What happened to Amy Bradley? Netflix documentary raises questions that internet sleuths are scrambling to answer.
In the opening scene of the Netflix documentary, Amy Bradley is Missing, several interviewees share their suspicions about what happened to the 23-year-old woman who went missing while traveling with her family on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship in 1998.
'Somebody killed her,' one person suggests. Another says, 'I think she jumped or fell off,' while a third posits, 'I think she got taken as a sex slave. But I don't know that.'
Bradley's unsolved disappearance has long been the subject of such theories. At around 3:40 a.m. on March 24, 1998, Bradley returned to her family's cruise cabin after dancing in the ship's club space. Her dad, Ron, said he woke up briefly around 5:30 a.m. and saw her out on the deck, but when he woke up again at 6 a.m., she was gone. A four-day search of the ship and the surrounding waters turned up no trace of Bradley.
The three-part Netflix series, which came out on July 16, doesn't have concrete answers, but it does explore several theories that police pursued as well as others that true crime fans and internet sleuths have clung to about what happened that morning.
Theories presented in the docuseries
One of the first theories police investigated was that Bradley had either fallen overboard or taken her own life by jumping off the deck. But Bradley's family has never supported either theory, maintaining instead that they believe she is still alive.
But Victor McCollum, an FBI agent who was on the case, says in the documentary that right after Bradley went missing, there was 'no direct evidence she jumped.' Other authorities who were interviewed added that, because of the ship's location and other conditions in the water surrounding it in the early morning hours of March 24, if Bradley had jumped, they would've found something.
'Because of the position of the boat, wind force, sea current, the wave height — the body would have washed up,' Henry Vrutaal, a Curaçao coast guard officer, says in the documentary. 'But she was nowhere to be found. Not even a piece of clothing, nothing.'
Another theory emerged when Chris Fenwick, a video editor who was on the ship, found the last known footage of Bradley, which shows her dancing with one of the cruise ship's band members, Alister Douglas, commonly referred to by his nickname 'Yellow.' Another passenger, Lori Thompson, said she and a friend were sitting on the deck 'sometime between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m.' on March 24 when they saw Bradley and Douglas in a glass elevator together. Thompson said that about 15 minutes later, the friends saw Douglas walk across the deck alone.
'I kinda got a bad vibe,' Thompson says in the series. 'Immediately, I thought, 'Where's Amy?''
FBI agents say that Douglas was interviewed, and he had 'vehemently denied' walking around with Bradley in the early morning hours on the ship. He passed a polygraph test, and no charges were ever filed against him. Douglas, who was not interviewed for the Netflix series, spoke about the case in an interview with the 'True Crime This Week' podcast in October 2024.
'About five minutes to 1 a.m., I said [to Bradley], 'Look, I have to go, I've got to get out of [the] passenger area.' And I left,' Douglas said on the podcast. 'That was my last conversation, last time I saw her.'
In the aftermath of her disappearance, some people have claimed that they've seen Bradley in Curaçao, a Dutch Caribbean island where the cruise ship was about to dock when she went missing, fueling theories that she was kidnapped or sold into sex trafficking. At the end of the first episode, David Carmichael, a Canadian scuba diver, says that he saw Bradley with two men on Curaçao in August 1998, but he did not know she was a missing person at the time.
However, authorities have not confirmed any reported Bradley sightings since her disappearance. The FBI has also stated that there is no evidence that Bradley was kidnapped by someone who was on board the cruise ship, and they have not arrested or detained any of the passengers in relation to her case.
Internet sleuths have been trying to solve this case for years
The Netflix documentary may be bringing Bradley's case to a new audience, but internet sleuths, who are people who use online resources to investigate mysteries and crimes, have been digging into her disappearance for years.
These amateur investigators tend to meet in designated Reddit threads, Facebook groups and other online forums. While internet sleuths have had some success (online sleuths were credited with helping identify people who were involved in the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021), there are many cases where they made inaccurate and potentially harmful accusations.
The most popular theories within these communities align with what is discussed in the Netflix series: that Bradley either fell overboard or was kidnapped and could still be alive. So far, though, neither internet sleuths nor professional investigators have been able to figure out what happened to Bradley.
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