When Iva and Ron Bradley boarded a week-long cruise in Puerto Rico with their daughter Amy and son Brad in March 1998, they expected to spend a relaxing time on the water surrounded by good food, drinks, and opportunities to spend quality time together. But before the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Rhapsody of the Seas made it to its second port at the island of Curaçao, Amy, 23, went missing in the early hours of March 24. She was never found.
Netflix’s new three-part docuseries Amy Bradley Is Missing, premiering July 16, explores the cold case that’s baffled the Bradley family and investigators for over 27 years. Amy’s disappearance prompted a boat-wide search. But after Curaçao investigators announced they didn’t believe she had gone overboard, suspicion swung to crew members. When no answers appeared, the search for Amy went off the boat and toward countless possibilities — drugs, illicit romance, murder, even human trafficking — all with the aim of answering her family’s all-consuming questions. If Amy Bradley didn’t die, then where did she go? Months later, the search was complicated further by sightings on Curaçao and neighboring islands, with multiple bystanders claiming to authorities that they saw Amy. So if the years-long rumors and sightings are true and Amy is currently living anonymously somewhere in the Caribbean, why did Amy leave in the first place? And why hasn’t she called home?
“There are a few stories that you just have to tell,” co-directors Ari Mark and Phil Lott told People in a statement. “This was a must do for us. The more we got to know the Bradleys… the more two things became abundantly clear — first, that the family’s belief that Amy is still alive was and continues to be unbreakable and second, that maybe they’re right.”
A Dream Vacation
According to Amy’s parents, the family won the cruise as a prize from the Illinois Mutual Insurance Company, where both Iva and Ron worked. Amy and Brad came with but were required to share a room with their parents. The group was last together on the night of March 23, when they had a formal dinner. Afterwards, the family attended a pool party. When Iva and Ron went to bed, Amy and Brad went to the ship’s disco, where they had several drinks before individually returning to the room.
The siblings sat on the balcony in their room and talked while they finished their drinks. In addition to discussing their itinerary for the next day in Curaçao, Brad says in the documentary series that Amy mentioned dancing with someone who later made a pass at her, but didn’t seem to imply it was that important. When he was ready for bed, she said she wanted to try and sleep outside. “She said, ‘ I don’t feel too good. I’m gonna sit right here with all the fresh air and the wind,’” Brad says in the series. “I told her I loved her and I’d see her tomorrow and shut the glass door behind me. And I went to bed.”
Around 5:30 a.m., Amy’s father Ron woke up and saw Amy’s legs and feet in a lounge chair on the balcony. He tells the docuseries he purposefully checked to make sure she was safe, and then went back to bed. But when he woke up again around 6 a.m., she wasn’t there. After searching the ship in places they thought she could be, Ron, Iva, and Brad immediately asked the crew for help.
A Missing Daughter
Even though Amy was reported missing only a few hours after she’d last been seen, much of the confusion around her disappearance came from the slow speed at which outside police were involved. This is a common problem with crimes on cruise ships, as a majority of the journey is spent in international water and it takes time for U.S. specific authorities to come, according to Jamie Barnett, a cruise safety advocate who’s interviewed in the show. Barnett’s daughter died on a cruise from Long Beach to Mexico and she says in the docuseries that the experience inspired her to work in cruise safety improvement.
The Royal Caribbean cruise ship Rhapsody of the Seas
Courtesy of Netflix
“Most people have no idea when they board a cruise ship the dangers that are inherent there. But the things that have happened to me, things that have happened to Amy Bradley and her family, can happen to anyone,” she says in the docuseries. “And they do happen all the time.”
Amy’s family noted her disappearance as the ship arrived at Curaçao and asked to keep people on the cruise ship, but that request was denied. After the ship’s crew searched again, Curaçao authorities conducted a search for her body in case she fell overboard, but found nothing. The F.B.I. was contacted, but the Bradley family’s room had already been cleaned — removing any potential evidence. After Curaçao authorities couldn’t find any indication that Amy jumped or fell overboard, the investigation moved to the passengers and potential evidence that could be found from that night.
The Initial Theories
One of the initial suspects in the case was Alistir Douglas, a bass player who usually performed on the pool deck who often went by the nickname “Yellow.” Several people, including Brad, saw Amy dancing and talking with Douglas the night she disappeared. Lori Thompson, a passenger who was 18 at the time of the cruise, says in the docuseries that she and a friend saw Douglas and Amy together sometime between 5 and 6 a.m., before noticing Douglas walking by again minutes later, but without Amy. Douglas was interviewed by F.B.I. agents, and took a polygraph test (which was inconclusive), but “vehemently denied” having anything to do with the disappearance, according to the docuseries. While investigators looked into men with whom Amy was seen, her close high school and college friends say in the documentary that she had only been in relationships with women, and had already come out to her parents as gay.
Douglas’s daughter, Amica Douglas, appears in the documentary and says her mother divorced Douglas because of Amy’s case. Amica calls her father in the documentary while cameras are rolling, but he continues to deny any involvement. “I don’t want to go through this again,” Douglas can be heard saying. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Months after Amy’s disappearance, there were several people who reported seeing someone matching her description on or near Curaçao — many implying that Amy was under some kind of duress from a trafficking or drug-related situation. When Iva, Ron, and Brad returned for a press conference asking people for help finding Amy, a taxi driver approached them and said he had seen a woman who matched Amy’s description before. Separately, in August 1998, an eye witness named David Carmichael told the F.B.I. that he saw a woman who looked like Amy walking on a beach in Curaçao, but was stopped from speaking to her by a man who looked like Douglas. In January 1999, Bill Hefner, a Naval service member on the U.S.S. Chandler, said that he was approached by a woman in a brothel who said her name was Amy Bradley and she was being held against her will because she owed men money for drugs. Hefner said the person who approached him looked like the released photos of Amy but it took him at least two years to report the incident to the F.B.I. because he was afraid of being demoted in the Navy, he says in the documentary. In 2005, a woman on vacation also reported seeing someone who looked like Amy in Bridgetown, Barbados, but F.B.I. couldn’t confirm her statement.
Throughout the Bradleys’ search for Amy, there have also been several potential messages sent directly to the family via email. In one they considered promising, an anonymous source sent a photo from a website that appeared to be promoting prostitution and included a photo of one of the women on the site. After the F.B.I. studied it, they believed it could possibly be Amy, but had no means of reliably tracking down where the photo was from or who took it.
The Ongoing Search
Amateur true crime enthusiast and online investigator Anthony Willis first heard about Amy’s case in 2014, but quickly became interested in the prevalence of online theories about Amy’s disappearance. He started a website compiling all of the information about Amy, including updated photos from her family, to keep knowledge about the investigation easily accessible. But when he and Carmichael — the eyewitness who thought he saw Amy on a Curaçao beach — mined the site visitor log and found that someone visited dozens of times during the holidays and family members’ birthdays. The IP address was located in Bridgetown, Barbados.
Throughout the years, including amid the online theorizing, Amy’s family has maintained that they will not give up their search. “Twenty six years of looking for Amy every day,” Iva says in the series. “It’s a life goal. In my quiet times, I mean, it’s just like ‘What did we miss? Because I know somebody knows something.”
Amy’s father, Ron, says the biggest question the family gets is, “If Amy is really alive and out there, why doesn’t she call?” His says there could be a lot of reasons for this. “Maybe she’s a victim of Stockholm Syndrome,” he says in the series. “Maybe she’s in a situation where she’s had children. Maybe they threatened her. Maybe they threatened her children. We don’t know any of these answers. It just gives me hope that she’s still out there somewhere.”
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