More than twenty-seven years after 23-year-old Amy Bradley went missing on March 23, 1998, while on a Caribbean cruise with her family, authorities still don’t know why and how she disappeared.
A new Netflix documentary, Amy Bradley Is Missing, spotlights her family’s ongoing journey to find her. Through interviews with Amy’s family members, FBI officials working on the case, and people who believe they saw Amy alive, the hope is that covering the case on the world’s largest streaming platform will reach someone who knows something that can help move it forward.
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In the film, the cruise director who was working on the ship insists that Amy fell or jumped overboard. A body has not been recovered in the case, which is one big reason why it remains open—and why people have theories that Amy is still alive.
People who claim they saw Amy
What makes the case hard to solve is that cell phones didn’t exist at the time of her disappearance. The cruise ship could determine the last time Amy used her key card to enter her bedroom, but there’s no way to tell when or how she left the room.
In a conversation with TIME, directors Ari Mark and Phil Lott shared several theories that they have heard that suggest that she could still be alive: Maybe she was murdered, stored in the ship, and taken off when the boat docked at the next stop. Maybe she walked off the ship and started a new life somewhere. Or, maybe she is being held against her will somewhere.
Amy Bradley Is Missing features people who say they saw her alive outside of the ship, but didn’t report their findings until years later, so authorities couldn’t act on them.
In the doc, one person who claims to have seen Amy, David Carmichael, says he was walking along a beach in Curaçao when he saw a woman with a tattoo of the Tasmanian devil walking towards him. She looked like she was about to say something, but then kept walking with the two men who were with her. He thinks one of the men was Alastair Douglas, a bass player that Amy was dancing with hours before she disappeared.
“It really isn’t until David Carmichael comes forward and says that he saw Amy on a beach that the possibility that she’s really alive gains some real momentum,” Mark says.
Other people have also come forward with claims of seeing Amy.
A Navy vet, Bill Hefner, says in the film that he met a girl at a bar in Curaçao who said her name was Amy Bradley and told him that she had hopped off of a cruise ship to score drugs and now was being held against her will.
In 2005, Judy Maurer says she was using a restroom in Barbados when she heard a bunch of people come into the bathroom. A group of men were ambushing a woman and telling her a deal was imminent and that she better be on time. When Maurer left the stall, she saw an emotional woman by the sink. When she asked the woman what her name was, the woman said her name was Amy.
A big lead in the case for Amy being alive happened that same year. An anonymous tipster sent the Bradley family a link to a website with sex workers for hire, and an FBI forensic analysis determined that one of the women looked like Amy.
A confrontation
Shortly after Amy disappeared, one of the first people that the FBI questioned was the bass player on the cruise ship, Alastair Douglas. A videographer on the cruise ship found footage that showed Amy dancing with him in the middle of the night, hours before she went missing.
The FBI found no evidence to charge him with Amy’s disappearance, and his polygraph test was inconclusive. However, his daughter, Amica Douglas, appears in the doc and says she’s not convinced that he had nothing to do with the case.
Douglas talks about red flags she saw in her father, saying that when he returned from the cruise ship that Amy was on, her mother found he grew more distant. Amica adds that her dad had a bag full of photos of white women who were not her mother, which she thought was suspicious.
It’s rare for someone who was a person of interest to be confronted in real-time in a true crime doc but that’s exactly what happened when Amica called her father while filming her interview for Amy Bradley Is Missing.
He sounds exasperated when his daughter brings up Amy, yelling, “I didn’t do anything wrong. What am I supposed to do?” He explains that all he did was dance with Amy at the club. When asked if he was walking on a beach in Curaçao with Amy, he said no, claiming he stays away from beaches, because he doesn’t like them.
“We just wanted to give her a chance to confront her dad, which she really wanted to do,” Mark explains, “and of course, at the same time, see if we could glean anything, see if his story was consistent, and see if his tone was defensive as she kept telling me it would be. And, of course, it was.”
Why Amy’s family remains hopeful
Amy’s family is convinced that she is still out there, and they regularly update a website where they’ve posted family pictures because they’ve noticed that an IP address from Curaçao and Barbados visits it around holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries—and dwells on the site for about 45 minutes. They hope it’s connected to Amy, but they don’t know for sure because the FBI can’t get more information on the IP address since it’s not from a U.S. carrier. “In case she happens to be able to look at it, hopefully she would know that we’re still trying and still thinking about her,” Amy’s brother Brad says in the doc.
Amy’s mother describes how every day she wakes up thinking “maybe today,” meaning, maybe today is the day they will find Amy. And at night, her parents have a special goodnight ritual, in which they say, “maybe tomorrow.” Her father Ron keeps Amy’s car in the garage and still handles its maintenance.
“We all have this gut feeling that she’s out there,” says Brad. “The lack of closure or the not knowing allows us to continue to hope. So I actually prefer it that way than the finality of having an answer.”
The documentary ends with a plea from her mother Iva, with tears in her eyes: “If you know something, please give us that one thing that we need, please do that for us and do that for Amy.” The final scene is a clip from a home video of a young Amy kissing Iva on the cheek.
Mark says he hopes that documentary will help lead to an answer. “Things happen and change as a result of these shows,” he says. “When you put these mysteries out there, something almost always moves forward.”
Amy Bradley Is Still Missing is the most comprehensive documentary treatment of the case so far (it has also been covered on America’s Most Wanted and Dr. Phil) and yet still, viewers will watch it and still have many questions about Amy’s whereabouts that cannot be answered. As Lott puts it, “Nothing adequately answers everything. And in fact, everything seems to just make the mystery that much more tantalizing.”