At 2:57 a.m. on August 23, 2009, 29-year-old Toni Lee Sharpless typed a text to her 12-year-old daughter, who couldn’t sleep. According to LancasterOnline, it read, “I hope you can get to sleep. See you soon. Love ya, babe.”
It was the last message Toni ever sent her family.
About two hours later, she drove away from a Philadelphia 76ers player’s house party in her black Pontiac Grand Prix, angry and alone. Her phone was never used again. Her bank account was never touched. Neither she nor her car has ever been found.
Who Was Toni Lee Sharpless?
Toni Lee Sharpless was born on December 27, 1979, in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Her father died in an accident when she was six. Her mother, Donna, later married Peter Knebel, who raised Toni and her sister, Candy.
At 17, Toni became a mother. Donna remembers her standing at a mirror with the baby, about a month old, and promising, “One of these days, I’m going to make something of myself. You’ll see.”
She graduated with honors from Coatesville High School, worked as a certified nursing assistant, and moved in with her parents during nursing school so they could help care for her daughter. In 2007, she finished. She took a job on the infectious disease ward at Lancaster General Hospital, picked up weekend shifts at a rehabilitation center, and planned to pursue a master’s degree, as reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Home was West Brandywine Township, where she lived with her parents and her daughter. According to her family, she spent nearly all of her free time with the girl and rarely went to nightclubs, bars, or into Philadelphia at all.
She was also fighting an illness that took years to name. Her parents told the Inquirer that doctors diagnosed her with bipolar disorder in 2004, and ChaddsFordLive reported that the family believed she had only recently gotten it under control. In 2008, she was convicted of driving under the influence. That conviction would come up again in the last conversation anyone had with her.
The Night Out That Ended With Toni Driving Away
Toni had worked so hard that she had almost no social life, her parents told ChaddsFordLive. So when an old friend, Crystal Johns, persuaded her to go clubbing on Saturday, August 22, 2009, the family didn’t stand in the way. Her stepfather, Peter, still had reservations, and reportedly believed the idea was Johns’.
Toni asked her parents to watch her daughter and left home around 9:30 p.m. in her black 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix GT, Pennsylvania plate DND-7772. The plan, according to the Inquirer, was to hit Ice nightclub in King of Prussia, then G Lounge near Rittenhouse Square, where they expected to meet a professional athlete. After that, they would spend the night at Johns’ home.
At G Lounge, they met Philadelphia 76ers guard Willie Green, who invited them back to his house in Lower Merion Township. Johns later told police that Toni had too much to drink and said Toni was taking medication for bipolar disorder. Christos Ballas, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Inquirer that mixing alcohol with such medication can intensify alcohol’s effects.
They left Center City shortly after 3 a.m. and drove to Green’s home on the Main Line. Johns later described Toni’s behavior that night as highly unusual, according to ChaddsFordLive. She became convinced that people at the party were mocking her, and she accused Johns of joining in.
Around 5 a.m., she reportedly poured a bottle of champagne across the kitchen floor and kicked objects across the room. Green asked the two women to leave after what police described as a verbal dispute.
The clock is not settled. One report puts her departure at about 4 a.m., while ChaddsFordLive says about 5. The Charley Project lists her phone as off since about 4:00 a.m.
Johns reached for the car keys. Toni took them back. Johns told police that neither of them was sober enough to drive, and that she herself had been awake for about 36 hours.
In the Grand Prix, Johns asked Toni whether she should be behind the wheel at all, given her DUI conviction. Toni told her to get out.
Johns did. She stepped out about 500 feet from Green’s house, and Toni drove off into the dark in a turquoise shirt, black tights and black sandals, her brown hair dyed red. The Charley Project says Johns noted the car was low on gas, though the Inquirer reported Johns saying the tank was half full when they left Chester County. Johns called her phone and got voicemail. Too embarrassed to walk back to the house, she called her nephew for a ride.
Hours later, Johns phoned Candy Sharpless to complain that Toni had abandoned her. Candy told her that Toni had never come home.
The Search for Toni Lee Sharpless
Lower Merion Township police took the lead because Toni was last seen in their jurisdiction. The first theory was the simplest and the grimmest. Investigators suspected that she had driven off a boat ramp and into the Schuylkill River, which runs past Gladwyne. Police divers searched it in September 2009.
Toni’s family enlisted Texas EquuSearch, a nonprofit search-and-recovery group, to scan the river near Flat Rock Park with side-scan sonar. It found 12 vehicles. Nine had been reported stolen. Three had their vehicle identification numbers removed.
None was Toni’s.
Police then turned to the people closest to the night. Lt. Frank Higgins of Lower Merion police told the Inquirer in November 2009 that officers had confirmed Toni was at Green’s home, but ruled him out. Green was cooperative, Higgins said, and the Green angle was a dead end.
Johns volunteered for a polygraph and passed, and her phone records supported her account of calling Toni and then her nephew. Every other guest was ruled out as well.
By August 2010, a year after she vanished, Higgins conceded that police had no productive leads. They never had a suspect, he said, and nobody had a reason to wish Toni harm.
The only hard evidence arrived on September 8, 2009. An automatic license plate reader in Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, recorded plate DND-7772 among a row of parked vehicles.
Camden police did not notify Lower Merion for several days. By the time investigators went looking, the car was gone. Nobody has ever established whether the plates were still on the Grand Prix or had been moved to another vehicle. Police records show the last lead was worked in late October 2009.
Donna Knebel had her own theory about the route. She suggested that Toni may have jumped on the Schuylkill Expressway, where the nearest entrance, at Hollow Road, allows only eastbound entry. A driver who took it would have been pointed toward Philadelphia and Camden, not toward home in Chester County.
The sightings that followed were scattered. Callers reported seeing Toni in Lancaster, Philadelphia, and Camden, and the Charley Project notes that every cluster fell in an area known for sex work and drug activity. None was confirmed.
Tips poured in from as far as Reading, and one woman in Denver, Pennsylvania, told Donna Knebel she had seen someone in a cowboy hat who looked like Toni, according to the Unionville Times. Other tips were outright hoaxes. According to ChaddsFordLive, West Brandywine Police Chief Walt Werner said one caller posed as a Canadian security agent and another as a North Dakota sheriff.
The Anonymous Letter That Reopened the Case
Six weeks after Toni vanished, her mother turned to a private investigator named Eileen Law. Law, of Kennett Square, charged the family one dollar and has worked without pay ever since. She told CBS Philadelphia that she took the case after Toni’s daughter ran up to her in tears and begged her to “please find my mommy.”
Law built a website and a tip line. She came to believe that Toni was alive, held against her will in a world of drugs and forced prostitution. Toni’s impaired condition that night, Law told ChaddsFordLive, could have made her vulnerable, and people have turned up alive years after being abducted.
In Philadelphia magazine in July 2010, she questioned whether police cared about women like Toni. “Private detectives and families of missing people are on their own,” she said. In February 2011, the Investigation Discovery series Disappeared aired an episode on the case, titled “The Darkest Night.”
Then, on December 1, 2012, Law collected her mail and nearly missed an envelope buried among the Christmas cards and junk. It was postmarked in Trenton, New Jersey, on November 29, handwritten on yellow legal paper, and signed “Tony Sharpless.”
The writer claimed that a friend had offered him $5,000 and a set of license plates to drive a Pontiac Grand Prix from Brooklawn, New Jersey, to an auto shop outside Boston. According to the letter, the friend said a Camden police officer he knew had gotten into a fight with a woman, that she died, and that the car needed to leave New Jersey. The friend also asked whether the writer knew anyone who wanted a new identity built around Toni’s Social Security card. The writer insisted he knew nothing more about what happened to her.
Then came the details. The letter listed the plate number, the last five digits of the car’s VIN, and a phone number that turned out to be Toni’s cell phone. Authorities who cross-checked the letter found that the VIN digits and the phone number had never been made public. Both were correct.
“When I read the letter, I started shaking,” Law told 6abc.
Police were far less moved. They initially dismissed the letter as a hoax. Lower Merion police said they hadn’t heard of it until reporters called, and Camden authorities said nobody had contacted them. Werner said there was no way to know whether it was real and sent parts of it for forensic analysis.
The pressure on Law grew. She told the Inquirer that someone had left dead animals in her mailbox, and that anonymous callers had told her to back off.
Law admitted that some of the letter didn’t hold up, though she said other parts were echoed in an email she received nine months later. Higgins told the Inquirer in January 2013 that he feared there was a reason nobody had heard from Toni, and that it was “something dark.”
Where the Case Stands Today
The case never closed, and the theories never lined up. In 2010, Donna Knebel told the Inquirer she had a gut feeling that Toni was alive, and that she talked to her daughter spiritually every day. Cpl. Russell Moore of West Brandywine, the investigator assigned to it from the beginning, told CBS Philadelphia in 2021 that he now believes Toni is dead.
According to CBS Philadelphia, police say she has since been declared legally dead, and the goal has shifted from finding her to finding her remains. Law has vowed to search for Toni until her last breath. Donna Knebel reportedly came to believe, by 2017, that her daughter was gone.
More than 17 years later, the Lower Merion Township Police Department, the West Brandywine Township Police Department, and the New Jersey State Police all keep the file open. “Somebody out there knows something,” Werner told ChaddsFordLive in 2016.
Toni’s daughter was 12 when her mother disappeared. Her grandparents raised her.
According to the Inquirer, Toni had planned an outing with her daughter at French Creek State Park, the day after she vanished.
