Robin Rhodes

Robin Rhodes (sometimes reported as Robbin or Robbin “Bobbie Lyn” Rhodes) was a New Bedford woman whose life was rooted in family and community ties on Massachusetts’s South Coast. Public records and contemporary reporting identify her as a mother and as someone who maintained friendships in her neighborhood; those connections were an important part of who she was.

Although the public record about Robin’s life beyond immediate relationships is limited, sources consistently note that friends and family knew her as “Bobbie Lyn,” a personal name that speaks to the private, human relationships she held. She lived in New Bedford and remained connected to people in the community there; several accounts also indicate she had struggled with addiction at times, a circumstance that many who knew her confronted with concern and care. Those who remember Robin would likely recall her as a real person whose life included both ordinary days and difficult ones, not reducible to headlines.

Robin’s body was discovered along Route 140 in neighboring Freetown on March 28, 1989. Investigators later included her among the women linked to a series of killings on the South Coast during 1988–1989; those facts appear in public records and reporting, but they do not define the whole of her story. She is reported to have known several of the other women who later were found and is described in some sources as a friend of Mary Rose Santos.

Because primary, family-published obituary records matching her exact name and the date of death were not located in available online archives, this remembrance focuses on what is verifiable about Robin’s life: she was a person with personal names, relationships, and a place in a community that cared about her. Although public documentation is limited, it is important to acknowledge Robin’s existence beyond the circumstances of her death: she was a mother, a friend known as Bobbie Lyn, and a member of the New Bedford community whose life mattered to those close to her.

May this remembrance honor the human being at the center of the public record and keep alive the understanding that behind every brief report there are relatives and friends who mourn a life that mattered.