Investigation into the Horrifying Mystery of Amy Bradley’s Cruise Ship Disappearance: Was It a Crime?

On March 24, 1998, 23-year-old Amy Bradley disappeared without a trace while on a Caribbean cruise with her family.

Amy Bradley is Missing, a three-part documentary series that will premiere on Netflix on July 16, will focus on her abduction 27 years ago and her parents’ belief that she is still alive.

“There are a few stories that you just have to tell and many that deserve to be told,” directors Ari Mark and Phil Lott wrote in a statement. “This was a must do for us.”

Interviews with Iva and Ron, Amy’s parents, who are “deeply convinced” that their daughter is still alive, are featured in the series.

“This is not uncommon in unsolved cases, especially since no body had ever been discovered and the FBI still labels the case as ‘open,’’ Mark and Lott said. “But, after hours of talking about Amy, meeting Amy’s brother who lived in the house next door, unpacking the pristine duffel bag Amy had used on that spring family vacation, and circling around (but not touching) Amy’s perfectly polished ‘all gassed up’ red Miata waiting for her return — this felt different.”

“The more we got to know the Bradleys in the subsequent months, 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,” the statement read.

The Bradley family set sail aboard the Royal Caribbean International Cruise Line’s ship Rhapsody of the Seas on Saturday, March 21, 1998, from San Juan, Puerto Rico, for what was expected to be an exciting seven-day journey. The ship set sail for Curaçao two days later.

Amy vanished on March 24, early in the morning, while the ship was halfway between the two locations.

Amy was with her brother, other passengers, and crew members at the cruise ship’s disco prior to her disappearance.

But even after a thorough search of the ship the following morning, she was nowhere to be located.

“Myself and my parents have had to endure a lot of sadness, but the last thing that I ever said to Amy was, ‘I love you,’ before I went to sleep that night,” Amy’s brother Brad said in a video, which was shared by the FBI. “Knowing that’s the last thing I said to her has always been very comforting to me.”

The family, passengers, and staff were all perplexed by Amy’s disappearance. Early in the morning, several passengers said they saw a woman—whom they could not identify was Amy—going to the ship’s top deck, while others said she was with an unnamed ship employee.

Or did she go overboard before port by accident?

“When we discovered Amy missing, we begged the ship’s personnel to not put the gangway down, to not allow anybody to leave the ship. And we told them that if Amy had left the room for any more than 15 minutes, she would have left us a note. And they put the gangway down anyway. People left the ship in Curaçao,” Iva said in a 2005 interview.

Soon after leaving Curaçao, the ship made two additional stops in the Caribbean before arriving back in Puerto Rico on March 28.

An FBI inquiry into her unexplained disappearance is still ongoing.

Age-progressed images of Bradley, who is 5′ 6″ and has brown hair, were released by the agency in 2017. She has four tattoos, according to the missing people poster: a gecko on her stomach, a Chinese symbol on her right ankle, a Tasmanian Devil on her shoulder, and the sun on her lower back.