Toni Sharpless

In the early 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. Neither Sharpless nor her vehicle have 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. In 2008 she was arrested and convicted of driving while intoxicated;

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. 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. the episode aired in 2011.

2012 anonymous letter In December 2012, Law received a letter, handwritten on a yellow legal-size paper,

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.

Five years later, Law noted that there are many cases where abducted people have been found after many years. She ascribed some of the difficulty in solving the case to having four separate law enforcement agencies in two states working some aspect of it. "I wish we could just get everyone in the same room to share information", she said. "Maybe someone would come up with something that no one had considered before".