Welcome back to the path Win, Chile. I'm Robin, I'm Jules,
and I'm Ashley. Let's dive right into this week's case. August twenty third,
two thousand and nine, Gladwin, Pennsylvania, Twenty nine year old Tony
Lee sharp List attends a party with her friend Crystal John's, but when Tony
becomes intoxicated and starts making a scene, she and Crystel are asked to leave.
While driving away, the two friends get into an argument which leads to
Crystal being kicked out of the car, but Tony does not return home and
is never seen again. Over the next few years, there are some intriguing
leads, including a license plate reading from Tony's car in New Jersey and an
anonymous letter claiming that she was killed during an altercation with the police officer,
but no trace of Tony or her vehicle is ever found. After that,
the path went chilly. So we've got an odd missing person's case to cover
today, the two thousand and nine disappearance of Tony Lee Sharpless. This is
a story which is featured on the true crime show Disappeared, and it is
both a tragic and baffling mystery. Tony was a single mother who struggled with
bipolar disorder but seemed to be getting her life together. However, she decided
to cut loose one night and go up partying, even though she was not
supposed to be drinking alcohol because of her medication. By the end of the
evening, Tony was highly intoxicated and displaying erratic behavior, and after taking her
best friend out of her vehicle, Tony drove off and manage without a trace.
A missing persons cases where a person and their vehicle disappeared together. The
most logical explanation is that they drove into a body of water, which would
make sense here given the ineviriated state that Tony was in at the time.
However, multiple searches of the nearest river failed to find Tony or her car,
and there were a pair of strange leads to suggest that Tony traveled from
Pennsylvania's New Jersey at some point. Needless to say, there might be a
lot more to this story, as allegations of surface that a police cover up
played a role in Tony's disappearance. So we're definitely going to have a lot
to discuss, you know, Robin. The first thing I thought when Jewels
said that Tony and the vehicle were never found, is where's the vehicle?
Because we've discussed countless missing persons cases, but somehow we always locate the vehicle
they were in. Were able to kind of pinpoint some details right before they
disappear, and with Tony her vehicles gone. You mentioned a body of water,
but there's also a potential of a successful burnout of the car or even
like a chop shop or something like that, isn't there. Yeah, pretty
much like we're going to talk about this later, that there is an anonymous
tipster who talks about being involved in the destruction of the vehicle to cover up
a crime, and that would be an alternate explanation for her rather than just
driving into like a body of water. Our story begins in Pennsylvania in two
thousand nine, and our central figure is twenty nine year old Tony Lee Sharpless,
who lives in West Brandywine Township. Tony is a single mother of a
twelve year old daughter, but even though she became pregnant at age seventeen,
Tony decided to keep her child and still managed to graduate with honors from high
school. She later became a certified nursing assistant in order to pay her way
through the Brandywine School of Nursing, and moved in with her mother and stepfather,
Donna and Peter Nebel, so they could help erase her daughter. She
eventually graduated with a Bachelor of Science and nursing and this led to her getting
a job as a registered nurse who specialized in infectious diseases at Lancaster General Hospital.
But unfortunately, throughout the course of her life, Tony suffered from a
series of breakdowns which involved manic and depressive episodes, and she underwent numerous hospitalizations.
It was not until two thousand and four when she was officially diagnosed with
bipolar disorder and went on medication to treat it. In April of two thousand
nine, Tony went through a manic episode and checked yourself into rehab for three
weeks. She also used this opportunity to undergo alcohol treatment, as she had
been arrested for driving under the influence the previous year. When Tony left rehab,
she received a prescription for some new medication which she would take daily in
order to control her bipolar disorder. I have to just make sure that I
say I'm so proud of her. I mean, we're talking about struggles that
she had, but if you rethink about what you just told me, Jewels,
she's really doing an amazing job. She gets pregnant as a teenager and
instead of saying okay, either this is going to set me on a path
where I'm not able to really be successful on my own because I have to
sacrifice everything for this baby or neglecting the child, she does it all.
It sounds like she's doing a lot of big decisions, like going back to
school, being an honorable student, getting through her bachelor's degree. That's massive,
and she has support from her mom and stepdad, which shows that she
really does have this kind of unit helping her raise this child. And you've
got to remember she's not diagnosed with being bipolar till she's aged twenty four.
If I did the math correct, and so pretty normal, right, she
probably had to fight really hard to get through high school and college, because
that's when the signs start to emerge that you might have kind of bipolarism.
It doesn't really officially get diagnosed till you're in your mid twenties, and so
that's when she's diagnosed. But you know, she dealt with those simo through
a forehand. That can lead to things like being highly sexual or putting yourself
in riskier situations. It can lead to manic drinking or drug use or things
like that. And so even when she's struggling, it's pretty classic signs of
bipolarism. And she sought help, she took help when it was offered.
I'm just I'm incredibly impressed by Tony. I see so many similarities to the
things that Tony struggled with and things I myself have struggled with. Because the
cool morbidity with alcohol or with addiction in general and bipolar disorder is extremely high.
It's probably three times higher than you know it would be in the general
population. I'm just pulling that number out of thin air, but it's something
like that. So you see people with bipolar disorder who often are I guess
at this point like Tony was before she was formally diagnosed and medicated and everything,
that maybe somebody who isn't dealing with something like this would be able to
do on a daily basis and feel balanced. You don't have that luxury,
so you're constantly reaching for something that is going to help balance you. So
it is very typical for those people who haven't been formally diagnosed to reach for
alcohol or you prescription drugs or elicit drugs to give them that kind of sense
of balance that just is missing when you have bipolar disorder. It's not something
that balance or that like feeling of youthmia is not something that personally I feel
a great deal of. I often feel out of whack even when I'm not
having a particularly depressive or manic episode. So I commend her because it is
really difficult to deal with all of the things that she's dealing with, to
be a bi performance student academically, to be working this job, to be
dealing with having a child and all of this responsibility while dealing with such an
encumbering mental illness. I just have the utmost amount of admiration for what Tony
is doing here, because I mean, I myself don't have a child,
so when you factor that into the mix, it is just really amazing what
she was able to accomplish. Oh, definitely, Like by all accounts,
Tony was a really good attentive mother, and she became pregnant at age seventeen,
and there's zero information out there about the child's father, so I have
to assume that he had no interest being a part of his child's life,
and Tony had to handle the whole thing single handedly. And thankfully she had
very supportive mother and a very supportive stepfather, so she was able to be
a good mother and be a very good at a nurse, be good academically
while also balancing all these terrible issues. During the four months after she left
rehab, Tony's life seemed to be in a good place as she alternated between
working long shifts at her nursing job, spending time with her daughter, and
making plans to work on her master's degree. On Saturday, August to twenty
second, after completing an overnight shifted at the hospital, Tony spent part of
the day with her longtime friend, Crystal John's, whom she hadn't seen since
her stay at rehab. Krystell invited Tony to go clubbing with her that evening,
and since Tony hadn't spent a night out partying in a while, she
asked her mother and stepfather or if they would look after her daughter. Her
plan was to stay overnight with Crystal before returning home the following day. Donna
and being her run easy with this idea since Tony was not supposed to consume
alcohol because of the medication she was taking, But they reluctantly agreed to her
request to watch her daughter and last saw Tony when she left their house at
nine thirty pm. This is so sad because here you have Tony where she's
she gets out of rehab and she goes straight back into this discipline. Okay,
I'm gonna go to work. I'm going to try to get this master's
degree accomplished. Like wow, that is so impressive. And she's spending time
with her daughter and then she says, I get a chance to see my
longtime friend Krystal. And Crystal is from a period of Tony's life where Tony
was struggling right, where she wasn't doing well, where she needed help and
rehab, and then she goes back into this environment where she got herself into
trouble right, and it wasn't a healthy environment for her. Donna and Peter
are asked will you keep my daughter by their twenty nine year old kiddo.
It's how you don't really have a luxury of saying no, you can't.
She's twenty nine. She does incredible in life. She's a professional, she's
an amazing student, she's a great mom, and she wants a break for
the night. And so I feel like Donna and Peter did what any other
parent would do with their adult child. They would say, hey, remember,
like, be careful. You're not supposed to really have alcohol with your
medication. But I will tell you ninety percent of the people I know the
take mental health drugs don't pay attention to those warnings. Right, It's like,
oh, I'm fine, I feel good, no problem. And unfortunately,
there can be severe interactions when you do have alcohol with that mental health
medication. But I feel like Donna and Peter did what any other parent would
do. I would tell my child, please be safe, I'll love you
so much, please keep in touch. Of course, I'll watch your baby
and pray that they got home safely. It just sounds like a bad idea,
Like Crystal is your rehab friend, and so the two of you meeting
up together to go drink alcohol together. It just seems like a bad idea
on all fronts. And obviously we don't know, you know, the subtleties
of like what Crystal's story are and how she ended up there. But it
just sounds like they're heading down a bad path because, like Ashley said,
Tony shouldn't be drinking. It's really not a good idea with a lot of
the serious drugs that people are prescribed for a bipolar disorder. Tony and Crystal
both eventually wound up at a Philadelphia nightclub called the G Lounge and cross paths
with Willie Green, a player with the National Basketball Association's Philadelphia seventy six ers.
Since Crystal was friends with green brother, both she and Tony were asked
to join him in the VIP Lounge. After the nightclub closed at two am
on August twenty third, he invited the two women to join him for a
party at his house, which was located on Boburn Drive in the affluent suburb
of Gladwin. Tony and Cristel traveled to the party, but while they were
there, Tony's behavior began to change. Throughout the course of the night,
Tony consumed a lot of alcohol, and she had also not gone to sleep
after completing her overnight shift the previous morning, so by this point she had
been awake for thirty six consecutive hours. According to Cristel, she was hanging
out in the swimming pool shortly before five am when she was approached by Willie
Greene, who said, quote, your friend is freaking out and you both
need to leave. Tony had started to behave radically as she became angry with
another guest and poured an entire bottle of champagne on the kitchen floor. When
she was asked to leave the party, Tony grew belligerent and started yelling and
kicking things before she began crying. Crystal grew concerned because she had not seen
Tony behave like this since right before she checked into rehab months earlier. After
they left the house, Tony got behind the wheel of her two thousand and
two Ponti at Grand PRIXGT before she drove away with Crystal. However, Crystal
expressed concern that Tony was too intoxicated to drive, which caused them to break
out into a heated argument. They only made it about five hundred feet before
Tony stopped the car and demanded the Crystal get out. Crystal exited the vehicle
before Tony drove away, but this would turn out to be the last time
she was seen alive. Oh goodness, there's a lot to unpack in that
scenario of what happened that evening. You have these girls who were hanging out
with at least a celebrity, if not multiple people who have some clout to
them. And so there's a lot of alcohol there at this VIP lounge owned
they're at this private pool and here's Crystal and Tony. They're both enjoying themselves.
Crystal seems to kind of get away from Tony for a little bit in
the pool and then is told that Tony's causing a scene. I don't know
about you, guys, but I've had many people that I adore who have
their head on straight, who are amazing humans, and they've gotten too intoxicated
and they become someone radically different and unhealthy, like a very dangerous version of
who they are, somebody that you don't know. And it's like suppressed trauma
and it's suppressed kind of anger, and their control mechanisms are down because they're
drinking when they normally don't, and you just start to see this kind of
movie unfold in front of you that goes like what is happening? Like there's
actually when you're talking about the champagne being poured on the floor. There's a
scene and The Bachelor, the show The Bachelor where this girl, like everyone
made her this laughing stock, where she has this freak out fest about champagne
and all this mess, and later she says, I take mental health drugs.
I shouldn't have been drinking. I went a little loopy that night,
and I don't even remember that interaction. And that's what I feel like happened
to Tony here. She almost seems like she blacked out, and it's just
enraged and kind of expressing trauma, and everyone just kind of wants her to
get away instead of helping her. Right it's too much to man and she
probably is not easy to rationalize with right now, So get her out of
here before she causes a scene. And then she gets in her car.
Lord have mercy, because we all know from her behavior she's not okay to
drive, and Crystal gets out. Honestly, I wish she had never been
hanging out with Crystal that night, but I'm grateful Crystal got out of the
car because there definitely could have been repercussions for being in the passenger's seat while
Tony's driving. In that state. I wish, I wish. I wish
someone had taken Tony's keys away from her. I wish someone had sent her
home in a cab, and we would be having a very different conversation about
someone else and not Tony Sharpless. I really want to point out the thirty
six hour sleep deficit because those of us with bipolar disorder know how important it
is to get adequate sleep. It can trigger a manic episode. And I
do question this party. It's five am, everybody's still awake. Is there
some kind of illicit substance being used as well, because typically if you're up
till that hour, and there's especially with people like that, there's a strong
likelihood that there's something like cocaine or MDMA. And I'm not saying that Tony
did those substances, but there is a potential or a possibility that she did.
And drugs such as cocaine can also trigger a manic episode, so it
could cause her to get to a point where she's almost in a state of
psychosism, doesn't really know what she's doing. So there's a lot of things
that are kind of this dynamic interplay of factors that are at an up to
a really problematic situation where Crystal's watching it unfold. So are these other people.
They're not really understanding because they don't know Tony and they don't know her
mental health history. But it is just so terrified to me that she just
drives off and nobody ever sees her again. So, Jill's from your own
personal experience, did you ever go through phases where you stayed up for thirty
six consecutive hours? Because I know Tony had worked the overnight shift, and
I always wondered, why didn't she try to get some sleep after she went
home, she got home before she went out later that night. But is
that just something you struggle with where if the bipolar disorder is kicking in,
you just don't want sleep or you can't sleep. Yes, to a degree,
Like I've gone through periods of time where I would have be having like
a really long episode. It would be lasting like a couple of months,
and at night I wouldn't stay up for that long. But it's sort of
like I would only sleep three hours a night, and those hours wouldn't be
RESTful. I would be constantly waking up, and then it would be like
being I'm awake at like three am. I've gone to bed at midnight and
I can't go back to sleep. And I've also stayed up for long periods
of time too, but that was back in my addiction, when you know,
I would be doing like cocaine for I remember one time I stayed up
for seventy two hours, but I was also in the middle of a bipolar
episode. So it's a very like nuanced situation when you're dealing with the comorbidity
of addiction and a mental health condition such as bipolar, such as what Tony's
dealing with. So there's just so many variables here that could have contributed to
her state. But I'm really worried about that thirty six hours that she hasn't
slept, and the fact that she wants to go and party. That she
doesn't want to go and sleep is also worrisome for me. So Crystal figured
that Tony would come to her senses and come back to get her, but
she never did. She attempted to call Tony but could not reach her because
her cell phone was turned off. As a result, Crystal was forced to
phone her nephew to come pick her up. Tony never returned home that morning,
and after not hearing from her the entire day, her family reported her
missing to the West Brandywine Police Department. By this time, Tony had not
been seen for nearly eighteen hours. The police failed to turn up any trace
of Tony, and they could not locate or Pawny at Grand Prix either.
Tony's family even went so far as to perform their own search of the Gladwin
area to see if they could find any evidence that she may have been involved
in an accident, but they found nothing. What made the situation even stranger
is that Krystel claimed that there was less than a quarter tank up gas left
in the Grand Prix at the time they left the party. Since West Brandywine
Township was about thirty five miles from Gladwin, it seemed unlikely that Tony could
have made at home without stopping for fuel, but there was no record of
her having done so, and there would be no more activity on Tony's bank
account or credit cards. That is incredibly odd. I mean, it wouldn't
be. I don't know the thirty five miles. I've definitely done the thing
where I'm like how much does my tank hold? Like I've asked my husband.
I'm like, I want empty. How many miles can I get out
of this? You think? But you have here where? Crystal says,
Hey, listen, I remember looking over and there's a quarter less than a
quarter of a tank of gas. There's no sign of her car. That's
what really, really really bothers me. Where is her car? Someone had
to have seen her. It had to have driven somewhere, and like you
said, she's not going to get very far on the tank of gas she
has, whether she was heading home or not. But there would have to
be some movement on her bank account, There'd have to be some kind of
movement on her credit cards, or someone would have to know that recently she
had acquired a lot of cash that could have gotten her through this period of
time. It's just like she disappeared, which is really odd. Again,
we talk a lot about missing people, but something of theirs was found and
left behind, and so far y'all haven't told me about anything that we found
of hers. Yeah, that's the thing is that in her state of mind
at that time, if she had been driving home and then she just ran
out of gas, it got stranded. I could see her having some sort
of episode and freaking out and then wandering away. But at the very least
you would find the abandoned car. So that's what has always baffled everyone is
that the car just vanished without a trace as well, which means that she
either drove into a body of water or if she could have had a bad
encounter with someone who disposed of the car along with her. And in that
state, I don't find her necessarily escaping and running away and disappearing on her
own volition because she's not really in a healthy mindset and that takes planning,
that takes careful movements so people don't see you. So I don't see that
being like, oh I need to disappear. She loved being a mom,
she was making plans to get her master's degree, and she was working.
She was doing well. I don't see her having any reason to not want
to go home that night. So scary because she would be so easy in
this state to predate upon, because her connection with reality seems to be tenuous
at best, and the fact that her car missing and that that isn't found,
it just like, what is the probability of that? Because if she
only had a quarter tank of gas. How far could she have gone if
somebody had taken her, how would they also make her car disappear? It's
so confounding. The last time Tony's cell phone was used was at two fifty
seven am on August twenty three, two hours before she went missing. Tony's
daughter had texted her mother to let her know she was having trouble sleeping,
so Tony texted her back to say that she'd be home soon. The phone
was turned off around the time Tony went missing, and was last picked up
by a cell phone tower at four fifty three am. Crystal, Willie Greed,
and everyone else who attended the party were interviewed by police, but fully
cooperated, and none of them were considered suspects. Since there was a lot
of rumors circulating the Crystal was not being truthful and knew more about Tony's disappearance
than she let on, she personally volunteered to take a polygraph test and wound
up passing. The morning before she went missing, Tony phoned her mother from
work to ask her to check if she was running low on her medication and
called a pharmacy if her pill bottles needed a refill. For this reason,
Her family did not believe she'd willingly stopped taking her medication before she disappeared,
but they suspected that an unstable combination of the medication and alcohol caused her to
have a manic episode. It's gotta be that and the lack of sleep.
I mean, you have a history of having your manica episodes. You have
a history of consuming alcohol and having issues where she voluntarily said, pleas,
send me to rehabbing, get me some help. But you also, like
I mean, any of us who struggle with insomnia, anxiety, mental health,
I've definitely had months and months, like you said, jewels were all
sleep for two or three hours a night, and it is just not going
to happen more than that. But you feel sicker and sicker and sicker every
day, Like everything's more sensitive, everything's heightened. You feel like physically ill
because you're not getting enough sleep. And so if Tony is having this manic
episode, her medicine maybe out of whack a little bit. She also is
consuming alcohol. She might actually feel just really strong at the moment, which
is another problem that you have with mental health, right, like, oh,
I'm doing great, now, let me do some of these behaviors that
are a little bit riskier, and then you realize, oh my god,
there's a reason I don't consume alcohol or drugs, you know anymore. It's
because it doesn't work well with my body. And so you watch her poor
family saying, listen, we know that she was having issues or she was
very aware of her bipolarism. She was doing well, we were trying to
help her with it. And then you have Crystal. I feel bad for
Crystal. I don't think she was a good choice to hang out with that
night. But that's not Crystal's fault, right, she has her own problems.
But Crystal says, wait a minute, why am I a suspect,
Like why are people talking about me? I'll take a polygraph test and she
passes. So she is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and
fortunately had a friend that she thought was quote healthy and could go have quote
fun, and it ended up really putting changing both their lives forever. Oh
yeah, Like at the time, like Crystal said that if you went to
comment sections on newspaper articles about Tony's disappearance, that there were people like all
over like accusing her of murdering her friends, even though they didn't even know
her, and they just assumed that she's lying about this story she killed or
got rid of her body. So it was Crystal that came forward and willingly
said, I want to take a polygraph to clear my name because I was
checked out by the police and they have said they do not consider me a
suspect. So I want you to believe me when I say that I don't
know what happened to Tony either. I mean, do you wish Crystal had
said, Hey, you just got out of rehab. I'm so proud of
you. Let's go to the movies. Hey, let's go to dinner.
Yeah, I wish that had been what Crystal suggested, but she invited her
to this party. Tony's a grown woman, Tony's twenty nine, and she
went. It's like I said, it's sad for both of them because Crystal
cared about Tony. That was her childhood friend, that was her lifelong friend.
Is the way you described it earlier, Robin, And so it's I
don't know, it's just it's sad. Since the Skycall River was located in
close proximity to Gladwin, there was fear that Tony might have driven into the
water and drowned. There was one particular spot where she could have taken a
wrong turn and wound up a flat rock park, and since it was dark
and Tony was heavily intoxicated, it would have been easy for her to have
accidentally mistaken a boat ramp per a road and driven her vehicle into the river.
An extensive search of the river was performed by Texas Equisearch, but while
they found quite a few submerged vehicles in the water, none of them were
Tony's Pontiac ran pri But there would soon be an interesting development. On September
the eighth, only two weeks after Tony went missing, a neighborhood in Camden,
New Jersey, was being patrolled by license plate Reader, a machine mounted
on top of unmanned police vehicles which automatically read the license plates of all the
parked vehicles it passed, and wound up getting a hit on the license numb
her DN D seven seven seven two, which matched Tony's missing Grand Prix.
This location was only about a twenty minute drive southwest from where Tony was last
seen, but unfortunately it would be six days before the West Brand New Wine
Police Department received an alert about the license number match. They traveled to Camden
to perform a search for Tony's car, but it could not be found.
The location where it was supposedly parked was known for being a high crime area.
Tony had traveled to Camden on one previous occasion to attend a concert,
but apparently said she cannot wait to get out of there and never wanted to
go back. So are you thinking, Robin, that this was somebody who
had discovered her in her kind of compromised state and then took her car and
took it out to Camden? Are you thinking that in her manic episode,
that she actually drove that direction? I think it could be either way,
Like she could have taken a wrong turn and easily wound up in Camden if
you look at her route home and possibly panicked and then parked the car and
then got out and walked away, and something how's happened in the car afterwards
because it was a high crime area, so possibly someone stole it. But
on the other hand, if someone killed her and wanted to get rid of
the car, just leaving it in a high crime area where there's a chance
of it being stolen would be a convenient way to get rid of it.
Tony's family soon turned to a private investigator named Eileen Law, who offered her
services pro bono but for the sake of official record keeping. Law still charged
them a dollar to hire her, and has claimed that she still keeps the
one dollar bill they paid her on a desk as a constant reminder of Tony's
case. Anyway, according to Law, there would be numerous reported sightings of
Tony in Camden in the months following her disappearance, as well as additional sightings
in Philadelphia and Lancaster, which is where the hospital she worked as a nurse
is located. Since Tony's license plate number was flagged in a neighborhood known for
having high amounts of prostitution and drug activity, Law has always pushed forward the
idea that Tony may have become a victim of sex trafficking after she arrived in
Camden. Tony did have passed issues with drug addiction, though Crystal maintained that
she did not witness Tony used drugs on the night she went missing. Law
has also claimed that once she started investigating Tony's case, she received anonymous threatening
phone calls warning her to back off and once she found dead animals in her
mailbox. But in spite of all the reported sightings of Tony, no one
has ever uncovered any concrete evidence that she was still alive for any period of
time after she drove away from the party in Gladwin. Tony had been planning
to take her daughter on an outing to a state park the day after she
went missing. So, in spite of what personal problems she may have been
experiencing, her family did not believe she would have willingly abandoned her child.
Her case would garner national coverage when it was featured on an episode of Disappeared
in February of twenty eleven. The investigation would remain at a standstill until a
surprising development took place nearly two years later. Okay, hold that, because
I need to know what this development is. But I'm there's no way Tony
left on her own. Tony was making too many big plans, and she
loved her baby girl too much. That just was not going to happen.
Tony also had such support from her family there was no need. She was
fighting for her health. She thought she could go out for an evening and
have fun with a girlfriend. And it all went wrong. I do definitely
think that trafficking as a possibility. I also believe that, like you said,
Robin, dropping a car in that high crime area, if you did
take Tony and then you needed to get rid of her car, many many,
many criminals will drop a car in a high risk area and say,
oh good, it'll get taken to a chop shop, it'll get burned out,
people will take all the parts off of it, It'll get driven somewhere
else, And that very well could have been what happened here. It's just
really sad because what we're to scribe and where people are going, like,
oh man, Tony was really struggling. What she went through that night is
not uncommon for people with mental health issues, and so best friends of ours
could have that same episode happened tomorrow night, and you wouldn't expect that they'd
be part of a disappeared episode, right, I mean, like it's a
mental health distress. She went out thinking she could control her mental health and
alcohol and she couldn't. Still having to sit here and talk about where is
she is so beyond what should be the conversation, because it's not that out
of the ordinary for things like this to happen. I have to wonder what
someone in her state of mind, like if she was having an episode and
she had had a bad combination of medication and alcohol, if she had driven
into Camden and fell into the clutches of say like a pimp or a sex
trafficker, could that person have exerted like enough control to keep her in that
lifestyle for a while, And could that explain why she didn't come home?
Oh yeah, definitely absolutely, Because what happens is you're taking by these people.
Typically they will treat you really good at first, or they will immediately
create a debt for you of like, oh, unfortunately, you can't go
anywhere until you can earn us this much money. But everything you do cost
you money too, So you didn't show up in time, that's another three
thousand you owe me. Ah, you didn't have enough tricks today. That's
more money you owe me. And you create this ledger of bill to your
keepers, and until you can pay that off quote end quote, you can't
go home and it's impossible to pay off. They'll keep you addicted to drugs,
they'll keep you addicted to alcohol, and that whatever they can do to
suppress your power, and so absolutely, I think it's near impossible to get
out of situations like that. And I think when you're in that situation,
the idea that like false beliefs could be kind of implanted into you, you're
so susceptible to that. Like just as an example, when my mom was
having an episode one time, she had convinced me that my stepdad had hired
Hell's Angels to murder her. And she believed this wholeheartedly, and she also
convinced other people of this, and so this idea that like this mistruth could
be spun around in her brain so much so that she was dogmatic about it
and had convinced two of her friends that this was the truth, and like
she was actually in danger and it was a whole situation. But you know,
when I told her rational self after she had she'd been hospitalized and she'd
finished the episode, she couldn't believe that she'd actually believe that. So I
think it is very possible she would be very malleable as opposed to just a
regular person who wasn't going through a mental health episode. And when you also
add, like Ashley said, like so many traffickers do, they add in
drugs and alcohol. It keeps you in this lowered state of awareness, and
the your ability to fight back and even just your ability to solve problems,
and your cognitive awareness is diminished to this incredibly low level that you just don't
have that personal agency over yourself. Yeah, that's why I was thinking,
is that Tony in her state of mind? If she just happened to make
a wrong turn, wind up in Camden in a bad neighborhood and cross passed
with someone who took advantage of her, then she could have wound up in
sex trafficking permanently. And that's why she never made it back home. So
in late November of twenty twelve, Eileen Law received an envelope at her office
postmark from Trent, New Jersey, and was surprised to see that the sender
was listed as Tony Sharpless, though Tony was misspelled with a y instead of
an eye. When Law opened the envelope, she found an anonymous handwritten letter
on a piece of yellow legal pad paper. Here's an exact word for word
transcription of the letter quote. The police in Pennsylvania do not have a tip
line. I tried calling the Philly police where I live, but they said
it was not in their jurisdiction. One of the detectives pulled me aside and
gave me your name and address. In the last few days of September two
thousand and nine, a friend in Camden called me and offered me money to
move a car from Brooklawn, New Jersey to Boston, Massachusetts. He told
me he would pay me five thousand dollars cash, plus I could have the
plates. He asked if I knew anyone twenty seven or twenty nine that wanted
to paper trip, so he gave me a Social Security card. I drove
the car, a black four door Pontiac Grand Prix, and drove to an
auto body shop outside of Boston, Massachusetts. I took off the plates and
with a black magic marker, wrote down the last five digits of the VIN
number and cleared out the glove box. I came back to Candon a day
later and he told me that the car was not stolen, but missing.
He said a friend of his, a cop in Camden, got into a
fight with a girl. She died, and he needed to get the car
out of Jersey. About a month ago, my daughter was playing in the
garage and found the box with the plates an SS card. I had forgotten
all about it. The plates are d N D seven seven seven two end
quote. The writer then proceeded to provide Tony's cell phone number, as well
as the last five digits of her vehicle identification number. They then wrote,
quote, because of Hurricane Sandy, I had to visit Jersey to help friends
clean up. I decided to drop you this letter. What happened to Tony,
I don't really know. All I know is that she had to run
with the police, and I was paid much needed cash to get the car
to a shop in Boston. End quote. For clarification, the phrase paper
trip, which was used earlier in the letter, is jargon for assuming a
new identity. The most interesting detail is that the last five numbers the writer
provided for Tony's vehicle identification number turned out to be the same numbers for her
missing Grand Prix Lost and a copy of the letter to the authorities, who
have ultimately concluded it was probably a prank. But even if the letter was
not entirely truthful, law still believes the writer might have been trying to tell
them something. Since Tony's disappearance, her mother and stepfather Peter and Donna have
taken custody of her daughter and raised her. But fortunately there are still no
answers of all what actually happened to Tony. So I guess you could say
the path when Chili amazingly crazy that the flash five digits of this VN number
actually match her grand Prix. How is this a prank? Yeah? I've
always been baffled by this. Why they think that because I do not believe
the vehicle identification number was ever released publicly and shared in any newspaper articles.
So that really indicates to me that the writer at the very least saw that
VIN somewhere and has inside knowledge. So I just do not understand the police's
logic here. What do you guys think when you combine those letters and numbers,
like what the probability of being able to pull out at a thin air
like one in a billion? Like zero? Yeah, zero, There's just
no chance. There's letters and there's numbers, and there's all kinds of things.
I mean, the combinations have to be just countless. And this is
one shot. They say, Hey, by the way, I was paid
to move this car. The tip about the police officer possibly being involved.
That would make a lot of sense of why the police would say, ah,
this is a prank. There's no way a police officer was involved.
But I just don't see how you could provide those last five digits in anyone
say holy hell, we need to really dig deep. This seems promising.
They're like, nah, it's a prank, and it's not even the same
police department because they're alleging that a cop in Camden was responsible for Tony's death.
But this is the West Gladwin Police Department in Pennsylvania. So I just
don't know why they're not taking it more seriously. I don't see any reason
they would have to cover for a police officer in a different department in a
different state. So this is a really tough story, not only because it's
a very sad and baffling mystery, but also because it's easy for discussions about
this case to degenerate in the victim blaming. I once heard Tony's mother,
Donn and Ebel, do an interview when she discussed the frustration over some of
the remarks which were made in online comment sections. Whenever this case receives coverage,
it's unavoidable to talk about Tony's story without acknowledging that she did make some
unwise choices on the night she went missing. The medication she was taking to
controller bipolar disorder seemed to be working quite well at that time, but the
instruction specifically stated not to consume alcohol. But not only did Tony go up
partying and get pretty intoxicated, she also decided to do so after not having
slept for around thirty six hours. And of course, even when things started
spinning out of control, she still got behind the wheel of her car when
she was in no condition to drive, before kicking Crystal out of the vehicle
and stranding her without a ride. That's a pretty lousy thing to do to
a friend. Though, if Tony's disappearance was in fact an accident brought on
by drunk driving, then the situation may have been a blessing in disguise for
Crystal overall. However, I do think that victim blaming in cold cases can
be very counterproductive, and it's a terrible thing for the victim's family to experience.
So this is the last time we're going to dwell on Tony's personal decisions
that night. While Tony certainly wasn't perfect. I can still feel a lot
of empathy for I've never experienced by polar disorder, so I'm not going to
pretend to know what it's like to live with something like that. But I
know Jules has, so in a few moments, she will share her insights
as best she can. Tony went through a number of struggles, but it
sounds like she was legitimately trying her best to make a good life for herself
and her daughter. Tony was only seventeen when she became pregnant, and well,
there's no information out there about who the father was. I think it's
pretty obvious that he had no part of his child's life. So Tony had
to undergo the challenge of being a single mother and putting herself through nursing school.
But in spite of her personal demons, she seemed to be succeeding very
well. It's heartbreaking how Tony and her daughter text each other in the middle
of the night because she was having trouble sleeping, and this turned out to
be the last time they ever communicated. Tony's decisions coming from a perspective of
she's obviously somebody who dealt with addiction, issues since she'd gone to rehab,
and she had been in kind of a pressure cooker situation, and this can
be really problematic for people with bipolar disorder. She's dealing with having her daughter,
she's dealing with going to school, looking into her master's program, while
working. She is doing all the things right, but this can be a
lot of pressure for somebody who's dealing with mental health issues. And I don't
know how well these meds were working for her, because I know from personal
experience and just objectively, it can be an arduous process trying to find the
right cocktail of medications that works for people without a myriad of side effects,
because a lot of psych meds can have side effects that are extremely detrimental to
other parts of your life. And so I don't know how well they were
working. It sounds like she was finding that balance, but we don't know
from her perspective. And yes, it does sound like she made some decisions
that were poor decisions. But I can tell you that people with bipolar disorder
when they're in a state of not having slept for thirty six hours and they've
potentially consumed alcohol, and I don't know if she'd consumed illicit drugs, but
there is a possibility that you don't make good choices. I myself have made
horrible choices when in situations that have been similar and got out of those situations
and wondered how the hell am I still alive. I remember, this is
like such an embarrassing story, but I'm going to share it just because I
hope that it will provide since everybody who listens knows me and knows that.
You know, I'm a middle class, like educated woman. But in this
situation in my mid twenties, I was going through a manic episode and I'd
been out partying with my boyfriend at the time with a bunch of friends.
We're at this club and it's kind of like in an industrial area, and
I got really pissed off and I don't really remember anything. I been doing
drugs too. I'd been doing like drinking and doing cocaine, which when you're
bipolar is a bad combination, and in a manic episode made worse and I
walked off for some reason, and I do not know what happened if I
ran into anybody. I somehow woke up on somebody's porch. Like the humiliation
of that and the feeling of like, how the hell did I make it
here? Did I encounter anybody? What happened? I didn't have my purse
with me or no, I did have my purse, I didn't have my
wallet. So I had to at the time get this person like the people
whose porch I was on, they weren't home, don't even know how I
got there, went to the neighbor's house, knocked on their door. It's
like five am. They're so concerned, and then they call a cab.
I had a camera in my bag, and so I gave the taxi driver
in my camera because I went home, woke up my boyfriend. He wouldn't
wake up at the time, and then I had to call the taxi driver
back like a day and be like, here's the money. But that is
a type of situation that you can get into where I just did not know
how I got there, and when I got out of it, I thought
it would have been so easy for someone to predate on me, to murder
me. And so the fact that Tony behaved like this is something that like
really strikes a chord with me because I've certainly myself been in situations like that
when I was in my younger years, and so it just it hit me
like a gut punch. I think, Jewels, you're incredibly brave for sharing
that, and it's like it's it is like what I was saying earlier,
This is not uncommon for someone who struggles with any mental health condition, and
bipolarism has its own unique things, but alcohol, an episode of any kind,
and also having that lack of sleep, Jewels, you nailed it.
Like you're such an incredible woman, You're so smart, you're so loving,
you're so put together, and guess what, mental health, especially when you
mental health with drugs, there's a lot of times you wake up, you
look up, you come to like a safe space, and you say,
wait, I did what right? I love several people in my life that
have done some horrible things and then wake up and feel like they can't live
with themselves, you know where it's like I don't even remember any of that,
and it's a result of a mental health breakdown. And so I find
you so brave and so inspiring to share those kinds of things, because it's
not doesn't make anybody lesser, it doesn't make anybody unworthy or broken or anything
like that. It's just a reality of I struggle, and sometimes those struggles
are bigger than myself, and they're bigger than what I even can comprehend.
But I work every day to try to do better and better and better,
and I think that's what Tony was doing. She just said, I've been
doing so good, why can't I go out with my childhood friend? And
it was just not a good combination then night. But I want to say
you're brave and thank you for being transparent and vulnerable and sharing. Oh thank
you, yes, thanks for sharing that. And if this Tony's case turned
out better, she could have had a similar situation where she just drove somewhere,
ran out of gas, and woke up like sleeping in her car in
the neighborhood she didn't recognize and wondered how did I get here and not remembered.
But unfortunately her story is one of the million where someone with bipolar disordered
acts ratically and then disappears and we never hear from them again. So I'm
very glad that didn't happen to you, Jules, because we're glad to still
have you with us in a much better place. Me too, And I
just want to add that whatever shame people have the desire to put onto these
victims who have mental health issues, those of us who have mental health issues,
we feel enough shame as it is, that any kind of extra shame
that other people are going to pile onto us is completely unnecessary, especially with
regards to victims. Not that I think anyone who's listening to this. All
of our listeners are extremely empathetic, and I don't think that anybody is going
to be going, oh, it's her fault, she made these choices.
But I just think that it's important that we keep reiterating that Tony is not
to blame for whatever happened to her. So I think this would be a
good time to bring it in to part one. But join us next week
as we present part two of our series about the disappearance of Tony Lee Sharpless.
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail
Went Cold Patreon? Yes, the Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three
years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like early ad free episodes,
and I also send out stickers and sign thank you cards to anyone who
signs up with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollar tier Tier
two. We also offer monthly bonus episodes in which I talk about cases which
are not featured on The Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to
Patreon and if you join our highest tier, tier three, the ten dollars
tier. One of the features we offer is a audio commentary track over classic
episodes of Unsaw Mysteries, where you can download an audio file and then brood
up the original Unsaw Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or YouTube and play it with
my audio commentary playing in the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids
about the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very first episode
that I did a commentary track over was the episode featuring this case. So
if you want to download a commentary track in which I make more smartass remarks
about Juel Kaylor than be sure to join Tier three. So I want to
let you know a little bit about the Jewels and Ashley Patreon, so there's
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but they're just too short to turn into a series. And we're really
enjoying doing those, so we hope you'll check out those patreons will link them
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the Path. So until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold
trails and chili pass call for warm clothing. Music by Paul Rich from the
podcast Cold Callers Comedy