Is Amy Bradley Alive? Why Her Family Feels Closer Than Ever to Learning What Happened on Cruise Ship (Exclusive) By Liam Quinn and Sarah Jones

It was a fun-filled trip — until the sun came up on March 24, 1998.

Hours earlier, on the first stop of a Caribbean cruise with his family, Brad Bradley recalls touring the sunny island of Aruba with his sister, Amy, 23, in a rented convertible SUV. Back aboard Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas, the siblings dressed for that night’s formal dinner and spent time with their parents, Ron and Iva Bradley, at a pool deck party before heading to the ship’s rooftop club where they briefly parted ways to chat with other passengers.

Sometime after 3:30 a.m., they were back together, Brad says, relaxing on the balcony of the family’s cabin as their parents slept inside: “I don’t remember looking at a clock but at 4, maybe 4:10, I went to bed.”

Today, Brad feels fortunate that he thought to say “I love you,” because those words may be the last he will ever speak to his sister. At around 5:30 a.m., Ron, 73, stirred in his sleep and glimpsed Amy on a lounge chair outside.

But when he woke after dawn some 30 minutes later, she was gone without a trace. Nearly three decades later, Amy Bradley’s disappearance — as the cruise ship approached the port of Curaçao — is an enduring mystery debated on TV talk shows and true-crime podcasts and recently spotlighted in Netflix’s hit three-part documentary Amy Bradley Is Missing.

It has spawned a constellation of theoretical explanations — including an accidental fall from the balcony, death by suicide and abduction aboard the vessel by sex traffickers — and led to more than a half-dozen reported sightings over the years, as well as a still-open investigation by the FBI.

Yet to this day, her anguished family, who have become dogged investigators themselves, don’t know what really happened to Amy. Still, they firmly believe she is alive.

“People can’t understand the level of hope that we’ve maintained,” says Brad, 48. “We’re still waiting for that call.”

Brad, who was 21 at the time and home from college, says he and his sister were excited to embark on the Caribbean cruise with parents they both enjoyed spending time with. The siblings grew up in Chesterfield, Va., where Amy excelled at sports and went on to play basketball at Longwood University.

While in college, she came out as gay to her parents, who grew to accept her sexuality and invited the people she was dating — both women and men — to their home and on vacations. But it was just the four members of the tight-knit family aboard the cruise ship the morning Amy disappeared.

When Ron woke at around 6 a.m., the door to the balcony was partially open, but Amy wasn’t in the cabin. He immediately searched the ship, thinking he’d quickly locate his daughter. But when nothing turned up, the concerned father woke up his wife to tell her the worrisome news: Amy was missing.

From the very beginning, the family never considered it possible that Amy accidentally fell overboard — or jumped to her death by suicide. A recent college graduate, she was about to start a new job and had just moved into a new apartment and gotten a bulldog named Bailey.

“She had way too much going for her,” says Brad.

Ron and Iva reported their daughter missing to the ship’s crew and begged them not to let anyone off the ship, which was now docked in Curaçao. Iva explains that Amy was meticulous about informing her parents of her whereabouts.

“She’s not going to leave the room and not come back without leaving a note,” she says. “My intuition was something is terribly wrong.”

Fearful that somebody had harmed Amy or was holding her against her will, Ron and Iva requested that the ship be thoroughly searched before any passengers disembarked. The crew declined to stop people from leaving and eventually paged Amy, who did not respond. Later that day the crew searched the ship.

“Nothing was found,” says cruise director Kirk Detweiler in the Netflix documentary. “Everyone, from at least the employees’ side, was just assuming that she jumped or fell overboard.”

Two days after Amy disappeared, FBI agents boarded the ship, which had continued the cruise and was now docked in St. Maarten. They interviewed the Bradleys, crew members and solo passenger Wayne Breitag, who had occupied the cabin next to the Bradleys and had shown an interest in Amy, speaking to her several times through the partition that separated their balconies. 

The FBI also interviewed Alister “Yellow” Douglas, the bass player in the band Blue Orchid, who was seen on video dancing with Amy at the nightclub before her disappearance. Brad says Amy told him when they were on the balcony early on March 24 that Douglas had made a pass at her.

Oddly, Brad says, Douglas approached him and said he was “sorry to hear about my sister” later that morning but before an announcement had been made that Amy was missing. Two passengers later told the Bradleys that they had seen Amy and Douglas walking into an elevator between 5 and 6 a.m. on March 24, before seeing Douglas return alone 15 minutes later. 

Although the Bradleys continue to believe Douglas may have been involved in Amy’s disappearance, he has repeatedly denied having anything to do with it and agreed to take a lie detector test. (The results were inconclusive.)

The FBI has not accused him of a crime. The FBI also spoke to the passengers who say they spotted Douglas with Amy after she was last seen by her family, but Special Agent Erin Sheridan, who works on the case, says in the documentary that investigators couldn’t establish a reliable timeline of the events they reported.

The FBI has also investigated several of the reported sightings of Amy in the Caribbean region and in the U.S., but to no avail.

The Bradley family continues to explore every theory. Since the release of the popular documentary, they say, they have received many new tips and leads on their website, AmyBradleyIsMissing.com.

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Brad recently learned via social media that the partitions separating the balconies on the cruise ship can be opened, leading to speculation about whether Breitag, their next-door neighbor, may have allowed a third party access to his cabin to abduct Amy and take her off the ship. (Breitag denies any involvement and insists that the wall between balconies could not be opened.)

And Douglas remains in the family’s crosshairs. Brad wants him, as well as Breitag, to take a new round of lie detector tests using today’s updated technology. But since Douglas is not a U.S. citizen and is currently living in Grenada, a country in the Caribbean, that is unlikely to happen. Attempts to reach Douglas for comment were unsuccessful. 

Meanwhile, Iva says, she told the FBI about the mother of one of the young passengers who reported seeing Amy and Douglas getting into an elevator early on the morning of March 24. According to Iva, the mother can confirm that her daughter returned to her family’s cabin just after 6 a.m.

But the FBI has yet to speak to the mother, Iva says. After the documentary came out, Iva says, Sheridan contacted her and told her that investigators never found any evidence that Amy had ever left the family’s cabin. Iva disputes the finding.

“My response was, ‘Nobody interviewed the mother of the two girls that opened the door that morning at 6 a.m.,'” she says.

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The Bradleys hold on to their faith that eventually Amy will return. They believe she is possibly a mother living overseas against her will and that her children are being used as leverage to prevent her from seeking help.

While they are working with the FBI, the family also has a dedicated team of investigators who chase down every tip that comes their way. And they keep Amy’s beloved Mazda Miata just as she left it in the hope that she will come back soon.

“We get up in the morning, we say, ‘Maybe today,’ and we follow leads, and we take calls,” Iva says. “And then at night we have a special little kiss for Amy, and we say, ‘Maybe tomorrow.’ ”

If you have information about Amy Bradley, contact AmyBradleyIsMissing.com or the FBI at tips.fbi.gov.