Disappearance of Toni Sharpless

As proof of the account, the letter included not only the license plate number of the Grand Prix, but also the last five digits of its VIN and Sharpless's cell phone number, represented as her Social Security number. The plate number had been widely disseminated during the initial media coverage of the disappearance, so by itself it would not prove the writer knew anything, but the latter two numbers had not been made public and were also correct. While Law was skeptical of some aspects of the story, and at the time said she was not sure if it was authentic, in 2017 she told Chadds Ford Live that an email she received in 2013 corroborated some aspects of it and that she now regarded the account as plausible. West Brandywine police chief Walter Werner, whose department continues to work with both the Lower Merion police and the New Jersey State Police to investigate Sharpless's disappearance, noted that the Grand Prix's VIN is included in reports on the case that would be widely available to anyone in law enforcement.

As of 2017, Knebel believes her daughter to be dead. Law, however, continues to investigate her theory that Sharpless was taken by human traffickers, who would have taken her cell phone and credit cards as soon as they could. In 2011 she told a reporter from Philadelphia that a woman she described as "a dancer in a Midwestern city" contacted her, claiming to have met Sharpless; her descriptions of the woman's body piercings and stretch marks were confirmed by Donna Knebel.

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.

After turning the letter over to the West Brandywine police, Law disclosed it to the media in early 2013. The Lower Merion and Camden police departments both said they had not been made aware of it before reporters called to ask them about it. Police chief Werner said the letter would be examined by forensic specialists to see what evidence could be developed from it. In 2016, Law said she did not know what, if anything, police had done with the 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Sharpless's family and friends have been suspicious of Johns since the disappearance. They note that she pleaded guilty to harassment charges in 2005 and question her story. "Toni would never, never, leave another woman on a dark street in Philadelphia", said one of her friends. "And what woman in her right mind would get out of the car there and wait an hour?" Donna Knebel is not even sure that the last text from her daughter's phone was actually written by her; she also questions why Green's house was not searched.

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.

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.

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.

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.