0	He didn't know.
0:15.0	Her whole story was a mystery.
0:18.0	He thought it was just, she walked out and she lived her own life and she didn't want
0:22.6	him. And that's huge. And to find out at 40 years old that that wasn't necessarily the truth,
0:29.2	I can't imagine how he felt was it relief or more anguish because it really wasn't closure.
0:35.6	We found the other side of the family.
0:38.0	They didn't even know what happened to her either.
0:40.9	You just seriously have to ask yourself the same questions over and over again.
0:44.9	After the 17th time, the same question, you know what?
0:47.7	That just dawned on me.
0:48.7	I never thought about that.
0:50.1	Or I just remembered that I'm happy to tell the story over and over again because more questions come up.
0:56.9	Honestly, we have more questions than we do answers, the more we do.
1:02.4	In February of 1981, a 29-year-old mother of two disappeared without a trace from Camden, New Jersey.
1:10.2	The story goes that she left her home,
1:12.3	heading out to buy a pack of cigarettes and stamps, and then she simply never came back.
1:18.2	Family members claim they tried to report her missing, but strangely, no official record of a
1:23.2	missing person's report exists until 41 years later. It was as though Roberta Michaels Hopkins had
1:29.7	vanished, slipping through the cracks of time, her name seemingly forgotten. Roberta's son, an infant
1:36.4	when she disappeared, spent much of his childhood in foster care, lost in a world without answers.
	...

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