Pennsylvania disappearance case
In the predawn hours of August 23, 2009, Toni Sharpless (born December 27, 1979) and her friend Crystal Johns left a party at the home of Philadelphia 76er Willie Green in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, United States. Not long after leaving, Johns suggested to Sharpless, whose erratic and combative behavior had led Green to ask that they leave, that she was not sober enough to drive; in response, Sharpless pulled over and told Johns to get out, which she did, and then drove off. Sharpless has not been seen since then.
An early theory, that she might have accidentally driven her car into the nearby Schuylkill River, was discarded when searches of the river were fruitless. An apparent break in the case came two weeks later when an automatic license plate reader recorded her 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix's plates among parked vehicles in Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. There had been other reported sightings of Sharpless in Camden, but police there were unable to locate the vehicle or find any information about where it had been found.
In 2013, the writer of an anonymous letter sent to Eileen Law, a private investigator handling the case, claimed that he had been hired to take the Pontiac to a shop in the Boston area in exchange for $5,000 in cash and the Grand Prix's license plates after Sharpless was killed during a confrontation with a Camden police officer. The writer did not personally know of any details about what had happened to Sharpless but included in his letter the number of her cell phone, missing along with her, and the last five digits of the car's vehicle identification number, information that had not been made public. Both were correct.
Police dismissed the letter as a hoax despite the details, but Law, whose theory is that Sharpless is alive and being held captive by human traffickers, believes it was genuine and continues to investigate. In 2011, the Investigation Discovery channel's series "Disappeared" devoted an episode to the case.
Background.
Toni Sharpless, a native of the Philadelphia suburb of Downingtown, Pennsylvania, was born in 1979. Her father died in an accident when she was six; her mother Donna soon after remarried Peter Knebel, who raised Toni and her sister Candy as his own daughters. In her late teens Toni had a daughter of her own.
Sharpless's childhood and young adulthood were marked by her struggles with bipolar disorder, a condition only diagnosed in her adulthood. She and her family kept that information to themselves, and even after learning she was bipolar the difficulties caused by the disorder persisted as doctors tried different combinations of different medications to control it.
Her condition had also led to problems with drug and alcohol abuse. In 2008 she was arrested and convicted of driving while intoxicated; she spent the month of April 2009 in rehab. After that she found a drug combination that seemed to work and that was contraindicated for alcohol consumption; she did not always take them, however.
On weekends during the 2000s, Sharpless worked as a nursing assistant at a local rehabilitation center, living with her daughter and parents in West Brandywine Township. The money she earned from that job went to pay her tuition at Brandywine School of Nursing. After earning her degree in 2007, Sharpless took a job in the infectious disease ward at Lancaster General Hospital.
Disappearance.
On the evening of August 22, 2009, a Saturday, Sharpless left her home around 9:30 p.m. for a night on the town in Center City (downtown Philadelphia) with her friend Crystal Johns. After she left, Peter Knebel expressed his reservations about the outing to his wife. Sharpless and Johns had only recently renewed their friendship after becoming estranged from each other a decade earlier; Knebel believed that the evening trip to the city had been Johns' idea and that his stepdaughter, who typically devoted her free time to her own daughter and rarely went to nightclubs or bars, or into Philadelphia at all, only went because Johns had persuaded her to. But they also recognized that Sharpless had been working hard for a long time and had not had an evening out in a while.
The two women left in Sharpless's car, a black 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix sedan. After stopping at Johns' house in West Fallowfield Township, they went to Ice, a club in King of Prussia, then to Center City's G Lounge nightclub.
From there they went to a party at the home of Willie Green, a professional basketball player with the NBA's Philadelphia 76ers, in Penn Valley, a neighborhood in Lower Merion Township, one of the city's affluent Main Line suburbs. Accounts differ as to whether Johns, who was reportedly friends with Green's brother, had been invited there before she and Sharpless left for the evening or whether Green met the two at G Lounge and invited them back to his house.
Johns and Sharpless left Center City for the party shortly after 3 a.m. on August 23. Unable to sleep that night, Sharpless's daughter had texted her within the previous hour; Sharpless responded at 2:57 a.m with a text of her own, telling her daughter to get to sleep and that she would be home soon. Her phone has not been used since; it was turned off around 4 a.m.
At Green's, Sharpless and Johns began drinking along with other guests at what has been characterized as more of a small gathering than a party. The group was playing the board game "Taboo", during which Sharpless reportedly made a remark to Johns that Green took as including an ethnic slur, although it was not intended that way.
Green made it known that he was offended, and Sharpless, who already felt that other guests were ridiculing her, became angry and erratic. Around 5 a.m., she reportedly dumped a bottle of champagne on the kitchen floor and began kicking things. Green went to Johns, who had retreated to the house's swimming pool, and told her that it was time for her and Sharpless to go home.
As the pair gathered their possessions and left the house, Johns, aware that she had had less to drink, attempted to take the car keys, but Sharpless immediately took them back. She was still angry and crying, accusing Johns of also making fun of her. A man called out from the house, jokingly warning them to be careful not to hit any other cars.
Once they were back in Sharpless's Pontiac, Johns, who later told police that neither of them were sober enough to legally drive, asked Sharpless whether she should really be driving in her condition given her previous drunken-driving conviction; she had also, at that point, been awake for 36 hours straight. Her response was to stop immediately and tell Johns to "get the fuck out of my car", which Johns did, and then Sharpless drove off. No one is known to have seen her since then.
Investigation.
Johns expected at first that her friend would soon calm down, reconsider her action, and return for her. When that did not happen within a few minutes, she called Sharpless; the call went to voicemail. Johns was still too embarrassed by the circumstances of their departure from Green's house to walk the back there and seek help, so after waiting a little longer she called her nephew for a ride home.
Later that morning, Johns called Candy Sharpless to complain that Toni had abandoned her and said she would come around later to return some items Toni had left at her house. Candy told her that Toni had not returned, whereupon Johns called the police. Candy later filed a missing persons report.
Sharpless's friends and family made and distributed flyers, while the Lower Merion Township police put out bulletins for her car. Speculation at first focused on the possibility that the intoxicated, sleep-deprived Sharpless had driven down a boat ramp by mistake and ended up in the nearby Schuylkill River. A Texas firm hired to search the river using side-scan sonar found 12 vehicles, nine of which had been reported stolen and three that were untraceable since the vehicle identification numbers (VINs) had been removed. None were the Grand Prix.
In September, two weeks after Sharpless disappeared, an automated license plate reader in Camden, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, recorded a hit on Sharpless's car's license plate number. The Camden police did not notify Lower Merion until a few days afterward, and efforts to locate the vehicle in Camden or nearby were unsuccessful. In late October, police records show they worked their last lead, although the case remains open.
Eileen Law.
In October, Donna Knebel retained Eileen Law, a private investigator with an agency in Kennett Square, to find her daughter. A segment on CNN's "Nancy Grace" captured Law's attention. She took the case for a symbolic fee of $1 in order to make it legal; the dollar bill Knebel gave her remains on her desk and photographs of Sharpless are on her office wall.
Law set up a website and hotline number. Many tips were phoned into her office; callers reported sighting Sharpless and/or her vehicle all over the Philadelphia area, from Lancaster, where Sharpless worked, to Kennett Square. Another woman, who worked a night shift doing security in Conshohocken, said that as she returned home one night at 1 a.m. she saw an apparently abandoned black sedan in Camden beneath an overpass after crossing the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. She notified the police there, but they had no record of the call.
Due to that tip and others, Law came to believe that Sharpless's disappearance had some connection to Camden. Donna Knebel told "LNP" that her daughter, who had a poor sense of direction even under ideal conditions, may have headed for the nearby Schuylkill Expressway, part of Interstate 76, to return home after evicting Johns. However, the nearest exit to where she was, Hollow Road, only allows eastbound entry, not westbound, which Sharpless would have wanted in order to return home.
Going eastbound on I-76 would have taken Sharpless toward Philadelphia and Camden. Law notes that the Grand Prix was very low on gas when Sharpless and Johns had left for the evening, with less than a quarter of the tank full, and Sharpless could likely have run out of gas soon after she left. Without her ATM card, she might have also been short of money to refuel and thus would have had to rely on whomever she encountered to help her.
Law soon came to believe that Sharpless was still alive, perhaps forced into prostitution against her will. From the different places where her tips placed Sharpless, Law conjectured that she was being moved around. In 2010, when the producers of the Investigation Discovery channel's series "Disappeared" went to the Philadelphia area, Law found that their interest was piqued because Sharpless's car remained missing along with her, so Law took them to some of the neighborhoods her tips had led her to; the episode aired in 2011. Law's efforts to find Sharpless have taken her as far from Philadelphia as New Jersey's Pine Barrens.
2012 anonymous letter.
In December 2012, Law received a letter, handwritten on a yellow legal-size paper, purportedly from a "Tony Sharpless", postmarked November 29 of that year in Trenton, New Jersey. The writer said that they had tried to give their information to the Philadelphia police but had been told the case was not in their jurisdiction; an officer there had taken them aside and given them Law's address.
The writer claimed they had been contacted by a friend near the end of September 2009 and offered $5,000 in cash to take the Grand Prix, then in Brooklawn, New Jersey, near Camden, to a shop in Boston. If they completed that trip, the writer said, they were told they could also have the vehicle's license plates. Additionally, they were asked if they knew anyone in their late 20s who wanted to "paper-trip"—which Law says refers to an attempt to create a new identity and would be a term used only by police or criminals—and was offered a Social Security card to give to such a person.
Since the writer had needed the money, they had taken the job and delivered the car to Boston the next day. When they delivered it, they not only took the license plates but also cleared out the glove compartment and