The Mysterious Case and Disappearance of Amy Lynn Bradley

Amy Lynn Bradley was 23 years old at the time of her disappearance. At that point in her life, she had graduated from Longwood University with a degree in physical education. The Virginia native was involved in sports, particularly basketball and swimming.

Amy’s athletic talents in basketball had earned her a university scholarship, and her swimming abilities had gotten her a job as a lifeguard. All in all, it seemed like Amy had a bright future ahead.

In March 1998, the Bradley family decided to take a Caribbean cruise on the Rhapsody of the Seas cruise ship. The family consisted of Amy, her younger brother Brad, and their parents Ron and Iva.

Amy had plans to start her career at a computer consulting firm the following fall, so it seemed like the perfect time for a family trip. The cruise started in Puerto Rico and was supposed to arrive in the Netherlands Antilles. However, everything changed when Amy disappeared in Curaçao.

Being young adults, Amy and Brad wanted to spend a good portion of the cruise at the ship’s nightclub. The siblings spent some time dancing at the club and Amy chatted up a member of the band, Blue Orchid, called Yellow (real name Alister Douglas).

At around three in the morning, Brad and Amy decided to leave the club and call it a night. That’s when things started to get suspicious and people’s stories began to change…

The Bradleys computerized door lock system shows that Brad entered the family’s room at 3:35 am. Interestingly, Amy entered the room five minutes later. It remains unclear as to why the siblings got to the room separately when they left the club together.

The pair spoke for a bit before Amy went onto the balcony, where she chose to sleep. Brad says that the last thing he remembers saying to his sister was that he loved her.

The last known person to have seen Amy was her father. Ron recalls checking on both his kids at roughly 5:15 to 5:30 am. He says that he saw Amy sleeping on the balcony sunlounger although, admittedly, he didn’t see her face as only her legs were visible from his point of view.

He specifically remembers that the door was closed as he says he would’ve closed it if it were open. Ron went to sleep, waking up again at 6:00 to find that Amy was gone.

The first thing Ron did when he noticed Amy wasn’t on the balcony was check her room. Nothing was missing except for Amy’s lighter and its accessories.

Ron recalls, “When I couldn’t find her, I didn’t really know what to think, because it was very much unlike Amy to leave and not tell us where she was going.” He then checked the common areas of the ship before waking his wife and son, at 6:30 am, to tell them something was wrong.

At this point, Ron worried that Amy had been taken against her will, so he wanted to search the staff-only areas of the ship. The boat was about to dock for the day so that people could explore, but the Bradleys begged the crew not to allow anyone off the ship.

As long as no one could leave, Amy would at least still be somewhere on the ship itself. Unfortunately, the crew refused and many passengers disembarked on the island.

The cruise ship had roughly 2,000 passengers and hundreds of staff members. One would think that if an announcement were made, or photos of Amy were hung up around the ship, someone would spot her.

However, the cruise staff decided not to publicize that something was wrong, as they didn’t want to worry the other passengers. Furthermore, the crew only searched the areas that the Bradley family had already checked. When Ron requested that they go through the staff-only parts of the ship, the workers refused.

The (seemingly) easiest explanation for Amy’s disappearance from the boat would be that she’d gone overboard. However, as was previously mentioned, Amy was a very strong swimmer and used to work as a lifeguard. Therefore, the idea that she’d drowned was ruled out.

There were other suspicions that she jumped in an attempt to end her life. Once again, that’s widely disregarded as there were no signs of Amy being unhappy. Furthermore, there was no body in the water anywhere near the cruise ship.

Realistically speaking, Amy couldn’t have gone overboard. It’s not like she could’ve just walked off, as the ship was in the middle of the ocean. And she obviously didn’t evaporate into thin air, which left only one explanation — she’d been taken.

Given the crew’s unwillingness to help find the young woman, they became the Bradley family’s first suspects. Upon reflecting on their time on the cruise, Amy’s family began to realize that the crew had given the 23-year-old an inappropriate amount of attention.

According to Amy’s mother, Iva, the staff gave Amy “a tremendous amount of attention.” Ron recalled one of the waiters inquiring about Amy and talking about how “they” (presumably, “they” was the waiter and other staff members) wanted to take her to a restaurant when the boat docked in Aruba.

That particular restaurant was called Carlos ‘n Charlie’s Restaurant. That name may be familiar to true crime lovers — it’s the exact same restaurant 18-year-old Natalee Holloway (pictured left) vanished seven years later.

As it turns out, Amy wasn’t a fan of all the attention she was getting on the cruise. She spoke to her father about the waiters, saying, “I wouldn’t go and do anything. They give me the creeps.”

However, it seemed to be a different story with the musician she met at the nightclub, Alister Douglas (a.k.a. Yellow). It’s clear that the pair bonded that night at the club. The question is, did they see each other again?

Everyone agrees that Amy and Yellow spent time together at the club but there are multiple versions of what happened after that. According to Yellow, he never saw the young woman again, after they parted ways at three in the morning.

That being said, several passengers on the ship insist that they saw Yellow and Amy together at six in the morning, near the nightclub. Other passengers claim that they saw Amy in the elevator, that same morning, holding her lighter and accessories.

Another person who claims to have seen Amy the day she disappeared was a cab driver. He says a woman matching Amy’s description was running around a parking lot, trying to find a phone. However, his story didn’t add up.

There were police officers in the area, so why would Amy run to a cab driver for help rather than a cop? The driver also failed to mention that the woman he saw was barefoot, which Amy would’ve been as all of her shoes were still in her family’s room on board.

Five months after Amy disappeared, a Canadian tourist reported that he saw her in Curaçao. He says he saw a woman who looked like Amy walking on the beach with two men.

The woman was trying to get the tourist’s attention but he lost sight of her as the men led her into a nearby café. The tourist says he was “two feet away” from the woman in question and was able to see her tattoos — which perfectly matched Amy’s body art.

The next person who came forward about Amy’s whereabouts had the most disturbing story of all. A Navy officer claims that he was in an adult establishment in Curaçao when he saw Amy.

According to him, one of the women who was working there happened to look exactly like Amy. He says that she approached him and told him her name — Amy Bradley. Tragically, the Navy officer’s story only got worse as he continued…

The Navy officer continued to say that the woman who he suspects to be Amy “begged him for help.” He says that she told him she was being held at the establishment against her will, forced to trade intimacy for money, and was unable to leave.

While this incident supposedly took place not too long after Amy disappeared, the officer only came forward after he retired — in 1999. The question is, why didn’t he help her sooner?

The officer explained that the delay was because he didn’t want to get in trouble for attending an adult establishment while in the Navy. He also admits that he forgot about the incident in which a woman begged for help until he saw Amy’s photo in a magazine.

It seems he felt his career in the Navy was more important than a woman’s life. Since then, the officer has been widely criticized by the public — rightfully so.

Three years after Amy disappeared, a woman named Judy Maurer claimed to have seen her in a department store bathroom in Barbados. She said that a woman entered the bathroom with two men. The men then warned her that there’d be “consequences” if she didn’t “follow through with the deal.”

Judy waited for the men to leave before attempting to help the distressed individual. The woman then told Judy her name — Amy, from Virginia. Unfortunately, the men came back for her before Judy could learn anything else.

Judy wisely called the police as soon as Amy and the two men left the restroom. Unfortunately, the trio was already long-gone and the cops couldn’t do anything with the lead. Still, Judy wanted to help and worked closely with a forensic artist to create sketches of Amy and the two men.

Meanwhile, the Bradley family went on talk shows, spoke to magazines, and utilized any media outlet available to them to beg anyone who had information about Amy to come forward.

Frank Jones is a man who claimed to be a former US Army specialist officer and a current Navy Seal soldier. He emailed the Bradleys with the claim that he and his team of “experts” could rescue Amy… for a price.

Frank insisted that in order to carry out the mission successfully, he’d need $210,000 and he could bring Amy home. Desperate to save their daughter, Ron and Iva sent Frank the money in the hopes that they’d hear from him in a few days.

Several months after Iva and Ron gave Frank the money, they discovered that everything he told them was a lie. Frank had managed to deceive the Bradleys by feeding them false information, including Amy’s supposed whereabouts.

He claimed that he saw her in a guarded housing complex, surrounded by barbed wire, in Columbia. That turned out to be untrue. Jones also perfectly described Amy’s tattoos and the lullaby her mother used to sing to her. In hindsight, he likely got that information from the Bradleys’ media interviews.

In February 2002, Frank was charged with defrauding the Bradleys and the National Missing Children’s Organization (they had helped Ron and Iva come up with the funds to pay Frank’s fee).

Jones pled guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. When asked how he’d been duped, Ron explained, “If there’s a chance, what else do you do? If it was your child, what would you do? I guess we took a chance. And I guess we lost.” We’re sure that any parent would’ve taken that same risk.

While the Frank Jones of the world takes advantage of people’s pain, there are those individuals who try to do good. Some people take it upon themselves to go through websites that offer adults intimacy in exchange for money, and they then try to match those missing individuals with their families.

One such person sent the Bradleys a photo they’d found of a woman called Jas on an adult site because she looked suspiciously like Amy.

In 2010, a jawbone was found washed up on a beach in Aruba. Initially, it was thought to be Natalee Holloway’s, as she disappeared in circumstances similar to Amy’s. However, DNA testing proved that the jawbone belonged to a caucasian human, though not Natalee.

Many people believe that the jawbone could be Amy’s, but the authorities never saw it fit to do further DNA testing. To this day, it’s unknown who the jawbone belonged to.

Iva firmly believes that someone abducted her daughter. She said that people on the cruise ship would “watch [Amy] admiringly” and that the young woman was seen as a “trophy.” Yellow, in particular, has been accused of lying to the police.

It’s said that the information he gave the cops doesn’t match what’s shown on the CCTV cameras. Furthermore, it’s known that he was with Amy the night she went missing. That being said, he hasn’t been charged with anything regarding Amy’s disappearance, to date.

If Yellow was innocent and was simply talking to the wrong woman on the wrong night, the next person on the public’s suspect list is a waiter who worked on the cruise ship.

Amy’s parents say that there was one particular member of the wait staff who was a little too eager to serve their daughter. He had tried to pass Amy notes and attempted to get her to go out for drinks with him when the ship docked. As far as the Bradleys are aware, Amy wasn’t interested.

It wasn’t just Amy that disappeared from the ship, but the photos of her also vanished. The cruise had a professional photographer who took photos of the vacationers onboard.

When Amy went missing, her parents went to collect the professional photos of her, hoping that such recent images would help people find Amy. However, all of the pictures of Amy were gone, presumably by whoever took her (assuming that she was, indeed, taken).

On March 24th, 2010 — 12 years after Amy went missing — she was pronounced deceased. That being said, her family still hasn’t given up hope.

The Bradleys have opened a website and hotline, and they’re offering $50,000 to anyone who has information about Amy’s whereabouts, and $250,000 to anyone who can bring her home. The FBI is prepared to reward $25,000 to whoever can help lead them to the arrest of Amy’s abductors.

At the time of writing, Amy Lynn Bradley’s whereabouts are still unknown. The main theory is that she was abducted and forced into the adult industry. Although, the only support of that theory is eyewitness testimony and photos — all of which could’ve been falsified.

Another thought is that Amy went overboard, either intentionally or forced by someone else. However, a body has never turned up. Given the mystery around her disappearance, the world is riveted by Amy’s story and hopeful that she’s alive and will return home soon.