Welcome back to the path when CHILEI for part two of our series about the
disappearance of Tony Lee Sharpless, Robin, do you want to catch everyone up
on what we talked about in our previous episode? Well. Tony Lee Sharpless
was a twenty nine year old single mother living with her mother and stepfather and
daughter in West Brandy Wayne Township, Pennsylvania. She had gotten pregnant at age
seventeen, but raised her child while putting herself through school, and she is
now working as a registered nurse. But she has also had a long time
struggle with bipolar disorder, and a couple of months before this, she had
done a stint in rehab because of issues with alcohol addiction. She had been
doing quite well, but on this particular night, after working an overnight shift,
she decided to go out with her friend Crystal partying at a club,
which her mother and stepfather did not like because she was not supposed to be
drinking alcohol because of the medication she was taking, but she decided to do
it anyway, even though she had been awake for around thirty six consecutive hours
at that point. So Tony and Crystal went to the club together met up
with a famous NBA basketball player named Willie Green who played for the Philadelphia seventy
six ers, who invited them back to a party at his house, but
Tony became intoxicated started behaving erratically, so Willie Green asked them to leave,
and while they were driving away, Tony and Crystal got into a major fight
where she kicked Crystal out of the car and never came back, and this
is the last time she was confirmed to be alive, as neither Tony nor
her vehicle have ever been seen since. They searched a bunch of bodies of
water just to see if she had driven her car to a river, but
came up empty. But there would be some very intriguing leads because a license
plate reader apparently picked up Tony's license in Camden, New Jersey, which was
a short drive away from where she disappeared, but they could not actually find
the car, and a couple of years later, a private investigator got an
anonymous letter from someone who claimed that they had been paid to dispose of Tony's
car and give it to a chop shock because she apparently had been killed after
an altercation with a police officer, and they needed to get rid of the
evidence, and what made this letter credible is that the writer was able to
provide five digits from Tony's vehicle identification number, which had never been released publicly.
But for whatever reason, the police were inclined to believe that the letter
was a hoax. And whatever the case, they've never been able to substantiate
this story, and Tony and her car are still missing to this day now.
To be quite honest, when they disappeared episode first aired back in twenty
eleven, a lot of viewers who saw it seemed to lean towards the whole
thing being a tragic accident where Tony drove her car into a body of water.
Whenever a person goes missing with their vehicle, I generally leaned towards that
being the solution. Yes, the search was performed of the Schykill River,
but it was mostly centralized around an area which they figured was the most likely
spot for Tony to have accidentally driven into the water. But the entire river
is one hundred and thirty five miles long, and given the state of mind
that she was in that night, Tony could have gotten lost and wound up
at a spot in the water where she has yet to be found by any
search teams. Over the past several years, we've seen numerous cases in which
missing persons have been found submerged in a body of water inside their vehicle,
decades after they originally vanished. This particular story is reminiscent of another unsolved missing
person's case from the Philadelphia area, which was covered on Disappeared, where a
couple named Richard Patrone and Danielle Imbo vanished without a trace while driving home from
a night out in their pickup truck in two thousand and five. To this
day, opinions are still sharply divided about whether they were victims of foul play
or if they simply drove into the Delaware River and have yet to be found
well. Many people's initial impression was that Tony was the victim of an accidental
drowning. The appearance of the anonymous letter stating that Tony was killed after an
altercation with a police officer has opened up the possibility that something a lot more
sinister took place. I mean, I certainly think there are some credibility issues
with the scenario outlined in the letter, but I don't think it's entirely implausible
either. And I can't overlook the fact that the writer provided details which they
should not have known unless they were personally involved in this case. There's no
way, guys, that when we look at this case and that letter says
that there were these that I remember the last five of the VIN number of
this car I was asked to move a cop friend of mine says he killed
a girl and needed this car moved. Here's the last five VIN numbered digits.
That could be so many things, the twenty six letters of the alphabet,
it could be all of your numbers, Like, what in the world
chance would you nail that? And then Copps literally read this letter and say,
unfortunately, miss Law, this is a hoax. We can't help you
with this. It seems way more probable to me that that letter had some
sense of accuracy and some truth to it that was worth following up on,
way more than just driving your car off into a But let's start from the
beginning and discount the one theory which I'm reasonably certain did not happen. I
don't think there's much chance that Tony was killed at the party at Willie Green's
house. If you go back and look at the original media coverage of this
case. There were some people, including Tony's family, who doubted Crystal John's
version of events, and people start spreading speculation online that something might have happened
to Tony at that party, which prompted everyone to orchestrate a cover up and
dispose of her body and her car. I'm sure a lot of this gossip
stemmed from the fact that Willie Green was a fairly famous figure in Philadelphia at
that time, as he played for the seventy six ers basketball team for seven
years, and a lot of people were tempted to paint this as a story
of a pro athlete who used his fame and influence to cover up some criminal
behavior. Well, the truth is that it was probably nothing more than an
unfortunate coincidence that a woman went missing after leaving Willie Green's house, and the
police always stated that Green was nothing but cooperative with the investigation and have made
it clear that neither him nor anyone else who attended his party were considered suspects.
And besides, if something did happen to Tony while she was there,
I seriously doubt all those people could have kept quiet about it for this long.
No, I don't think so at all. And Willie Green's having this
party where everyone's having time of their life. Remember, he's saying like,
hey, get her out of here. She's pouring champagne on the kitchen floor,
She's yelling at people, She's very angry. Can you get your friend
out of here? And Crystal leaves with her friend. Crystal passes that lie
detector tests later. So I definitely am with you, Robin. This is
just there's no way that this has any weight to it because he was throwing
a party, they were there, it's five in the morning. Crystal gets
approached to please get Tony out of the scene, and Crystal says, Tony
drives off with her in the car, shortly dropping her off on the side
of the road. And so I can't imagine the party itself and the being
any kind of incident where it happened. I could see someone from the party
knowing that Tony was vulnerable and perhaps leaving shortly after and hurting her. But
I don't think Willie Green or anybody at the party, in that home or
in this VIP lounge was actually responsible at that party. Yeah, I guess
it is a potential alternate possibility that someone saw it Tony in her vulnerable state
and then just decided to follow her and leave the party, But we don't
really have any accounts from that from Crystal, like she didn't see any other
vehicles following Tony after she was kicked out, so that's probably not what happened.
And it sounds like police cover their bases pretty well and interviewed everyone and
did not find any of the partygoers to be suspicious. It's also important to
point out that Crystal John's was never considered a suspect either, though she was
certainly the subject of a lot of wild rumors in speculation herself. Tony's family
seemed to feel a lot of resentment towards her, and it's clear that Crystal
was no saying herself, as years earlier, she had once pled guilty to
two counts of harassment. Crystal got a lot of heat over the fact that
she allowed Tony to consume so much alcohol, but she has always maintained that
she was unaware that Tony was not supposed to be drinking because of the medication
she was on. And I can believe she's being truthful because this was the
first time christ had seen Tony since her most recent stint and rehab, Even
though police had told her she was not a suspect, Cristel personally volunteered to
take a polygraph, something which I'm sure most attorneys would advise you not to
do. But even though polygraphs are unreliable, I think Cristel just wanted it
on the record that she passed. What's indisputable is that Tony had some sort
of meltdown before she went missing and was not acting like herself. For this
reason, you really cannot apply some logic to her actions or discount any possible
scenario, because Tony could have conceivably driven anywhere. So now we'll explore the
other theories which don't involve Tony driving into the river. According to Cristel,
Tony had less than a quarter tank of gas left in her car when she
drove away from the party, and it sounds like this wouldn't have been enough
fuel for her to make it all the way back home to West Brandywine Township
without stopping. It's very easy to imagine a scenario where Tony at a gas
and was harmed by someone who pulled over to help her. But if that's
the case, then what happened to her car? Okay, so I don't
think it's someone who pulled over because she ran out of gas. I'm thinking
let's say let's say she does realize like your car does, ding low gas.
Right. Let's say that she realizes she's on low fuel and she pulls
over on her own to fill up, and someone gets her there. Or
let's say she pulls over because she is having a manic episode she realizes she's
too intoxicated or something along those lines, and she's having a panic attack outside
the car, or she's sitting on the hood of the car trying to get
her wear with all, and then someone sees her and takes her because remember,
if she's completely out of gas to the point where her car has stalled
out, someone had to come to hurt her. But then also go,
oh, yeah, I need to take a gas too, and find a
way to put gas in her car and move it. So that seems like
a lot of involved effort, whereas her already being stopped either at a gas
station or on the side of the road for some reason would make more sense
to me definitely, like it could be a thing where she pulled over before
she ran out of gas, and there was just enough fuel in the car
that whoever got rid of it had enough was able to drive it somewhere,
Whereas like it would be very difficult to do something like buy a separate tank
of gas or even hire a tow truck to get it out of there,
because that sort of thing would show up on the payment records, so there
would be a record of it somewhere. So that's what's kind of weird to
me, is that whoever got rid of her just had the wherewithal in order
to dispose of her vehicle as well. Well. The one piece of evidence
which has made people believe that Tony did not simply drive into the Skykoll River
was the fact that her license number was picked up by an automated license plate
reader in Camden, New Jersey, two weeks after she went missing. I
think it's important to look at the geography of this situation. Tony lived about
thirty five miles west of Gladwin, and Camden is located around fifteen to sixteen
miles southeast in the opposite direction. So even if she didn't have enough gas
to make it back to West Brandywine, township. She probably would have had
enough to make it to Camden, and he's found exit for Interstate seventy six
is located in close proximity to where Tony was last seen, so she easily
could have turned in that direction and wound up in Camden by mistake. Perhaps
the reason her license number was picked up in that particular neighborhood because this is
where Tony ran out of gas easily could have been. And now that you're
sitting in Camden in a neighborhood and you have a place that's high with crime,
right it's riddled with you were saying, sex work and drugs in that
area, it is possible someone could have then moved the vehicle to, let's
say, at shop shop or something like that. I still am inclined to
think she pulled over for something, whether she was so stressed she couldn't drive,
whether she just simply couldn't focus on the road anymore, or whether she
had some kind of paranoid episode. But I very much think she could have
been the one to be driving to Camden. Having that license plate captured on
that license reader. How awful, Like it's so eerie to be a family
member or a parent or something like that saying like, oh my god,
my baby was alive, my baby was at least here, or her car
was at least taken here, because again, in this case, you have
her just evaporated out of thin air with her car. It's gone. So
it's this kind of promising but also kind of devastating revelation as well, if
that makes any sense of where I'm going with that, Like it would break
your heart as well to say, oh my god, what if we had
found out sooner that her license had been caught on that reader, could we
have gotten to her right, like, oh my god, what took her
to this place? You would have at least known where to be looking.
And at that time, I mean, if it was sex trafficking or something
like that, then you know, they could have moved her somewhere else.
So in that amount of time a luck can happen. Oh yeah. There
was a six day gap between when the license plate reader caught the plate and
when the West and when the Candid police and notified the West Brandywine Township Police
that the car was there, and of course by the time they made it
Camden, the car was gone and they could not find it. So I
have to think that if the car had been parked in that neighborhood, someone
got rid of it or someone stole it during that six day window of time.
So there were apparently a lot of reported sightings of Tony and Camden around
the time period. Her license plate was flagged, leading to speculation she might
have become involved in drugs or sex trafficking. I know that Tony's family said
she had a good life going on and never would have willingly abandoned her daughter.
But that's the thing about bipolar disorder, It's completely unpredictable. Tony was
in in a rational state of mind at the time she was last seen,
so if she somehow got lost and wound up in Camden while she was off
her medication, who knows what could have happened. It seems like the major
proponent of this sex trafficking theory was Eileen Law, the private investigator hired by
Tony's family. I think that largely stems from the act that in the year
prior to Tony's disappearance, a pimp named Alan E. Brown aka Prince,
was arrested for running a sex trafficking ring in New Jersey. Brown had been
doing this for twenty years up until that point, using violence and drugs to
control a number of young women and forced them into sex work. Of course,
Brown was already behind bars by the time Tony went missing, but perhaps
she crossed paths with someone else who did the same thing to her. But
overall, even though there have been a number of sightings of Tony and Camden,
Philadelphia and Lancaster, here we are fourteen years later and no one has
ever uncovered any conclusive proof that Tony was still alive after the morning of August
twenty third, two thousand and nine. As we've seen in countless missing persons
cases, eyewitnesses can be mistaken. So these sightings may have been from people
who saw another woman that resembled Tony. Absolutely, I mean there easily could
have been people who saw Tony's picture on the news or on a you know,
missing person's poster, and they said, oh, I saw a girl
that look like her, Oh my god, and they want to be helpful
and they want to say, I think I saw her. Doesn't guarantee that
that was actually Tony. It could have been someone who looked very familiar.
What's also really difficult is Tony might not have been in her normal state or
been acting her normal way, might not have, you know, had her
hair kept in a clean way or anything like that. So it would be
very difficult to be confident you saw Tony if you weren't a friend of hers
or very close to her. It's also very interesting because, you know,
we talk about the fact that Alan E. Brown had been arrested for sex
trafficking in New Jersey, but people even today in twenty twenty three, I
remember being at lunch the other day and I heard these people talking about,
like, oh my god, did you know that they'll like grab normal kids,
Like there's actually a lot of people who will take normal kids and sex
trafficked them. And it's like, still this bizarre idea to people that it's
not just these you know, foreign individuals who come over and because they can't
speak a language they get manipulated. It is runaways, it's the kid they
call quote throwaways, it's sex workers, it's quote normal people. It's everyone
is vulnerable to sex trafficking if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time
with the wrong people. It's not this kind of rare thing that happens,
right, it happens in every city and every state, and especially around interstate
commerce areas, And so I kind of had to chuckle when they're like there
was a pimp in that area at the time, Like, come on,
guys, there were several pimps in the area at that time, right,
And so I think it's very possible that Tony Bean in that distressful state and
in this kind of heightened mental health crisis state, that easily someone could say
I'm gonna grab her, and when I grab her, I'm going to keep
her on some kind of substance that doesn't ever allow her to get out of
this lifestyle. I don't think that would be very difficult to do. I
just don't think they're looking into pimps all that often, especially when they aren't
abducting people off the street. So I agree with you. I think there
is probably many pimps operating in that area, But it's sort of like when
you have missing sex workers and law enforcement doesn't look into it. The way
that they would be pimping then would be different than they would be now because
a lot of times now it's behind a computer screen. But if they have,
you know, girls that are out there on the street and they're saying
they're being terrorized. Different story. But I just don't think that they're going
to be privy to all of the details and who's operating in that area.
I think there's probably so many different hidden variables with regards to people who would
potentially traffic, women or men or anybody. And I'd be curious to know
about when a lot of these sightings of Tony and Camden took place, because
if they took that they occurred before the news came out that our car license
plate had been picked up in Camden, then that lends more credence to them,
because there are people who've seen a photo in the newspaper and they think,
I llegitimate looks like her. But if a none of these sightings took
place until after the story about the license plates hit the news, then a
lot of these sightings may have just been confirmation biased where they hear, oh,
she was last seen in Camden, and then they see a young woman
who kind of looks like Tony and then they just automatically assume it's her,
even though she might be mistaken. All that being said, the flagging of
Tony's license number in Camden on September the eighth has been seen by some people
as conclusive proof that she was still alive for some period of time after she
went missing. However, there's a potential alternate explanation for this, and one
article I saw about this case is specifically mentioned that while the camera from the
license plate reader was able to read the license number, it was unable to
pick up the actual state listed on the plate. And that's a very important
detail because in America, two different states can issue different license plates but the
exact same number. This actually leads us to a rather funny story, which
appropriately enough involves another pro athlete who played in Philadelphia, former National Hockey League
star Jeremy Roenick. At one point during his career, Roenick left the Phoenix
Coyotes in order to sign as a free agent with the Philadelphia Flyers, and
after moving to Pennsylvania, he had a tendency to run through toll lanes without
using an easy pass to pay the toll, causing him to rack up thousands
of dollars in fines. Well, it wasn't long before some elderly gentleman living
in the state was shocked to receive a bill for all of Roenick's fines.
It turned out that when Roenick moved to the area from Phoenix, he was
still driving a car with his original Arizona license plates, which got tagged when
he ran through all those toll lanes. The problem is that this poor elderly
man had the exact same license number as Ronick, only he had Pennsylvania plates.
So when Ronick's number got tagged, the automated system sent the bill with
all the toll fines to this other guy. So theoretically, the vehicle which
was flagged by the license plate reader in Camden could have had Tony's license number,
but plates from a different state besides Pennsylvania. Of course, I'm not
saying that's what happened. Given Campden's close proximity to the location where Tony went
missing, it would be quite a coincidence of her license number showed up there
on an entirely different vehicle. But the Jeremy Roenick story does demonstrate that the
license plate reading is not infallible proof that Tony's Pontiac ran Prix was in New
Jersey. Okay, I have two other explanations. Someone else was driving the
car. I don't think it proves that she was alive at all, but
the car was definitely driven, in my opinion, through that spot. It
could have been something like Jeremy, but I think it's more likely that it
was her car. Or remember, you're driving into a high crime area.
So if I want to commit a crime and I see an abandoned car somewhere
that I just took to a chop shop or I just helped strip or things
like that, I could take the license plate off your car. I could
put it in my car and or on my car and drive through that card
reader as well, and that way my car's not registered with my license plate.
Yeah, that's true. That happens all the time when people steal cars.
They'll just take license plates off random vehicles and put them on their own.
So, for all we know, it could have been attached to a
completely different vehicle besides the Grand Prix. And well, this has nothing to
do with the main story. I just wanted to mention that I hate Jeremy
Roenick because he scored an overtime goal to eliminate the Toronto Maple Leaves from the
Stanley Cup playoffs in two thousand and four, So not surprised at all that
he racked up all these fines. I'm sorry. Robin's in a support group,
guys. Yeah, yeah, I'm a Leaf fan. I'm always in
need of a support group. So do we know Jeremy Roenick ever paid the
fine so this poor elderly gentleman could get off the hook. I haven't found
that out, but I hope he did because this got a lot of publicity
in Pennsylvania. So I hope he did the decent thing and paid them off.
Here's what I think the main issue is. The two biggest pieces of
evidence supporting the idea that Tony traveled to Camden are the l since plate reading
and the anonymous letter claiming that she was killed by a police officer. But
the problem is that both of these pieces of evidence seemed to contradict each other.
As you'll recall, the writer of the letter claimed that he was paid
five thousand dollars to dispose of Tony's Pontiac Grand Prix by driving it to a
body shop near Boston. But if Tony was the victim of a police cover
up and they needed to destroy the evidence, why would her vehicle have been
parked outside in a public neighborhood in Camden to be picked up by the license
plate reader. Well, there's one possible explanation which might account for this.
I find it interesting that the writer of the letter claimed he was approached about
disposing of the car during the last few days of September two thousand and nine,
one month after Tony went missing. Let's just say Tony was pulled over
by a Camden police officer which led to some sort of altercation where she was
killed. The perpetrator may have thought their best course of action would be to
abandoned her car in a high crime section of Camden in hopes that it would
eventually be vandalized or stolen and ceased to be their problem. But the license
number is picked up by a license plate reader on September eighth and flagged is
being connected to a missing woman. If someone from the Camden Police Department was
involved in Tony's disappearance, they may have learned this information was going to be
passed along to the West Brandywine Police Department, so they realized they had to
move the Grand Prix out of the neighborhood and get rid of it. The
letter writer specifically said they were asked to move the vehicle from Brooklawn, which
is only about five miles south of Camden, so perhaps it was temporarily hidden
there while they figured out what to do. According to the writer, they
were asked to drive the vehicle to Boston by a friend, but they did
not actually learn that it belonged to a missing woman until after they returned.
This is when they found out that their friend happened to be the friend of
a police officer who killed Tony. So if the writer is telling the truth,
it seems like they never interacted with the officer personally and that they only
heard the story third hand. It also could have had nothing to do with
the police officer. The person who killed her could have said, oh,
yeah, by the way, my friend, a police officer killed her,
right, and that would take you down a whole another rabbit hole of conspiracy
theories and government cover ups and things like that. So if they didn't have
that one on one connection with that police officer who specifically asked them personally to
move the car, maybe that part of the story is incorrect. But the
rest of it, again, because that Vin numbers included, it seems like
what would be the motivation to lie and you wouldn't have had that kind of
information. So I do think there could be truth to it, maybe just
not the police officer part. And if your focus is on misdirection, the
best lies are founded in truth, right, So there is some kernel of
truth there. So if you're giving a correct VIN number, if you really
want to lead people on a wild goose chase, you give that correct VIN
number, and then you that a police officer is responsible, when that is
so far removed from the actual truth. But because you've given that then number,
it's something that we all are clinging to because it's like, well,
what is the probability that they would ever have that information? You could never
just come up with it. You would have to be connected to it somehow.
But we can't then assume that the rest of their story that they're telling
is true because their objective may have been misdirection. Yeah. I was just
about to address that whole police cover up angle. I mean, overall,
it's hard to know what to make of the letter. On one hand,
in most cases where there are allegations of a police cover up, you usually
notice some suspicious behavior on their part to make you suspect they're hindering the investigation,
but until that letter showed up, I saw no indication that the camd
In PD did anything suspicious. I know that the West BRANDYWINEPD looked into the
writer's allegations, but it doesn't sound like they found anything to raise any red
flags. With the Camdon PD. It seems like investigators now lean towards the
letter being a home oakes, though Eileen Law has stated that even if the
scenario described in the letter is not entirely true, the writer might still know
something. Quite frankly, the idea of Tony getting into an altercation with a
police officer and winding up dead is not all that far fetched given her erratic
behavior. At the time she was last seen. She was driving well heavily
intoxicated, So if Tony was pulled over and went through a manic episode in
which she tried to be confrontational with the police, you can definitely see how
things might have escalated out of control. If she was stopped by the Candon
police, then this would have meant that Tony had taken a wrong turn somewhere
when driving away from Gladwin, which probably would have put her in an even
worse frame of mind. Absolutely, I mean, I do think that it's
possible. I think the letter had to be from someone who knew something.
But I do agree Eileen Law said, listen, is everything accurate? No,
But there's again no way this person doesn't know something of what is going
on. It's really frustrating because I feel like you'd be holding a letter in
your hands saying this person knows the ven number, this person knows some details
and probably is adding in some distractions into this letter too. But if there's
a single nugget of truth, that's more than we know that. We don't
know anything right now. So if there's anything and this is true, how
do you isolate what's true and what's not? If? Oh, man,
the letter made it worse. Someone knows something and they're almost like taunting by
sitting this letter and not necessarily including enough information for us to know what happened.
I mean, there are many documented cases of people being stopped by the
police who have mental health issues and they wind up dying in custody, and
it also wins and it winds up causing a lot of controversy or the whole
situation about how much complicity the police had in their death. But once again,
I have never heard anything suspicious from the Camden PD to suggest they're recovering
anything up, which is why I think this letter might just have a mixture
of truth, where the writer does know what happened, but they decided to
fabricate this entire police angle in order to create misdirection and take the heat off
themselves. It's also worth mentioning that the letter never specifically says that Tony was
pulled over, only that she was killed in a fight with a police officer.
For all we know, maybe she did travel the Camden and was alive
for a while, but was killed at a later time in an entirely different
situation. The most convincing detail about the letter is the fact that the letter
writer provided the last five digits of the Grand Prix's vehicle identification number, which
they claimed they wrote down while getting rid of the car. While the description
of the Grand Prix and its license number were constantly mentioned during the media coverage
of this case, I don't believe the VIN was ever disclosed publicly. It's
also interesting how the writer provided Tony's cell phone number as well, though it's
not entirely clear how they would have obtained this information. To begin with,
since they never made mention of handling her phone. Remember, phone records showed
that Tony's cell was turned off shortly before she went missing, and it still
hasn't been found to this day. The part of the letter which stretches credibility
for me is the writer's claim that they kept the license plates and Tony's Social
Security card inside a box for three years and completely forgot about them until their
daughter found them. That apparently bothered this writer enough to send an anonymous letter.
But why they did not feel this way three years earlier when they first
learned about what happened. Also, you'd think that if they wanted to provide
definitive proof their story was true, they might have included Tony's Social Security card
with the letter. I had forgotten about this cell phone number. I mean,
this is crazy because it wasn't the last call or kind of message on
there. At three am and she was Crystal was pulled out of the pool
at five by some partygoers name please get Tony out of here. Yeah.
Her last communication is when she texted her daughter because her daughter couldn't sleep,
so she said, I'll be home soon and I know that after Tony took
off. Crystal did try to collar phone a few times, but it was
turned off so she never answered. But yeah, there's no communication after five
am on the morning she went missing from the phone. Oh that's so sad.
And yeah, I mean, like, I don't know if I don't
know how easy it is to find cell phone numbers. I mean I don't
I know that we used to have phone books you could have but that didn't
have cell phone numbers in it. And when you put in a cell phone,
I think it just tells you, like where it's located on the internet.
So I don't know. That's a very interesting tidbit there too. And
you know, Jules, you said why now, like why three years later?
I think a lot could go into that. Like I think at the
time, if your focus is okay, I gotta protect myself, I kind
of got caught up in this and you get a little bit of distance.
I don't think you would have quote forgotten about what happened, but I could
see wanting that distance and trying to ignore what happened. I also could see
relationships changing, or you know, finding faith, or all kinds of things.
Maybe even just the daughter looking up at you and saying like what is
this you know, and going, my god, my kids are going to
know I'm associate with some murder, Like I need to get this off my
conscience. So I think there's a lot of factors of why now, But
like you said, why not actually like go a step further and either give
us something definite or something like the social Security card. Again, you gave
us just enough to cause almost like heartache and not enough to do any good.
In the case. It might have something to do with the fact that
the case was featured on Disappeared the previous year, in twenty eleven, so
it may have been a thing. Well, the person is thinking, well
this no one is going to miss this woman and we'll never hear from her
again. But then they find out that the case has been featured on national
television and is getting all this media exposure. They finally realize, oh my
god, this is the same woman. I feel like I should come forward
and share information, but I don't want to actually identify myself just because I
could get into serious trouble. I really don't like the part where they say
that they forgot like you so unsettled that you took these items like the license
plate and the social insurance card, and you put it in a box with
maybe the intention of late at a later date going to law enforcement. That
we're supposed to believe that you then forgot about it till your kid found it.
It just doesn't really add up. I think you could want to forget
about it. Yeah, Ver, sure you really forgot about it. So
part of me wonders if the letter is some sort of half truth, and
that Eileen Law is correct in her assumption that the writer is trying to tell
them something. They might have legitimately been involved in Tony's disappearance or have some
knowledge of what happened, which is how they were able to provide specific details
like the last five digits of the vehicle identification number. However, their story
about Tony being killed by a police officer is a complete fabrication, and the
real truth is a whole lot different. The writer may have wanted to clear
the conscience, but also downplay their own complicity, so they minimize their involvement
by claiming that the perpetrator was the friend of a friend and all they personally
did was disposed of evidence without finding out until after the fact that it was
connected to a missing person's case. If Tony was pulled over by the police
at some point, then you'd assume the officer would have called in or recorded
her license number before they approached her. Unless the Candon PD managed to completely
bury the incident, there should have been some sort of record of this traffic
stop to be uncovered by investigators. And I think that if the Candon PD
was that thorough about destroying evidence, Tony's car never would have been left out
in the open to be picked up by a license plate reader to begin with,
I agree, I mean, I think that the police officer angle unless
that letter writer had given us a badge number or some kind of information knowing
who this officer was. I think either their friends who asked them to discard
of the car quote for a police officer were lying, or the letter writer's
lying to distance himself some. If you bring the police into it, it
really does take you down an entirely different path of CONSPI. You see and
cover up and the whole department turning against this family, And I don't necessarily
see that in this case. I think that that's a stretch. Again,
like you guys said, if it was the police and they were really going
to go to all these links. I don't think that car license plate would
have ever left the possession of whoever was trying to cover it up in the
first place, so I'm thinking the police part might be a throw off that's
just something to distract from the real perpetrator. There are times when I'm inclined
to go with Ockham's razor and believe that Tony and her vehicle are still in
the Skykill River somewhere, but something tells me that her car did wind up
in Camden at some point. It's possible that Tony was in such a bad
place mentally that she drove there and parked in that neighborhood, but something happened
to her after she left her vehicle. Perhaps some of the alleged sightings of
Tony and Camden were legitimate, but she soon became the victim of foul play
and was no longer alive by the time the investigation put their focus there.
There was just so little evidence to work with that the only way this case
might be solved is if the letter writer was legitimate and decides to come forward
and share everything they know. If they're being truthful, they might not actually
know what happened to Tony's body, but at the very least they might be
able to disclose the identities of the people who would know. That's exactly what
I think, Jules. I think this letter writer has to know something.
But again, they didn't give us anything to work with. You said,
hey, I know that there was a car. Here's proof, And I
had some of the evidence, that's all. I felt bad. But we
don't have any kind of leads that the detectives or any kind of analysts could
go on. So it would take this person who wrote the letter. It
would take someone who's associated with the case to say, you know what,
enough times passed. I don't owe anybody anything. I owe this family information
more than I owe loyalty to someone i'm protecting that may not have protected me
from something. Right, And here's what I know. It's going to take
one person to give one little clue that could really bust this whole case wide
open. She's somewhere, her body somewhere, her car went somewhere, and
so if this letter's true, we could figure out where this car went with
a little bit more information. And if we can find out where the car
went, we can trace it back to who has her or who took her
and what happened. The family deserves those kinds of answers. The community deserves
those kinds of answers to know what happened to this young lady who just said
I want to go out for the night and she lost her life over that.
One of the things about missing persons cases was just hits me is when
the victim had a child at the time they went missing, and you realize
that so much time has passed that this child is now an adult. Tony's
thought it would be in her mid twenties right now, but she has had
to spend the past fourteen years growing up without her mother. Hopefully she can
receive some answers about what happened someday. So if you happen have any information
about the unsolved disappearance of Tony Lee Sharpless, please contact the West Brandywine Police
Department at six one zero three eight zero eight two zero one. That's six
one zero three eight zero eight two zero one, Jules Ashley. Any final
thoughts on this case. This one is pitiful because you have somebody who it's
easy to sit back and talk about her mental health struggles. But she's so
similar to so many people that we know, right, She's a normal human
being who is working really hard to kind of overcome her own demons. She's
saying, listen, I'm not perfect, but gosh, Jarnett, I'm going
to try to be the best mom I can be. I'm trying to be
a good daughter, I'm trying to be a good nurse. I'm trying to
be a good student. And by all accounts, Tony was checking all of
those boxes. Right. Did she stumble? Absolutely to have any of us
not stumbled, Heck no, Right. She was living a normal life really
well by all accounts, and she went to rehab. She got healthy,
she got more stable, and she had been working, she hadn't been sleeping,
and she probably, like many of us, Mama said I just need
a break. I need a break. And a childhood friend says, come
out with me. You should come out with me. We should go hang
out. It's gonna be really fun. And mom and dad say yeah,
we'll keep the baby. She leaves and she goes to have fun. Unfortunately,
I think she had already started to experience some of that bipolar mania and
kind of distress that she would experience later in the evening before she ever started
drinking. Then she started drinking, and I think it got to one of
those scenarios like Jewels so bravely described, where you just don't know what's happening
around you. If I had to make a judgment right now, I would
say someone witnessed her in that kind of vulnerable state and said, what an
easy person to pray on, and they took advantage of the situation. They
were an opportunist who found Tony at the wrong place at the wrong time.
It's literally, when you read the text, you said, the last thing
she texted her daughter was I'll be home soon. It gave me chills from
top to bottom because that's exactly what should have happened. Tony should have been
able to go out, she should have been able to come home to her
safe space, and her parents could have helped her with the distress that she
was in, and her little girl should have been able to snuggle her mom
the next morning, and unfortunately we don't have that. So it's tragic,
But like we know, it takes one lead, and I'm praying that Tony's
case isn't too old, that it's not too obscure that somebody will have the
bravery to say Tony's family deserves answers and she just deserves justice. Well,
said Ash, And this case reminds me a lot of I mean, there's
multiple cases on Disappeared where the person who I'm missing had bipolar disorder. But
another one that I can think of off the top of my head is April
Pitzer. Do you remember that one, Robin, Yeah, I watched that
episode. I don't remember too many of the details. She also was married
and had a daughter, I believe it was a daughter, and she was
a really good mom. But then, you know, started experiencing all of
the issues that can come along with bipolar disorder at any point in time,
even when you're medicated. It's just it can be a bit of a roller
coaster for some people. And it was for April. And everyone said though,
she wasn't the type of person that would you leave her daughter, and
she ended up doing so, and ended up she was using drugs at that
point and living in a very strange area I think in the desert in California,
in like a low income community with a lot of people who were criminals
or hiding out from something, and it looked like she was killed there and
maybe put into a mine or something like that. So you see somebody who
walks away from their life. I don't think that that is what happened here.
I don't think that Tony did walk away from her daughter willingly. But
I do think that you don't know what you may do when you're in a
manic episode, especially when you coupled with thirty six hours of no sleep,
or you're adding alcohol to the mix and there's a potential for illegal drugs.
It just seems like she was not in a good place. So it is
possible that, like a scenario that actually outlined earlier, could have happened where
she came across somebody who decided to sex trafficker and she was very pliable,
easy to manipulate, and they kept her under their control, or she could
have met with foul play. I'm just more inclined to believe that that letter
is a red herring put forth by somebody who was involved. But I just
don't believe the police officer angle. I just my heart really breaks for her
daughter because I can't imagine what it would feel like for her. I know,
as a kid, my mother had by polar has by polar disorder,
and she was diagnosed when I was a kid, like a little baby,
and having her taken away when my parents were divorcing because she was in a
very unstable place mentally. Well, this is a lot different your mom's taken
away in there's this permanent to it and this open ended question mark where you
you don't know what happened, and to have that lack of resolution is something
that I'm sure weighs heavily on the entire family and everybody involved in this case,
people like Crystal who were blamed and vilified when she clearly had nothing to
do with this. It's this is just such a heartbreaking story that really hits
close to home for me. Yeah, I still remember watching this on Disappeared
back in twenty eleven, and this was before the anonymous letter had been sent,
so they didn't mention it at all on the episode. And my initial
impression was that this just sounds like a horrible tragedy to me, where we
have a woman struggling with mental health issues, she had a rough night and
that she probably drove into a body of water somewhere and the search just has
failed to turn up her body or her car. But I have to admit
that my perception of this case changed about a year later when I heard the
news about the anonymous letter being sent. And while even though the police have
tended to write this off as a hope, the fact that the writer provided
the vehicle identification number is way too much of a coincidence. So I do
agree. I don't think that this killed by a police officer scenario is true.
I think it's intentional misdirection. But I do know that the writer had
to have handled the car at some point in order to guess the VIN number
correctly, So they probably do have knowledge of what happened to Tony, but
it's just unwilling to share the full truth about it. I mean, I
can't imagine how Tony wound up in that situation. Perhaps she just took a
wrong turn and wound up in Camden, New Jersey and something bad happened to
her. But until the writer letter writer comes forward, or they're able to
find her body or uncover additional information that corroborates the information on this letter,
she's probably still going to remain a missing person. But even if you discount
all that, it's just a very sad story because Tony was someone who who
had a lot of mental health challenges but still did the best she could,
Like she raised her child as a single mother since age seventeen, but still
managed to put herself through school and graduate with honors and become a registered nurse
and did what she could to try to handle her addiction issues and our mental
health issues. But unfortunately, this one night, she just happened to go
out drinking and would up driving away. But if she did become the victim
of foul play, then it's definitely not her fault what happened. It's only
the fault of the person who killed her or harmed her. And I do
hope someday we finally have conclusive answers about what happened. 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 dollar 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 Patreons. So there's early ad free episodes of The
Path Went Chili. We've got our Path Went Chili minis, which are always
over an hour, so they're not very many, but they're just too short
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hope you'll check out those patreons will link them in the show notes. So
I want to thank you all for listening, and any chance you have to
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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