Disappearance of Toni Sharpless

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.

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.

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.

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.

After earning her degree in 2007, Sharpless took a job in the infectious disease ward at Lancaster General Hospital.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 2011, the Investigation Discovery channel's series Disappeared devoted an episode to the case.

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.