On the evening of Aug. 22, 2009, Toni Lee Sharpless, a 29-year-old nurse at Lancaster General Hospital, attended a party in suburban Philadelphia.
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When a friend who had gone to the party with Sharpless found that she had not returned to her Chester County home the next morning, she notified police. Sharpless’ family then filed a missing person report.
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On the morning of Aug. 9, 2011, an older woman left her East Hempfield Township home to visit family in Fair Haven, N.J., about 150 miles away.
When she did not arrive at her destination by that evening, her family filed a missing person report. Police immediately released the woman’s story and photo to the media.
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Two missing persons. Two worried families. Two radically different outcomes.
More than two years after her disappearance, Sharpless remains missing. Everyone agrees foul play is involved. But those closest to the nurse believe she is still alive.
By contrast, East Hempfield police checked with various sources and located the woman early on the morning after she disappeared. Police say she was unharmed.
Hundreds of adults are reported missing in this country every day.
The vast majority, like the East Hempfield woman, are located in short order.
A few, like Sharpless, go missing for months or years.
Some disappear on purpose. No law says an adult cannot walk away from one place and go live in another without telling anyone about it. In many cases, such people are not reported to authorities and never are included on lists of missing persons.
But if something specific seems amiss, someone usually reports a missing person to the authorities.
Some flee money problems or an abusive spouse.
Some suffer from dementia or mental-health problems.
Some fake drownings in deep water or find other ways to “die” so that their bodies can’t be found.
Some fake abductions, as Lancaster City police allege that 19-year-old Lancastrian Symone Stevens did in early September.
And some really have been abducted.
Some have been sexually abused.
And some have been murdered.
In all of these disappearances — whether coerced or contrived — families are left behind to worry and work with police and, sometimes, private investigators to find their loved ones.
In the East Hempfield Township woman’s case, police checked with Pennsylvania Turnpike officials and hospitals between here and New Jersey and quickly located her.
“No crime was committed, and she wasn’t hurt,” reports East Hempfield Township police Officer Bret Hollis. “The rest is personal.”
More than two years after Toni Lee Sharpless went missing, however, very little remains personal about her case.
Her story has appeared repeatedly in recent months on “Disappeared,” a series that runs on the Investigation Discovery Network.
Every time the Sharpless story airs, Eileen Law gets multiple calls.
“The case is anything but cold,” says the private investigator, owner for the past 28 years of CIA Security & Patrol, a large company with dozens of investigators in Kennett Square and at other locations.
Law has been working the Sharpless case, pro bono, from the beginning. She says the case is special to her because Sharpless was a nurse who left behind a 12-year-old daughter. Law begins every work day by reviewing the case.
The investigator has received more than 100 calls from people who claim to have seen Sharpless in Lancaster, where she worked; in Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County, where she partied the night she disappeared; or in Camden, N.J., where her car was sighted shortly after she vanished.
Law is working on a “promising” lead right now. A man says he is 100 percent sure he recently saw Sharpless on four separate occasions in Camden.
“He and Toni have the same drug dealer,” Law says. “He says she seems exceptionally distraught. He mentioned physical characteristics, which her mother confirmed.”
The informant “told me things about her that other people would not have known,” Sharpless notes.
Previous callers who have spotted Sharpless at various places similarly have said she looked “sad, ashamed or distraught.”
Many say she is followed by a black man of large build who seems to be controlling her.
Law suspects that Sharpless, who has bipolar disorder, is hooked on drugs and has become part of a human trafficking operation.
The investigator has traveled to Camden several times. She believes that eventually she will find and help return Sharpless to her family.
“There’s no evidence to the contrary that she’s not still with us,” she says.
Donna Knebel, Sharpless’ mother, agrees.
“We haven’t found her yet as a deceased person, so I have that glimmer of hope,” she says.
Knebel, who is taking care of Sharpless’ daughter in West Brandywine Township, Chester County, and works in that county’s courthouse, says she could not cope without Law’s help.
“My emotions are like a roller coaster,” she says. Law doesn’t tell her everything she knows about the case, she adds, “because if I knew everything I probably couldn’t keep going.”
Both Knebel and Law praise the West Brandywine police, who have cooperated in the investigation from the beginning.
They make less positive remarks about Lower Merion and Lancaster city police. Law says she provided valuable information to a Lancaster police officer one time and was told, “What do you want me to do about it?”
That’s not a customary response. Police and investigators say they usually work together to exchange information.
Children, adults
Daniel Ford, with DS Investigations, of Elizabethtown, served as a police officer for 25 years before becoming a private investigator about a year ago.
“Working with police, hand in hand, is very advantageous,” he says “We have different advantages.
For example, police can run data checks on license plate numbers and the like in seconds. Private investigators, for their part, have fewer regulations on where they can go and what they can do.
“Any private investigator who doesn’t have a good rapport with local police is a fool,” Ford says.
Not that there are many opportunities to cooperate on missing person cases in Lancaster County.
Most of the nearly 50,000 names of missing adults on the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database at any one time have been reported from large metropolitan areas.
Local police report relatively few missing persons.
Lancaster police processed 37 missing-adult cases in 2010 and 20 so far this year. Most of those cases were entered into the NCIC database. All persons have since been located and removed from the database.
Similarly, East Hempfield Township police entered reports of one missing adult in the NCIC database in 2010 and six so far this year. They eventually found all seven people and removed their names from the national list.
Law says she knows of no one in Lancaster County who deals with missing persons on a regular basis. She has no Lancaster cases now, but has handled a few in the past.
Ford has pursued a couple of missing persons, but spends most of his time simply locating people who owe money.
For example, he recently traced a woman to Lebanon after interviewing family members and discovering what she likes to do. He found her and served divorce papers.
That person was “missing” only to her spouse. She was never listed in a database of missing persons.
“Most of the time it’s running away from something much more than it is hiding,” Ford observes.
Missing children are a priority. Families, police and entire neighborhoods go into overdrive when a child is reported missing.
But without clear-cut evidence of foul play, mental incapacity or other unusual circumstances, police agencies rarely get excited about a missing adult.
There is no requirement to report missing adults in Pennsylvania, and so many are not recorded.
“We have to be a lot more careful that an adult needs to be found,” says Lt. Todd Umstead, spokesman for Lancaster city police. “What if a 22-year-old doesn’t come home? If we put his name in the NCIC system, we’re taking away his liberties.”
So Lancaster police do what many police departments do. If someone reports a missing adult, police require that person to check at least one item on a form that includes several possibilities before they will file a local report and send it to the NCIC.
A missing adult must have a physical or mental disability that subjects him or her or others to immediate danger.
Or a person must have disappeared involuntarily.
Or a person’s physical safety must be endangered.
Or a person must be missing as the result of a catastrophe.
None of these categories includes someone who is simply escaping his or her past.
As an example, Umstead uses a situation similar to the case Ford mentioned: If a woman is divorced and doesn’t want an ex-spouse to find her, police will not reveal where she is.
“We don’t want to be the agent of a stalker,” he notes. “There’s very few times we can take away a person’s liberty, if they didn’t commit a crime.”
When missing person reports are filed, they usually are cleared within days or weeks. Most subjects are located alive and well.
Occasionally, as in a four-week search for Kathleen M. Connolly this summer, a body is found. Police charged the West Hempfield Township woman’s boyfriend, Timothy Handel, with her murder.
There are only a handful of serious, long-term missing-adult cases in Lancaster County in which no body has been found.
One is the Sharpless case.
Others are the years-old cases of Brenda Heist and Mary Ann Bagenstose.
Vanished
On Feb. 8, 2002, Brenda Heist drove her two children to school and then returned to her Lititz home. She and her husband had planned to divorce, and she had taken off a couple of days from her job at a local car dealership to look for new living quarters.
That afternoon the kids returned to an empty house and no car in the driveway. They suspected something was wrong and called their father. Lee Heist III called Lititz police.
Four days later, the car was found parked in York, close to a bus station.
At first, police thought Heist had left her home and family voluntarily. But she had taken none of her possessions, which eventually persuaded everyone that her disappearance had not been planned.
Two years ago, Lancaster County Court declared Heist dead. That released a $100,000 insurance policy.
It did not release the police from the case.
Lititz police Lt. John Schofield says he has heard “not a thing” about the Heist case in several years.
“Every time we have a body found, of course we inquire about it,” he says. “Whatever comes up, we follow up.”
In the nine years since Heist disappeared, Schofield says, every other person reported missing from Lititz has been located — from teenage runaways, who are relatively common, to adults who have left home for a weekend without telling anyone.
The Heist case is an anomaly.
“If you asked me if there’s one thing that bothers me in my career, it’s this case,” Schofield says. “This is the top one.”
Never came home
Mary Ann Bagenstose, a 26-year-old nurse’s aide and mother of a 2-year-old son, vanished from her home south of Willow Street on June 5, 1984.
She and her husband were separated, but he was going to take her car-shopping that day. She wasn’t home when he arrived. Jere Bagenstose told police that his wife had left a note saying that she was walking to a nearby store.
She never arrived at the store. And she never came home.
Both her family and police long ago decided that Bagenstose was murdered. But her body has not been recovered, so officially she remains a missing person.
“It would always be the hope that she would be found alive,” says Gerry Sauers, the state police trooper handling the case.
“But after 27 years,” he adds, “I would think that’s unlikely.”
The case will remain open indefinitely, he says, as do the cases of all missing persons and unsolved homicides.
Recently Sauers got a call from Dick Jeffries, a private investigator in Lancaster. He had received a tip about the case.
“Information still trickles in from time to time,” notes Jeffries, owner of Forensic Scientific Investigations. “All leads are followed up, no matter what they may be.”
Jeffries has specialized in homicide cases and crime scene reconstruction for 35 years. Occasionally, as with Bagenstose, he takes on and sticks with a missing-person case.
Early in his career, he went searching for people who didn’t want to be found. He says he found them all.
“Some people want a different lifestyle,” he says. “They want to get away from present problems. There might be a love triangle. There are many different reasons people disappear.”
In Bagenstose’s case, however, Jeffries believes the reason she disappeared and can’t be found is clear.
“All of the leads and the people who have contacted me, probably in the past 20 years … their opinion is that she’s deceased,” he says.
