What Happened to Amy Lynn Bradley? All the Theories About Her Disappearance

Amy Lynn Bradley’s disappearance almost seems impossible to imagine today—a 23-year-old woman vanishing from a Royal Caribbean cruise ship. It’s been 27 years, and there’s still no trace of Bradley.  

The last confirmed sighting of her was during the early hours of March 24, 1998, when she and her brother, Brad, attended an after-hours disco hosted by the cruise line on board. After dancing for several hours, Brad went back to their family cabin around 3:30 a.m., leaving Amy alone. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation determined Amy’s key card was swiped to get into the cabin at 3:40 a.m., but there’s no evidence that shows when she left. Her father, Ron, woke up around 5:30 a.m. and saw Amy sleeping on the balcony in a chair. Thirty minutes later, the cabin’s balcony door was ajar and the shirt Amy was wearing the night before was draped over a lounge chair inside the cabin and her cigarettes and lighter were missing.

Amy was gone. 

Her family begged the cruise line to make an announcement to the ship, the Rhapsody of the Seas, immediately, but they waited until nearly 8 a.m., at which point the ship had docked in Curaçao.

The FBI has a reward of up to $25,000 for information leading to the recovery of Amy and information that leads to the conviction of the person(s) responsible for her disappearance. 

There have been few theories about what happened.

The theory with the most speculation behind Amy’s disappearance is that she was smuggled off the ship to be trafficked, or that she left the ship and ended up caught in a trafficking ring ashore. 

Multiple people have reported seeing Amy ashore in Curaçao, but the true first sighting of her outside of the family’s cabin happened the morning she went missing.

Two women reportedly saw Amy and Alister Douglas, a ship employee she had been spotted dancing with at the disco, on an elevator around 6 a.m—after her father noted she was gone. The women allegedly saw Douglas 15 minutes later, alone.

Investigators and the Bradley family have received reports that people saw her in Curaçao just after the cruise, as well as years later.

A few weeks after Amy went missing, Ron and Brad Bradley returned to Curaçao and spoke with a taxi driver who claimed he saw Amy after the ship docked. She was looking for a phone, the driver said. 

Months later, David Carmichael told authorities he was walking on a beach on the island in August 1998 when he saw a woman with a Tasmanian devil tattoo—like one Amy had—walking toward him. She was with two men, including one that Carmichael identified as Douglas.

Any report of Amy being seen seemingly went stale until the next year.

Bill Hefner, a Navy vet, said he was at a brothel in Curaçao in January 1999 when a woman, who identified herself as Amy Bradley, told him she left a cruise ship to find drugs and she was being held against her will. Hefner was afraid he’d get in trouble if he admitted where he was—and he didn’t know she was possibly a missing person—so he didn’t report what he saw until 2001. 

Then, in 2005, a picture began to circulate of a woman who resembled Amy dressed in lingerie and being advertised for sexual services on a website in the Caribbean. Authorities pursued the lead but were unable to confirm the identity of the woman in the photo. The same year, tourist Judy Maurer claimed to have seen a distressed Bradley in a store bathroom in Barbados.

The FBI has interviewed Douglas and found no evidence to charge him, though Amy’s family has asked them to look at him again, "I think [Douglas] went and handed [Amy] off to somebody who took her down into the crew quarters," Brad told Fox News Digital.

The director and employees of the cruise theorized that Amy either intentionally jumped or accidentally fell overboard.

The Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard searched for Amy for four days, thinking if she went overboard, her body would wash ashore. She was never found, and her family staunchly believes that she didn’t fall overboard.

Brad has spoken out against any theory that Amy intentionally jumped, saying that she had just graduated college, was about to start a new job and had gotten a new apartment.

“She had way too much going for her," he told People.

Brad also sounded off on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying that Douglas’s roommate reported that the ship’s crew searched their cabin for Amy before her family made them aware she was missing. “I thought the company line the employees were supposed to parrot was that she jumped or fell,” Brad wrote in August.

It’s possible that Amy simply left the ship on her own with the intention of never being found again. This is only backed up by internet sleuths who have found that there are IP addresses that trace to Barbados (roughly 650 miles from Curaçao) that show someone who routinely logs into forums related to her disappearance on key anniversaries or birthdays, leading people to believe it’s Amy logging in herself.

Amy was declared legally dead in March 2010, but in October 2025, The Hollywood Reporter reported that three “very significant” new leads emerged about the case, including a female bar server from the cruise ship who corroborates that Amy was trafficked off the boat.