Amy Lynn Bradley was 23, a college basketball player turned graduate from Chesterfield County, Virginia, with a computer consulting job lined up to start when she got home. In March 1998 she joined her parents, Ron and Iva, and her younger brother Brad on a Caribbean cruise her father had won through his employer, aboard Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas. Early on March 24, as the ship approached its berth in Curaçao, she disappeared from the family’s cabin. More than 27 years later she has not been found.
What happened
On the last night at sea Amy and Brad stayed up dancing at a party on an upper deck. The ship’s keycard system logged them back into the family suite around 3:35 to 3:40 am. The two sat talking on the balcony until Brad went to bed, telling his sister he loved her; she stayed outside. Between about 5:15 and 5:30 her father woke, looked out and saw her legs on a lounge chair. When he got up again at 6:00 she was gone, and so were her cigarettes and lighter. The sliding door, the family later said, was standing partly open. Ron searched the public decks, then woke the others.
The family asked staff to make an announcement and to keep passengers aboard. By their account they were told it was too early, the gangway went down as scheduled, and a page asking Amy to come to the purser’s desk was not broadcast until about 7:50 am, after many passengers had gone ashore. A shipboard search followed later that day. The Netherlands Antilles Coast Guard searched the waters along the ship’s route for four days with helicopters and a radar plane, and Royal Caribbean chartered a boat to continue. Nothing was found.
The investigation
The FBI investigated, with help from Interpol, and the family later complained that American claims of limited jurisdiction in foreign waters had hampered the search. Two passengers told investigators they had seen Amy around 6:00 am riding an elevator toward the top deck. Investigators doubted that she had fallen or jumped: she was a strong swimmer and former lifeguard, the ship was close to shore, no body surfaced, and she had a new job and plans for the day in port. In November 1998 an FBI agent admitted they had pursued accident, suicide and foul play alike without getting anywhere. No passenger or crew member has ever been charged.
The reported sightings
Over the following years the case became a string of alleged sightings, none ever confirmed. A Curaçao taxi driver said that on the morning the ship docked a woman matching her description had run up to his cab asking urgently for a phone. In August 1998 two Canadian divers on a Curaçao beach said they had stood within a couple of feet of a woman with Amy’s tattoos who seemed to be under the control of two men; one of them later flew to Virginia to meet her parents. In January 1999 a US Navy petty officer said a woman in a Curaçao brothel had told him she was Amy Bradley and begged for help; he did not report it until after leaving the service in 2002, and by then the building had burned down. There were later reports from San Francisco in 2003 and from a department store restroom in Barbados in 2005, which produced composite sketches of a woman and the men with her. In 2005 a photo of a woman resembling Amy, taken from a website advertising sex workers, was shown on national television; the FBI said it could not establish whether the image was genuine or altered.
The sightings sustained the theory her family holds most strongly, that she was taken off the ship and trafficked. They also made the Bradleys a target. In 1999 a man claiming to be a former Special Forces officer with a rescue team took about $210,000 from the family and a missing-children charity with invented reports of Amy held captive in Colombia; he pleaded guilty to mail fraud in 2002 and went to prison.
Where it stands
Amy Bradley was declared legally dead in 2010, though her family has never accepted that she died. The case drew new attention after Natalee Holloway disappeared in Aruba in 2005, and again in July 2025, when Netflix released a three-part series, Amy Bradley Is Missing, whose directors said it brought in fresh tips that they passed to investigators. The FBI still lists her among its missing persons with a reward on offer, and the family continues to run its own site for information. Accident, suicide, foul play aboard and abduction ashore all remain possible; none has been proved.