Patricia Kopta was classed as a ‘critical missing person’ when she vanished in 1992.

The husband of a woman who went missing for over three decades made an emotional statement after she was miraculously found.

Patricia Kopta went missing from her neighbourhood of North Hills, Pittsburgh, US on 20 June 1992, and was reported missing by her husband Bob on 27 November 1992.

Bob waited a few months before reporting her disappearance as she was known to wander off for periods of time due to her deteriorating mental health.

Patricia, a devout Roman Catholic, was known as a ‘free spirit’, and claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary, while preaching messages related to her religion and telling strangers that we were all going to die in a worldwide nuclear holocaust.

But after police couldn’t find her, she was classified as a ‘critical missing person’, with an urgent search being launched.

At the time, the ‘eccentric’ Patricia was 52 and was said to ‘love the ocean, the beach and the warm sunshine’, enjoying trips to Puerto Rico before marrying Bob, according to information given by her sister Gloria.

She firmly believed that her sister may have fled to start a new life that matched that description, but no-one had any way of knowing as Patricia had gone radio silent, which worried her husband who though she could be ‘laying in a ditch somewhere’.

Bob even paid a psychic to try and find answers and put adverts in Puerto Rican newspapers to try and find his wife, whom he had been married to since 1972, 12 years before a doctor diagnosed her with ‘delusions of grandeur’, with suspicions of schizophrenia.

Seven years after she vanished, Patricia’s family were given a legal declaration that considered her dead.

Bob later said: “I come home one night, and she’s just gone,”I went through a lot. Every time they’d find a body somewhere [I wondered], ‘Is it Patricia? Is it Patricia?'”