Amy Bradley and her younger brother, Brad, could hardly believe their luck.
It was March 1998, and the Virginia-based siblings were about to embark on a once-in-a-lifetime, all-expenses-paid cruise with their parents, Iva and Ron, who won the trip from their employer, an insurance company.
‘We weren’t even supposed to go,’ Brad, now 48, tells the Daily Mail, explaining how his mother ‘got special permission to bring us’.
Brad had been on a cruise as a teenager with a friend, but this was his sister’s first time, and he remembers hyping up the trip. Then 23, Amy was an athletic recent college graduate. She had just started a job, moved into a new apartment and brought home an English bulldog puppy.
The siblings flew to meet their parents and boarded the Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas on March 21, 1998, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The first stop was Aruba, and passengers were partying up a storm on the evening of March 23 with a cruise-wide formal dinner before the ship left overnight for Curacao.
Amy and Brad continued the party at an onboard disco before retiring separately to the cabin they were sharing with their parents.
When Ron woke up around 5:30am, he says he spotted Amy’s legs on a lounge chair of the room’s balcony. But when he awoke again about a half hour later, she was gone – the Bradleys have not laid eyes on Amy since.
Today, after decades of desperate searches and calls for information, they still don’t have any answers in one of the most mystifying cases to ever hit international waters.
‘We’ve always had a gut feeling, as unrealistic as some may think it could be, after 27 years, that’s she’s still out there somewhere,’ Brad tells the Daily Mail.
Amy Bradley, left, and her brother, Brad, right, weren’t even supposed to be on the all-expenses paid trip their father won from his parents’ insurance company employer – but their mother obtained special permission to bring her children
Amy Bradley set off on a seven-day trip with her parents and younger brother Brad from the Puerto Rican capital of San Juan on Saturday, March 21, 1998
Brad, now 48, tells the Daily Mail: ‘We’ve always had a gut feeling, as unrealistic as some may think it could be, after 27 years, that’s she’s still out there somewhere – even though we realize, again, realistically, the chances are pretty low in anyone else’s eyes’
As Brad speaks, he is preparing to hop on a Zoom call with his parents and a tight-knit team they assembled over the years, including a Canadian who is 100 percent certain he spoke with Amy in the Caribbean in the months after her disappearance.
He is not the only one who believes they’ve seen Amy alive.
The Zoom was organized to ready the Bradleys and their loved ones for next week’s release of Netflix docuseries Amy Bradley is Missing – which includes interviews with eyewitnesses.
The family hopes airing their story might finally yield more clues as to where she is.
‘We can’t not try,’ Brad says. ‘If we say no to something like that, then it’s almost like we’re giving up, or we’re missing out on a chance and an opportunity to get this in front of more eyes and ears.’
Amy’s disappearance, he says, ‘feels like it was last week and 100 years ago at the same time’.
The Bradleys are adamant that Amy neither fell nor jumped from their balcony, because she was scared of how high it was.
‘We don’t think she got anywhere near the rail,’ Brad says. ‘When we first got on the cruise, we’re up on the eighth story and I’m looking over the rail, kind of looking straight down, like “Man, check this out.”
‘She said, “Nope,”’ he remembers. ‘And she wouldn’t even get close to it.’
Amy and Brad were two years apart and very close’ He tells the Daily Mail he misses ‘everything about her’ – and insists she neither fell nor jumped
Amy, pictured with her father at a family birthday party, had just graduated from college, got a new job and apartment and brought home an English bulldog puppy
According to Brad, many people believe she was sleeping on the balcony and somehow fell off after he went to bed.
He thinks the people she was hanging out with that night at the disco invited her to see or do something.
Meanwhile, a cab driver in Curacao claims he interacted with Amy. Passengers had been allowed to disembark the ship during the search for her – and he told the family he spoke to her on the island while she was looking for her phone.
Many more theories have also been put forward by law enforcement, online and in the Bradleys’ own circles over the years – with much focus being placed on a bassist from Grenada named Alister Douglas who Amy danced with that night.
Douglas has vehemently denied any involvement, though details of his story have changed in interviews since Amy vanished.
The Bradleys also noted that strange things kept happening after she went missing.
When the family – along with throngs of happy vacationers – went to collect official photos taken by cruise photographers, they didn’t find any that featured Amy.
Before she went missing, during that first formal welcome dinner, the Bradleys remember wait staff as being overly attentive toward her.
And when Amy’s parents said goodnight to her before returning to their cabin in the hours before her disappearance, they felt they were treated oddly by a pair of American women speaking to their daughter.
Brad, who was still in college, flew with Amy to meet their parents for the ill-fated cruise in 1998, enjoying the trip and each other’s company, he tells the Daily Mail
Brad and Amy, who grew up in Virginia, were not only siblings but also ‘really good friends’
The story is the subject of a new Netflix documentary, Amy Bradley Is Missing (pictured), a three-part series set for release on July 16
Amy vanished from Rhapsody of the Seas after a cruise-wide formal dinner followed by a disco and dancing – where she was spotted spending time with a bassist who has for decades denied any involvement in her case
Brad says the two Americans were ‘wearing matching uniforms, kind of navy skirts and Oxford blue button-ups’ and were ‘off to the side talking with her for upwards of an hour’.
‘And when my parents walked over to her to tell her that they were going to bed, the ladies kind of put a wall up and got kind of icy,’ he says.
The next day, as the surreal horror of Amy’s disappearance set in, her mother Iva asked for a priest.
‘These two Scientology officers got on board,’ Brad says. ‘So they came in our room. They did all this weird stuff. They’re dressed in these captain’s, admiral-naval kind of uniforms …. they were doing all these weird verbal and hands-on stuff.
‘They’re laying us down on the bed and putting hands on us, and my dad finally was like, “Look, that’s it.”’
Upon further research, he thought the outfits of the ‘icy’ women the previous night looked similar to the staff uniforms on Freewinds, Scientology’s Curacao-based cruise ship. The family’s unexpected encounter with the famously mysterious organization just deepened their sense of shock.
Years later, a Scientology spokesman tells the Daily Mail that Freewinds had not been in port the night Amy spoke with the two women in matching uniform, arriving only on the afternoon following her disappearance.
That night, around 11.30pm, he explains that a call had come in from the then-US Consul in Curacao, who had ‘been phoning around many churches… to see if someone could come and help console the grieving parents, because it was very upsetting for them, obviously.
‘None of them were, unfortunately, being very helpful… so he knew that we console people in times of loss,’ says Scientology spokesman David Bloomberg.
‘Scientology has various processes and assists to help people in various scenarios – loss of a loved one, etc – and those types of things were administered,’ he says, noting that the details were ‘private between the minister and the family’.
The episode tops the list of many peculiarities Brad wishes had been fleshed out earlier.
Brad says he worries about the ’emotional or mental or physical state’ that Amy may be in based on whatever she may have gone through over the years’
The decades of searching for answers and participating in docuseries like Netflix’s new Amy Bradley Is Missing have been ‘really tough emotionally’ on Amy’s mother, her son Brad tells the Daily Mail
Brad describes Amy, left, as ‘happy-go-lucky’ and says he wonders, if she had not vanished, ‘where would she be, and what would our relationship be like, and what would life be like?’
The Bradleys realized their family crisis unfolded in just about the worst investigative circumstances possible – on a cruise line, in foreign waters, with thousands of transient strangers, involving multiple jurisdictions with reams of lost evidence.
‘You’ve got a billion-dollar corporation fighting against you to protect their liabilities …there’s no safety net,’ Brad tells the Daily Mail. ‘And then international waters and foreign flags.’
As time wore on, though, there were sightings. Canadian David Carmichael – now a close friend joining the Bradleys for the Zoom call – insists he definitely saw Amy.
He says he identified her by her tattoos on a beach in Curacao in August 1998. Amy had several tattoos, including a sun, a gecko lizard, and a Tasmanian devil spinning a basketball.
An American naval officer also reported meeting Amy in 1999 in a Curacao brothel, where she told him her name and said she was being held against her will for owing drug money.
Another American tourist said she ran into Amy in a Barbados bathroom in 2005, overhearing a strange conversation with men who seemed in charge of her.
Amy told the tourist her first name and home state, which the eyewitness misheard as ‘West Virginia’.
But the Bradleys have also been plagued by false tips and bad actors over the years.
Most memorably was a conman who posed as a Navy Seal and milked the Bradleys for more than $200,000 of their own money and donated funds by claiming they had tracked Amy down.
Frank Jones pleaded guilty to mail fraud in 2002, was sentenced to five years in prison and was ordered to repay the money.
Brad, pictured with Amy as a child, tells the Daily Mail he looks at a picture of Amy nearly every day – and that he and his family ‘don’t leave any stone unturned. We follow up on every lead. You can’t stop trying’ to find her
Several credible eyewitnesses claim to have spotted Amy in the years since her disappearance, identifying tattoos and other details
‘Sightings drag it up; every time we do a show, all these emotions are dragged back up,’ Brad says. ‘It’s a persistently frustrating way to live.’
Despite that, he says, ‘the not knowing is the only thing that provides us any hope or any opportunity to continue to hope.
‘If we did know something, probably it wouldn’t be good, and then all hope goes out the window,’ he says.
‘We don’t leave any stone unturned. We follow up on every lead. You can’t stop trying.’
Now an orthopedic physician assistant, Brad still lives in Virginia, a stone’s throw from his parents, and keeps a picture of his sister in his marital home that he looks at nearly every day.
‘I just miss everything about her,’ he says. ‘It crushes me to think of, if she’s still out there, what type of emotional or mental or physical state she may be in based on whatever she may have gone through over the years or whatever she may have been involved in.’
He and his parents believe that ‘if she went overboard, someone threw her overboard and that’s terrible, because she’s gone,’ he says.
‘And if she didn’t, we believe she was taken into some type of either drug trade or sex trafficking’ or other underground nefarious scheme, he says.
The family is hoping the Netflix program will spark more tips, jog some memories and finally lead to real answers.
They are currently working out how to handle what is sure to be an avalanche of ‘correspondence’ and monitoring a GoFundMe set up to ‘pursue credible leads, consult with experts, obtain legal support if needed and travel wherever necessary to uncover the truth,’ Brad writes on the page.
‘Back then, there was no cell phones, there was not a whole lot of internet going on, there was no social media,’ Brad says. ‘There was none of that.’
The upcoming series has been ‘really tough on Mom, mostly, emotionally,’ he adds.
‘And Dad obviously doesn’t like that part of it for all of us.
But the docuseries, he says, was still ‘kind of a no-brainer’.
‘Anytime anything happens – and this is, I mean, 24/7 for 27 years – we do it.’
A tip line has been set up at 804-789-4269 along with an email, amybradleyismissing@gmail.com
