The FBI is trying to breathe new life in the Amy Lynn Bradley case — 28 years after she vanished from her cruise.
Bradley was 23 when she embarked on a Royal Caribbean International cruise with her family for a seven-day trip to the tropics – then seemingly vanished in thin air from her stateroom in the early morning hours of March 24, 1998.
The case has baffled investigators — and a new three-part Netflix docuseries titled “Amy Bradley is Missing” last year has reinvigorated interest in the case.
Last week, the FBI made a new push to bring in additional leads — announcing a $25,000 reward for details leading to her recovery, and “information that leads to the identification, arrest, and conviction of the person(s) responsible for her death.”
In the hours before she disappeared, Bradley and her brother Brad partied at the nightclub aboard their ship, Rhapsody of the Seas, then returned to their family’s shared room.
Her father reported woking up and seeing her legs on a chair of the balcony at around 5:30 a.m.
Half an hour later, she was gone.
Her family, which lives outside Richmond, Virginia, has tirelessly searched for her since.
Her parents are adamant that she’s still alive.
“The hope doesn’t go away,” brother Brad told NewsNation last month. “As unrealistic as it may be to some people, it’s possible that she’s still alive and still out there.
“It’s just a gut feeling. My parents and I have shared the same feeling ever since Day 1…I don’t know how to explain that to people or make it make sense to everybody.”
Extensive searches for the Longwood College basketball player turned up nothing, and the FBI previously stated authorities had no evidence of foul play.
But multiple witnesses claim they’ve seen her throughout the years, including a taxi driver on the Caribbean island of Curacao, where the cruise ship docked just minutes after Bradley vanished.
The driver told the Bradley family that he’d seen her running and searching for a phone within hours of the boat pulling into port.
Years later, another person said they saw Bradley, who would be 52 today, in Barbados.
Theories include that she was abducted and forced into sex work in the Caribbean, or that she voluntarily left to start a new life there.
After the popular Netflix docuseries aired, a source close to the program told NewsNation that it spurred three new leads – including a claim that a ship bartender heard Bradley yelling “Senorita kidnapped! Senorita kidnapped!” on the night she disappeared.
“We believe she was targeted, we believe she was taken, and we believe she was removed from the ship,” said her brother, who has maintained that Bradley was not suicidal and wouldn’t have jumped from the ship.
The FBI’s investigation into the case remains ongoing.
