Police unveil sketch of what missing Camden woman may look like, 43 years after disappearance

The sketch was drawn to help solve a case, but it’s also helped fill the void a little in a South Jersey family’s heart.

Roberta Michels-Hopkins was 29 with two young children, when she supposedly walked out into a blizzard to get cigarettes and food stamps in Camden, in February 1981 and never returned home. In the last year, her granddaughter, Trinity Jagdeo, made it a personal quest to report Michels-Hopkins missing and have a sketch drawn of what she might look like today.

The resulting sketch, released earlier this summer, shows Michels-Hopkins with gray hair and a smile carried over from old photos. Seeing it for the first time was bittersweet for Jagdeo.

“It was really shocking. Obviously, we hope she looks that healthy. She looks like a sweet grandmother,” Jagdeo, 23, of Vineland, said Thursday morning. “For that reason alone, it’s really cool. At the same time, we may never know what she looked like. There’s pros and cons to it.”

The sketch was released in late June, Jagdeo said, and has not resulted in any tips. The missing persons case is being handled by police in Cinnaminson, Burlington County, but Jagdeo said the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office’s Cold Case Unit is now assisting. Neither agency returned immediate requests for comment Thursday.

Jagdeo said there had always been a fog of rumor and myth about her grandmother. Some family members assumed she died by suicide or may have been using drugs and disappeared onto the streets of Camden, where she was living in 1981. She was never reported missing.

“Her parents were still alive. Her brother was still alive. Her ex-husband was still alive,” Jagdeo told The Inquirer at her home in February. “Didn’t she have any friends?”

When Jagdeo took a DNA test, in 2019, she found family she’d never spoken to on her grandmother’s side, along with a letter that may offer clues into Roberta’s state of mind at the time. The letter, written just days before she went missing, hints at unspecific family tensions over a missed wedding.

“I will no longer bother anyone, anymore,” Michels-Hopkins wrote at the end.

Jagdeo spearheaded efforts to have her grandmother officially reported missing, and in March 2022, her case was officially entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). Jagdeo’s also been very active in online, amateur sleuthing websites and Facebook groups, where some noticed similarities between Michels-Hopkins’ case and “the cheerleader in the trunk” case out of Maryland in 1982. That woman remains unidentified today.

“Over time, as I read about the case, the possibility that it’s her is large,” Jagdeo said. “It would be closure and answer some questions but it would be really upsetting for my dad.”

In February, Krsna Jagdeo, Roberta’s son, said he was ready to accept whatever comes of the case.

“At this point, death is death, no matter the story,” he said. “I’m just trying to support Trinity.”

Trinity Jagdeo said local investigators are still trying to match dental records on the cheerleader case out of Frederick County, Md.

Anyone with information about the disappearance of Roberta Michels-Hopkins can call the Cinnaminson Township Police Department at (856) 829-6667.