In the quiet community of Grass Lake, Michigan, 34-year-old Tonia Renee Stiles vanished from her home on Orban Road on November 18, 2010. She was a mother of two children, a 15-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter, who lived with her boyfriend, Scott Steven Cassidy, and a male roommate. On the day she was last seen, her roommate reported falling asleep on the couch and waking up about an hour later to find that Tonia was gone.
She left without her personal belongings, and since she did not own a vehicle or a cell phone, her disappearance was immediately concerning to her loved ones. Friends and family described her as a bubbly and outgoing person, and though she had faced personal struggles, they did not believe she would have willingly abandoned her children, to whom she was deeply devoted.
The circumstances surrounding Tonia's disappearance grew more complex and tragic in the days that followed. Six days after she was last seen, her boyfriend, Scott Cassidy, was arrested for auto theft. While incarcerated at the Jackson County Jail, and just over two weeks after Tonia went missing, Cassidy took his own life on December 3, 2010. He left behind a handwritten note titled 'My Last Testament and Will.' In the note, he denied any involvement in Tonia's disappearance or knowledge of her whereabouts, expressed his love for her, and called her children 'beautiful.' Despite his denial, Cassidy was considered a person of interest in the case as he was one of the last people known to have seen her. His suicide left investigators with more questions than answers and added a painful layer of complexity to the search for Tonia.
Years have passed since Tonia Stiles was last seen, and her case remains an unsolved and deeply felt loss for her family and community. Law enforcement has investigated the possibility of foul play, a belief shared by her loved ones who are convinced she would not have voluntarily left her children. Vigils have been held, and her family continues to hope for answers and closure. The investigation has been hampered by the lack of physical evidence and the death of the primary person of interest. The case is an overview of a devoted mother's sudden and mysterious disappearance, a subsequent tragedy that deepened the mystery, and a family left in a painful state of uncertainty, still waiting for the day they will learn what happened to Tonia.
Tonia Renee Stiles was a 34-year-old woman who was last seen on November 18, 2010, at her home in Grass Lake Township, Michigan, in Jackson County. Her residence was in the 10700 block of Orban Road, and that home became the starting point of a disappearance that has remained without a publicly documented resolution. The Doe Network describes Tonia as a white female standing approximately 5 feet 4 inches to 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing between 130 and 150 pounds. It lists her as having long brown hair worn below her shoulders and blue eyes, although another longstanding public case profile has published different hair and eye colors, illustrating some inconsistency among descriptions circulated over the years. More distinctive characteristics were consistently recorded: Tonia had a large tribal-art tattoo covering her back, an approximately one-inch scar on her right leg, a mole or birthmark near her upper right lip, and pierced ears. She was also known as Renee and has been listed under the name Tonia or Renee Whitehill. NamUs continues to identify her as missing from Grass Lake with November 18, 2010 as her date of last contact under case MP9378.
At the time she disappeared, Tonia was living at the Orban Road residence with her boyfriend, Scott Steven Cassidy, and another male roommate. According to the account preserved by The Charley Project, the roommate said he had fallen asleep on the couch and discovered after waking roughly an hour later that Tonia was no longer there. No subsequent confirmed communication from her has been publicly reported. Her belongings were left behind, and missing-person sources state that she did not have a cellular phone or a vehicle of her own, circumstances that left investigators with fewer obvious ways to trace where she might have gone after leaving the residence. She did not contact family members or friends afterward. Tonia was a mother of two, and published accounts describe motherhood as an important part of her life. She had previously talked about being dissatisfied with aspects of her life and had discussed leaving, but her loved ones did not believe she would simply abandon her children without contacting them. The Charley Project reports that she and Cassidy had lived together for roughly a year and a half and that she had been helping him as he worked to establish a tree-service business from the property. The absence of her possessions, transportation, and any subsequent contact made the disappearance increasingly difficult to reconcile with the possibility that she had simply decided to begin a new life somewhere else.
Only days after Tonia vanished, events surrounding Cassidy added another complicated and deeply troubling dimension to the investigation. On November 24, 2010, six days after her disappearance, Cassidy was charged in an unrelated auto-theft case involving a van from a Jackson-area security company. While he was being held in jail, investigators had an opportunity to question him about Tonia because he was among the last people known to have seen her. Public case summaries state that he denied being responsible for her disappearance. On December 3, 2010, Cassidy died by suicide while still incarcerated. According to The Charley Project, investigators had intended to question him further. He left behind a handwritten document described as his last testament and will, in which he addressed the distribution of his belongings, expressed hostility toward Tonia’s parents, referred affectionately to her children, and denied killing Tonia or knowing what had happened to her. Cassidy was never publicly named as a suspect, but missing-person sources identify him as a person of interest because of his relationship with Tonia, his presence near the time she vanished, and the fact that he was one of the last people known to have seen her. His death did not establish what happened to Tonia, and public records do not provide evidence proving that he was responsible for her disappearance. Instead, his suicide eliminated a person investigators had planned to interview further and left another unanswered question in an already uncertain case.
As the investigation continued, concern increasingly focused on the possibility that Tonia had encountered foul play. The Charley Project reports that Tonia and Cassidy had been experiencing financial difficulties and had apparently argued around the time she disappeared. It also notes that although she had talked about leaving her circumstances behind, her family did not believe she would willingly leave her children and remain completely out of contact. Investigators ultimately shared the concern that something may have happened to her, but the publicly available record does not establish who, if anyone, was responsible. There has been no publicly confirmed sighting of Tonia after November 18, 2010, and no publicly disclosed physical evidence has provided a definitive account of where she went after leaving or disappearing from the Orban Road home. The uncertainty weighed heavily on her family. In reporting nearly a year after she vanished, Michigan journalist Aaron McMann described the Orban Road residence as empty and overgrown and quoted Tonia’s foster mother, Betty Whitehill, explaining that the family continued thinking about her and remained without an answer to what had happened. That reporting also remembered Tonia as someone who loved being a mother and who had appeared to enjoy helping Cassidy establish his tree-service business before her disappearance abruptly divided that life from everything that followed.
The passage of years has not produced a publicly documented explanation. The Doe Network continues to classify Tonia as an endangered missing person and identifies the Michigan State Police as the investigating agency, with the Jackson Post handling case number 17-7333-10. Missing People in America likewise continues to list her as missing from Grass Lake and directs information to the Michigan State Police, while NamUs maintains her federal missing-person record as MP9378. The Charley Project’s case page, updated in April 2026, still describes the disappearance as unsolved. Those current listings preserve Tonia’s name, photograph, identifying features, aliases and final known location so that the years since 2010 do not reduce her to a forgotten case number. Behind those records is a mother whose final known morning began at her own home, whose belongings remained behind, and whose family never received the communication that might have explained where she had gone. In overview, Tonia Renee Stiles was a 34-year-old woman last seen at her residence in Grass Lake, Michigan, on November 18, 2010. She disappeared without a vehicle or cellular phone and without subsequently contacting her family or friends. Her boyfriend, Scott Cassidy, was one of the last people known to have seen her; he was interviewed, denied involvement, was never publicly named as a suspect, and died by suicide in jail a little more than two weeks after Tonia vanished. Investigators and her loved ones came to fear that she had met with foul play, yet no publicly released evidence has established exactly what happened after she disappeared from the Orban Road home. More than fifteen years later, the central questions remain painfully unchanged: where Tonia went that morning, what happened to her afterward, and what information may still exist that could finally give her children, family, and those who have continued remembering her the answers they have been missing for so long.Last Seen: Nov 18, 2010
