Eerie clue missing cruiser still alive 27 years on

News.com.au

17-07-2025

Embarking on her first ever Caribbean cruise, Amy Bradley was excited for the luxury trip ahead.
Her insurance agent parents, Ron and Iva, had won the once-in-a-lifetime holiday for being top of the annual sales list and were delighted that their children – Amy, 23, and Brad, 21 – were allowed to join them.
But the family's dream holiday turned to tragedy on the high seas when Amy disappeared without trace – sparking a mystery that remains unsolved 27 years later.
The lively, vivacious young woman, who had soon made friends among staff and passengers, often stayed up with brother Brad after their parents headed back to the cabin on the Rhapsody of the Seas cruise liner.
On the third night aboard she was letting her hair down and planned to head to the ship's nightclub after bidding Iva and Ron goodnight.
'I said 'I love you' as I headed back to the cabin, and she said, 'I love you, too, Mum. I'll see you in the morning.' And we went to bed,' recalls Iva.
But Iva was not to see her fun-loving daughter ever again. Somehow, during the early hours of the morning of March 24, 1998, she vanished.
Did she drunkenly fall overboard, take her own life, or hide on the ship and leave when it docked the following day – or was she taken against her will?
There have been many theories over the years and several 'sightings' of Amy, but one thing is for certain – her family are convinced she is still alive.
'Twenty seven years of looking for Amy every day. It's a life goal,' says Iva. 'In my quiet times it's like, 'What did we miss?' I know somebody knows something.'
Amy's disappearance is examined in the new three-part Netflix documentary Amy Bradley Is Missing, which explores the various leads and purported sightings over the years with interviews from suspects, family and friends. On that fateful night, the ship had just left Aruba when Ron and Iva went to bed around 1am.
'We went up to the disco because that was the last place that was open,' says Brad.
'We weren't ready to turn in yet. We were having drinks and listening to music and having a great time.'
After a while he indicated to Amy, above the noise, that they should call it a night and he headed back to the cabin at 3.35am.
'My parents were sleeping,' he remembers. 'I went out onto the balcony and five minutes later, Amy came back to the room.
'We were both finishing our drinks and hanging out and talking about the next day. She brought up that someone she had been dancing and talking to during the course of the evening made some sort of physical pass at her.
'She told me it was the bass player from the band. She didn't make a big deal of it, just mentioned it in passing.
'At that point we were both tipsy. It was time for bed. She said, 'I don't feel too good. I'm going to sit right here with all the fresh air and the wind.'
'I told her I loved her and would see her tomorrow and shut the glass door behind me and I went to bed.'
Brad would not see her again – but her father did, briefly.
'I remember waking somewhere around 5.30 in the morning,' says Ron. 'Brad had come in and gone to bed, but I didn't see Amy in there.
'I saw her legs and feet, sitting in a lounge chair on the balcony, and told myself, 'Well, she's safe.'
'About six o'clock, something woke me again. I don't know what it was but when I looked out, she wasn't there.
'I noticed that the balcony door was open about 12 to 14 inches, the shirt that she had on that night was laying on the chair in the room and her cigarettes weren't there.
'So I'm thinking she's changed her clothes and has left the room to get a coffee and take pictures, because we were coming into port.'
Amy's shoes were on the balcony neatly placed beside the little table.
'I left the room, leaving the others asleep and figured that I would find her in a few minutes and then everything would be good,' says Ron.
'But when I didn't, that's when I came back and told Iva, 'I can't find Amy'.'
Becoming increasingly concerned, Ron and Iva reported their daughter's disappearance at the purser's desk and a call went out over the tannoy system asking for her to make contact.
By now people were starting to disembark for the next stop, Curacao.
'They were still all going on their merry way, laughing, talking, and there we were, looking for our daughter. It was what nightmares are made of,' says Ron.
At 9am a full search of the ship by staff found no trace of Amy.
The immediate assumption was that she had gone overboard and so a search took place at sea between Curacao and Aruba involving the Venezuelan Coast Guard and Navy.
'Our waters have a very strong current, so something should wash ashore,' says Curacao harbour police chief, Adtzere 'John' Mentar.
'Because of the position of the boat, wind force, sea current, wave height, the body would have washed up. But she was nowhere to be found.
'We have sharks but the shark will not eat her completely. Something, maybe a leg or an arm, would have washed ashore. It is very strange.'
The incident hit news headlines and two days after Amy went missing the FBI boarded the ship, but were frustrated to find that if there was any evidence in the cabin, it had been cleaned away by room service.
The Bradleys were all interviewed together and separately.
'I said to Iva, 'You understand why they are interviewing us separately? It's because we're suspects,'' Ron recalls.
Ultimately the FBI found no evidence that led them to consider a family member was responsible.
Mystery conversation
Establishing an accurate timeline leading up to Amy's disappearance has been difficult.
What is certain is that she returned to the cabin at 3.40am from the nightclub, because the electronic key card kept a record.
But no one knows if she left the room after that as the key is not used when exiting.
The FBI also interviewed others of interest, such as Wayne Breitag, the passenger in the adjoining cabin.
'I told them that I saw Amy Bradley at the disco that night around two o'clock because I went there to see what was going on and I just observed and sat down and, yeah, looking for girls, whatever,' he says.
'That night I probably was back in the room by 2.30 … I don't remember hearing anything from their room. That's why it was a real surprise to me that this stuff happened.'
Iva says: 'I told the FBI, Wayne Breitag would come out on his balcony next to us and lean over the partition to talk to Amy.
'He was just odd. The passengers in the cabin on the other side of him said that after Amy disappeared, his TV or radio was at a level of, 'You gotta be kidding me.'
'They could hear him talking inside of his room, even over the sound of the loud TV or radio. I thought, 'Well, who's he talking to?''
After posters of Amy were stuck up on the ship, several people came forward to talk to the investigators, including Chris Fenwick.
He worked for a computer company in San Francisco that had organised a trip for its top sales people and had been editing some footage that his cameraman had been taking at the nightclub that evening for a 'highlights reel'.
'I remember seeing Amy. She was the life and soul of the party,' he says.
'I went through my box of tapes and until I found her and she's dancing with Yellow.'
Yellow was the nickname of the bass guitarist in the band, Alister Douglas.
Lori Thompson, then 18, told the FBI that she and her friend had got talking with Amy at the nightclub and later, between five and six in the morning.
She claimed she saw Amy and Yellow in the glass elevator going up to the nightclub even though it was closed. Then, 10 to 15 minutes later, she said Yellow walked briskly past them alone, without saying a word.
'I thought it was strange because in the nightclub he had tried to get us to talk to him,' Lori says. 'I got a bad vibe. Immediately I thought, 'Where's Amy?''
In his interview with the FBI, Yellow admitted that he knew who Amy was and had flirted with her, but said that was the kind of thing he does.
In a polygraph test he vehemently denied having anything to do with her disappearance. The results were not conclusive and the FBI released him due to having no evidence to charge him in Amy's disappearance.
Sex trafficking fear
Back home in Virginia the family felt powerless, so Ron and Brad returned to Curacao to hold a press conference.
Afterwards they were approached by a taxi driver, named Deshi, who said he had spoken to a frantic-looking Amy on the island when she asked for directions to a phone box.
'He said, 'You need to go to Kadushi Cliffs and look around but don't talk to anybody because it was dangerous',' recalls Ron.
It was the first indication Amy was alive. Worried about their safety, harbour police chief Adtzere 'John' Mentar accompanied them.
'Curacao is a very lovely island but the crime we have here is drug-related because we are not too far from Venezuela,' says John.
'We also have some prostitution on the island and sometimes sex trafficking. She could have been lured off the ship. Someone might be able to sweet-talk her.'
On a remote car trip at one o'clock in the morning, Brad was sure he heard his sister.
He says: 'We were driving along this little dirt path and I distinctly heard Amy's voice say, 'Brad!' in what seemed like a vehicle that was passing us.
'I freaked out and spun around and asked everybody if they heard it and they said they did.
'We turned round and followed the car into a backstreet, fully expecting we were going to pull the guy over and she would be in the car, but it ended up being just an old dude by himself.
'I know what it sounds like when Amy calls me. This was very distinct. I've never been so sure of anything in my life that that's what I heard.'
Beach sighting
Ron is also convinced his daughter is still alive.
Over the years there have been several more credible sightings, often from people whose memories have been jolted after the family has appealed for information on TV chat shows.
Among the identifying features was a distinctive tattoo of the Tasmanian Devil cartoon animal on Amy's left shoulder blade.
David Carmichael told the FBI that he and his friend had been on a diving trip at Porto Maries, Curacao, when he was convinced he saw Amy and two men walking towards them along the beach.
He noticed her Tasmanian Devil tattoo and was about to say something when he was unsettled by the larger man staring at him. He believes the other man was Alister Douglas.
Bill Heffner, from Nevada, said he was in the US Navy in January 1999 when he walked into a bar in Curacao and met a white girl with tattoos who told him her name was Amy Bradley, and she was being held there against her will by armed men.
'I had heard all kinds of stories from working girls in Singapore and Thailand and I just kind of took it with a pinch of salt and I left,' he says.
'It wasn't until 2001 when I saw her picture in a magazine feature that I connected the dots.'
The family was emailed pictures in May 2001 of a woman who resembled Amy, posing provocatively on a prostitution website in the Venezuela area.
An FBI forensic analyst studied the photos, measured things like the chin, ear and eyes, and believed that it was Amy. But police inquiries led nowhere.
Eerie 'premonition'
At college Amy had come out as gay to her family and friends.
In 1998, she told her girlfriend, Mollie McClure, that she had kissed another girl after they had been drinking, but that it didn't mean anything and that it had helped confirm her feelings for Mollie.
But Mollie told her that she needed time to process this and stopped answering her calls, so she sent Mollie a letter – a message in a bottle – asking for her forgiveness.
It has a heart-aching resonance of her going missing at sea with the comment: 'I feel like there is an ocean between us. Like I'm on a desert island waiting for you to rescue me. A message in a bottle is my only hope. I miss you, Mollie. Save me please. Stranded, Amy.'
Mollie says there have been suspicions that this note, which she sent one month before her disappearance, may have had deeper meaning.
'Because of the circumstances of her going missing a month to the day that she sent me this letter, and also it being a message in a bottle, the convenience of the metaphor is ripe for misunderstanding,' says Mollie.
'It could suggest suicide but I don't connect with it in that way. For me, it is a love letter.
'After the message I reached out to her and we got together a few days before she left for the cruise.
'She wanted me to meet the dog she had adopted and to see her new apartment. I knew we were going to make it work and we had planned that we would see each other after the cruise at Easter.
'She was incredibly excited about the trip. She had written me a postcard that arrived after I had got word she was missing. I'm a photographer so she referenced taking photos and then she said, 'I wish you were here'.'
Wherever she is now remains a mystery, but the Bradleys will never give up their search.
'We've lost a lot of years of our life, searching, but we won't stop,' says Iva.
'Somebody knows something. We were told by an FBI agent, 'Keep your lights on. Nobody can keep a secret their entire life'.'
'We keep her car in the garage at home, out of the weather and polished,' adds Ron.
'It's going to be pristine when she gets here. And then she'll get to drive it again.'
Amy Bradley Is Missing is available to stream on Netflix from today.